The public AI debate is a false dichotomy between 'hype folks' and 'doomers.' Both camps operate from the premise that AI is or will be supremely powerful. This shared assumption crowds out a more realistic critique that current AI is a flawed, over-sold product that isn't truly intelligent.

Public discourse on AI's employment impact often uses the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy. Critics make a bold, refutable claim that AI is causing job losses now (the Bailey). When challenged with data, they retreat to the safer, unfalsifiable position that it will cause job losses in the future (the Motte).

Unlike previous technologies like the internet or smartphones, which enjoyed years of positive perception before scrutiny, the AI industry immediately faced a PR crisis of its own making. Leaders' early and persistent "AI will kill everyone" narratives, often to attract capital, have framed the public conversation around fear from day one.

The rhetoric around AI's existential risks is framed as a competitive tactic. Some labs used these narratives to scare investors, regulators, and potential competitors away, effectively 'pulling up the ladder' to cement their market lead under the guise of safety.

AI models will produce a few stunning, one-off results in fields like materials science. These isolated successes will trigger an overstated hype cycle proclaiming 'science is solved,' masking the longer, more understated trend of AI's true, profound, and incremental impact on scientific discovery.

AI leaders often use dystopian language about job loss and world-ending scenarios (“summoning the demon”). While effective for fundraising from investors who are "long demon," this messaging is driving a public backlash by framing AI as an existential threat rather than an empowering tool for humanity.

The narrative around advanced AI is often simplified into a dramatic binary choice between utopia and dystopia. This framing, while compelling, is a rhetorical strategy to bypass complex discussions about regulation, societal integration, and the spectrum of potential outcomes between these extremes.

Ben Affleck makes a point that mirrors AI researcher Andrej Karpathy: the aggressive rhetoric about AI's world-changing potential is often a tool to justify massive valuations and capital expenditures. This narrative is necessary to secure investment for building expensive models, even if the technology's actual progress is more incremental and tool-oriented.

An AI entrepreneur's viral essay warning about AI's job-destroying capabilities lost some credibility when it was revealed he used AI to help write it. This highlights a central hypocrisy in the AI debate: evangelists and critics alike are leveraging the technology, complicating their own arguments about its ultimate impact.