Am I Meant to Be Impressed?

Ed Zitron’s latest broadside is basically a giant neon sign flashing “Why are the biggest tech companies spending mountains of money on artificial intelligence if they can’t clearly show what it’s earning?” He argues that firms like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are on track to pour staggering sums into AI systems over the next two years, while giving the public lots of buzzwords and very few clean, easy-to-understand money figures. In plain English: the article says the hype is huge, the spending is even bigger, and the proof is weirdly slippery.

But the real fireworks are in the comments, where readers split into two loud camps: Team “he’s right, this is smoke and mirrors” and Team “this guy has AI derangement syndrome.” One commenter dragged Zitron for allegedly contradicting his earlier takes on whether people even find these tools useful, while another sneered, “People pay for this?” Ouch. Others said his complaint about current spending is unfair because giant projects take time to pay off — basically, you don’t plant a tree and yell at it for not being a forest tomorrow.

And then came the comedy. One reader asked if AI had “run over this guy’s dog,” which pretty much captures the mood of people exhausted by his all-out anti-AI crusade. Another offered a cooler long-game prediction: today’s spending spree could eventually make the tech cheaper for everyone. So yes, the article is about money — but the comments turned it into a full-on cage match over whether AI is a scam, a slow-burn revolution, or just Ed’s personal supervillain.