This short essay from Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) is a deliberately sharp counterpoint to the “AI will save us” genre. It opens with an example of overly flattering, low-signal AI-generated praise, then flips it into a sarcastic letter aimed at the companies building and selling today’s generative systems.
The core argument is less about model quality and more about second-order effects: training on scraped creative work while asserting ownership, pushing “AI” features into everything, raising costs (energy and infrastructure) for questionable value, and flooding communication channels with confident-sounding nonsense. Even if you don’t agree with the tone, it’s a useful read as a checklist of failure modes to watch for when you’re deciding where (and whether) to ship AI features: what problem is actually being solved, who pays the cost, and how much trust you’re burning if the output is often wrong.