Don't Take the Bait

There is a new generation of AI companies for whom distribution is the product. They embrace vice signaling, plastering streets and feeds with ads that say "Stop Hiring Humans" (Artisan) and "Cheat On Everything" (Cluely). These signs are built to goad people into snapping pictures and posting dunks. Bernie Sanders recently posted a photo of Artisan's bus stop ad. Friend's subway billboards are now the most talked about in New York, racking up more than 25 million views.

On X, users are now paid by the view. Savvy creators around the world post bait, statements that are maximally divisive, or so obviously wrong as to beg to be dunked on, in return for biweekly bank deposits. For these posters, baiting is like a video game that pays out in cash. But for our information ecosystem, rage-bait provides a distorted, exaggerated, and often straight-up false view of what our fellow citizens believe.

Mechanize, a startup creating RL environments (simulated playgrounds for AI agents to train in), does not go for the splashy ads. They prefer plaintext blog posts, tweeted out as screenshots. "Little can stop the inexorable march towards the full automation of the economy. We should be glad," one essay concludes. Are they true believers in robots taking all the jobs? Probably. But other incentives are in the mix. There are a million startups creating RL environments, recruiting is really hard, and hot takes are one reliable way to stand above the fray.

The viral trend that made me saddest involved young women posting thirst traps to announce that they had just joined a startup and were looking to make friends in tech. I think women can post whatever they like on their personal accounts, but trading looks for lead-gen, on "consumer data marketplaces" of all things, is a losing game.

What we are seeing is the provocation school of tech marketing: be as inflammatory as possible, then let other people's moral outrage carry you into prominence. It is an old law of social climbing. Irrelevant people want to be relevant and will say outrageous things to make it happen. There are copious financial rewards for whoever excels at it. As performance art, I can even respect it.

The bit is working, too. I was in New York and DC last week trying to get a sense of how the East Coast views tech today. I was surprised to hear a palpable, slightly insecure feeling that SF and AI are what is driving culture and business forward, a view reinforced by the ubiquitous ads for Friend pendants, gambling apps, and various inscrutable forms of enterprise software. New York is now getting the billboards too.

But there was also distrust. Some friends said they were embarrassed to admit they worked in AI, for fear of censure. One newsroom I visited looked hollowed out, near-empty at 11am on a Thursday, while a reporter there complained about how much the company spent on pointless AI integrations to patch its losses. Media folks were on the back foot. Editors knew that important things were happening in SF's AI scene, but not really how it worked or what values it operated by. From three Bay Area refugees: Silicon Valley now seems "valueless," "like it died 15 years ago," and "a little bit evil." New York may be static and decadent, they implied, but at least it has shame.

Back home, I asked a founder I know if he thinks AI is a bubble. "Yes, and it is just a question of timelines," he said. Six months is the median, a year for the naive. Most AI startups are all tweets and no product, optimizing only for the next demo video. The frontier labs will survive, but it will be carnage for the rest. And then what will his founder friends do? He shrugs. "Everyone is just trying to get their money and get out."

Grift is not my primary experience of the Bay, an ecosystem where I have found my most treasured friends, with its respect for weird nerds and big ideas, what still feels like, in spite of it all, the last place the American dream survives. Unlike New York, SF continues to export plenty of novel ideas: remote work, YIMBYism, generative AI. But how can I blame others for misunderstanding, given the nihilistic stories that tech companies and VCs project about who we are? If Cluely is the face of SF, people are right to dislike us for it.

So it is up to us not to take the bait. We do not have to publicly denounce every incendiary ad, particularly when it comes from an anonymous poster or a tiny seed startup. Instead of quote-tweeting, you can mute and ignore. Often, disengagement is the best way to waste the baiters' time and money.

Or, if you must, go test these people's most outlandish claims. If someone says they work on agents, ask if they personally let AI book their flights. (I have never gotten a yes.) Never mind automating the entire economy. Has Mechanize eliminated a single software job? I remember living in Brooklyn during the crypto summer of 2021, attending lavish NFT raves funded by smoke and promises. When the products do not work yet, the tweets and the parties are all that you have.

I also worry that Silicon Valley now punishes outward earnestness. Young technologists have expressed fears of appearing soft. I do not want these vice-signalers to represent the industry, lending credence to an already budding distrust of tech. If the bubble pops, or if an SBF-style scandal erupts, or if we get evidence tying social harms directly to AI, the public will not be kind to those who got rich bragging on the way up.

It is harder, and better, to build pro-human technology. When your product is good enough, you can market on the merits and not the threats.

Not just pro-consumer, as in satisfying individual impulses, but pro-social, as in enriching our shared social and civic life. Silicon Valley is capable of real inventions. I feel safer taking Waymos and I learn more with ChatGPT. AlphaFold was a real accomplishment, and hopefully a sign of more biology breakthroughs to come. I have found countless friends and jobs on Twitter and Substack without totally frying my brain. The good products do not need the threats.

Touching grass is the other antidote to taking the bait. Go connect with real living people and real experiences. When you are deep in conversation you will not even notice the dumb subway ads. I had drinks with a friend last week at a quiet East Village sake bar, where he told me about reading all the online fear-mongering about the death of partying and literacy and trust, then looking up and seeing New Yorkers booking out the local cinema and turning the city marathon into an ecstatic block party. When you see everyone outside, talking and laughing and falling in love, the world no longer looks so grim.