AI'S PROPHET OF DOOM

ED ZITRON PEELS OFF HIS GREEN BUTTON-UP SHIRT TO REVEAL THE GRAY TEE BENEATH. NOW PROPERLY UNIFORMED, TWO CANS OF DIET COKE QUEUED UP BEFORE HIM, HE'S READY TO RECORD THIS WEEK'S EPISODE OF HIS PODCAST, BETTER OFFLINE, AT AUDIO BEHEMOTH IHEARTMEDIA'S MIDTOWN MANHATTAN STUDIO.

- BY Harry McCracken PHOTOGRAPH BY OK McCausland

One of Zitron's guests, screenwriter, director, and producer Brian Koppelman, talks about paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. When Koppelman earnestly asks, “Do you not think AI is mindbogglingly great at times?” Zitron’s answer—“No!”—comes so quickly it seems to spring directly from his cerebral cortex.

It would have been startling if he'd responded any other way.

As AI has become the tech industry’s principal obsession, Zitron—who runs a public relations firm that represents technology companies—has developed an unexpected side hustle as one of its highest-profile naysayers. “I’ve tried all of these different things, and I still can’t tell you with clarity what it is that’s so amazing with these products,” he tells me.

Countless people in and around the tech industry share Zitron’s dim view of generative Al's usefulness, the billions of dollars that companies are pouring into the technology, and its voracious appetite for computing resources. But his take-no-prisoners punditry sets him apart from other noted gadflies such as cognitive scientist Gary Marcus. On Better Offline and in his email newsletter, Where’s Your Ed At, he’s particularly unsparing in his appraisal of CEOs such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (“a monster”), OpenAI’s Sam Altman (“a con man”), and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella (“either a liar or a specific kind of idiot”).

Zitron says that his work is motivated by “[seeing] these bastards and what they’re doing, how much money they’re making doing it, and how shameless they are.” He has his own name for the pursuit of growth above all other goals, regardless of its impact on customers and society at large: the “rot economy.” He believes the current Al boom will end in disaster.