AI, it’s impossible to escape the word if you follow the news. It’s the technology that’s revolutionising the economy, causing a stock market boom, and is set to replace workers. There have been products like ChatGPT, Sora, and Midjourney released, and most tech companies have developed some sort of AI product. However, the technology has already harmed the economy, culture, society, and the environment, and the economy may see the biggest bust since the 2008 Financial Crisis.
Artificial Intelligence as a concept isn’t new. There have been projects, experiments and advancements since the 1950s, as well as being useful for research, such as during the development of COVID vaccines. Yet when most people think of AI, they probably think of chatbots, which have been around since the 1960s. The 2010s saw the rise of products like Siri and Alexa, which proved useful to many people. The AI Boom, as we know it, kicked off in the 2020s with the launch of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, and 2023 became the start of the AI Boom. Many companies launched their own AI products. Google has Gemini, and Microsoft has Copilot, smartphones commercials highlight new AI features, and there have been many start-ups like Midjourney, Particle6, and Claude. Anyone who was around would have seen treads like the Wes Anderson-style AI trailers, posts involving Studio Ghibli-inspired AI ‘art’, and job advertisements to train AI Models. AI was one of the main reasons why actors SAG and the Writers’ Guild of America launched a simultaneous strike.
AI does have its uses. I am dyslexic, and I use Grammarly to double-check my work. I have noticed improvements since I started using it in 2016. I have used ChatGPT for basic research and as a starting block. ChatGPT has even been a source of traffic for Pop Culture Maniacs. Google has made avoiding AI impossible since Gemini is integrated with their search engine. Pixlr has incorporated a useful AI tool where it cut out backgrounds when merging pictures. AI works best as a tool that speeds up repetitive tasks and takes away the busy work, and it can see the use of the technology for analysing data and doing psychologically stressful jobs. If it can be used to retrieve data from my faulty hard drive, I will be singing its praises. AI has been promoted as a grand problem solver and money saver. However, tech companies keep coming up with products that are arguably causing more harm than good.
The most famous recent AI consumer products have been chatbots and generative image creators. They have limited value, and if they suddenly disappeared, most people wouldn’t notice or think things have improved. Chatbots are mostly advanced search engines that can be more detailed than a simple Google search. However, it’s not detailed enough, and people need to do the work and research a topic, whether it’s through books, articles, academic papers, or specialist websites. Chatbots can be unreliable. If it doesn’t know a subject, then it would make up facts instead of admitting they don’t know. They are programmed to come up with an answer, even if it’s not true. There have been questions about the ethics of where AI companies obtain their information, as they cast a wide net and utilise a range of sources, including academic papers, news reports, and Reddit posts. AI companies follow the Silicon Valley mantra of ‘move fast and break things,’ which means do whatever you want until the law and society catch up. AI companies never asked permission to use material to train their AI models.
There is a trust issue regarding who controls the chatbots. They are owned or controlled by tech companies run by tech bros, or linked to authoritarian regimes. Grok is the most infamous since engineers have altered its programming to ignore negative information about Elon Musk or Donald Trump.
As a creative person, I am opposed to the use of generative AI in any role beyond a supporting role. The use of these products is the antithesis of the creative process, which is meant to be hard. All artistic people know art needs passion, effort, collaboration, and refining. Art needs thought and passion. All generative AI can do is copy and regurgitate. Rob Bredow, a visual effects artist at ILM and Lucasfilm, gave a TED talk showcasing generative AI videos, but all it managed to do was merge two animals together, such as a snail with a peacock and a crocodile with a turtle.
Executives at companies like Netflix and Disney want generative AI to succeed because they feel they can save money, but they are developing something audiences don’t want. Filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron have stated their opposition to the use of generative AI in their films. It should be noted that James Cameron is a member of the board of directors for Stability AI and used AI for the 4K transfers of The Abyss and True Lies. Some films and TV shows (i.e. Heretic and Pluribus) have a disclaimer to say no AI was used on their films, and The Bad Guy 2 had added a notice prohibiting the film from being used for training AI.
Generative AI has made the internet a worse place since YouTube and social media platforms have become infested with AI Slop. A lot of this content has used templates, leading to repetitive content. It’s usually easy to tell AI videos and images because they can’t get the lighting right. Generative AI has been used by the Trump administration to make videos, including Trump taking over Gaza and Trump piloting a plane to bomb excrement on protesters. It’s being used to make low-effort propaganda. There have been reports that generative AI has been used to make explicit, illegal images, and ChatGPT has encouraged suicides, leading to lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft by families in Connecticut and a Texas A&M student.
Coca-Cola has released AI-generated Christmas commercials two years in a row, and they have been rightly ridiculed because they looked uncanny. If I were working for Pepsi-Co, I would commission an animated Christmas commercial that encourages creativity and wholesomeness, and release the behind-the-scenes videos on every social media platform available. The SEO firm Graphite did a study of articles published online from January 2020 to May 2025. They discovered that after the launch of ChatGPT, AI content has exploded, and 50% new URLs are now AI-generated. Content farms have now become industrial, and the quality of articles has declined. There are economic issues since higher-quality websites are unable to compete with AI, which can bash out an article in minutes. Combined with the large number of bots on various websites, this makes internet-based ventures less viable, especially those using an ad-based model. If AI content becomes dominant, then AI models are going to end up eating their own tail because they will be copying themselves.
The rise of AI has led to a stock market boom in America. NVIDIA has become the most valuable company because it is one of the world’s biggest microchip manufacturers. America and China are leading the way, and many other countries are betting big on AI, like Britain, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Israel. However, there have been more warnings that the AI boom is a bubble. It’s easy to find articles, videos, and podcasts asking the question about when the AI bubble will pop. This includes major financial outlets like the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Organisations like the Bank of England and Morgan Stanley have publicly warned about the AI bubble. Even Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said no company is immune if the AI bubble bursts when he spoke to the BBC. If you look at the chart below showing how AI companies invest in each other and buy each other’s products, it looks like corporate inbreeding. OpenAI is 50% owned by Microsoft and is valued at $500 billion despite the fact that it hasn’t generated a profit, and there are questions about where the company gets its revenue.
History has been littered with stock market crashes and speculative bubbles. There’s the South Sea Bubble, the Wall Street Crash, and, more recently, the 2008 Market Crash. Speculative bubbles in tech have involved the Dot-com bubble, and the NFT and cryptocurrency booms of the early 2020s. The AI Boom has been compared to Rail Mania in the 1840s. OpenAI went into panic mode when Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer, suggested the US government should provide a ‘backstop’ when speaking at a Wall Street Journal event. Despite the tech sector booming, it’s not felt by ordinary people, with AI promising to replace human workers, including graduate-level positions, and many Big Tech giants have been laying off their employees. If people don’t feel the economic and financial benefits, they will vote their discontent at the ballot box.
OpenAI received investment because they promise they are developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which they claim to be the next leap forward. Silicon Valley is filled with bold promises and predictions that have never come to fruition. The list of failed projects involving Elon Musk includes the Hyperloop, self-driving cars, and the Loop in Las Vegas. One of the biggest tech warnings is Theranos, which promised to revolutionise blood testing with its devices, but it turned out to be a fraud since the devices never worked.
Finally, there are environmental factors. Data centres consume a considerable amount of electricity and water. Data provided by Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, showed that data centres currently consume as much electricity as France, and AI alone consumes nearly double the amount of electricity as the Netherlands. Water is a basic resource, and due to Climate Change, it is set to become a rarer resource. It’s predicted that AI could use 6.6 billion m³ by 2027. It’s a scary time with the unchecked growth of AI providing little benefit to most people. It feels like we are living in a cyberpunk novel where humanity is servicing AI instead of the other way round, and it’s accelerating humanity’s destruction, whilst tech bros and companies get richer. Tech bros seemed to have read Ready Player One and used it as an instruction manual.
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