Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: ‘AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings’

If some time in an entirely possible future they come to make a movie about “how the AI bubble burst”, Ed Zitron will doubtless be a main character. He’s the perfect outsider figure: the eccentric loner who saw all this coming and screamed from the sidelines that the sky was falling, but nobody would listen. Just as Christian Bale portrayed Michael Burry, the investor who predicted the 2008 financial crash, in The Big Short, you can well imagine Robert Pattinson fighting Paul Mescal, say, to portray Zitron, the animated, colourfully obnoxious but doggedly detail-oriented Brit, who’s become one of big tech’s noisiest critics.

Zitron first started looking into generative AI in 2023, a year after the industry-shaking launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “The more I looked, the more confused I became, because on top of the fact that large language models (LLMs) very clearly did not do the things that people were excited about, they didn’t have any path to doing them either,” he says. “Nothing I found made any suggestion that this was a real business at all, let alone something that would supposedly change the world.”

Explaining Zitron’s thesis about why generative AI is doomed to fail is not simple: last year he wrote a 19,000-word essay, laying it out. But you could break it down into two, interrelated parts. One is the actual efficacy of the technology; the other is the financial architecture of the AI boom. In Zitron’s view, the foundations are shaky in both cases.