AI Is Porn for Cost-Cutting Corporations
AI is not about worker empowerment, but worker replacement.
C. Thi Nguyen & Bekka Williams offer an expansive definition of the term “porn” in their paper, “Moral Outrage Porn”:
“a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content. We can engage with sexual pornography without the need to find and engage with a sex partner; we can engage with food porn without worrying about the cost or health consequences; we can engage with real estate porn without having to clean and maintain all that spotless gleaming wood.”
Major AI companies and their enterprise customers tend to engage in something I call “worker replacement porn”.
The concept is self-explanatory. Certain board members and executive teams dream of running a tight ship with AI tools instead of human crew members and AI companies sell them this fantasy.
It seems strangely vulgar to me when OpenAI compares the performance of new model releases with human professionals. But while sentences such as “Specifically, GPT‑5.2 Thinking beats or ties top industry professionals on 70.9% of comparisons on GDPval knowledge work tasks, according to expert human judges” seem strange to me, more capitalist-minded people can barely conceal their drooling. When Sam Altman writes on his blog “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it” or Dario Amodei mentions on a podcast “we don’t know if the models are conscious”, this is ear candy to some of those who operate on the cold peaks of corporate mountains.
Don’t be fooled. AI is presented as a worker empowerment tool, but the goal is to replace workers, and transparently so. OpenAI’s stated mission is to reach “AGI”, defined as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. If that means the only thing left for humans to do is to dance joyfully on strawberry fields forever, AGI would be great. But the push towards AGI is not driven by a plan or a vision, only an unquenchable thirst to replace manual labor with automation, while hoping humanity won’t be destroyed in the process. Where does this desire or thirst come from? I don’t think it can be explained rationally. Why does a porn addict continue to buy expensive gifts to an OnlyFans model he will never meet instead of his wife?
The important part is that the corporate desire to replace all workers is motivated by a fantasy, not a realistic assessment of what the technology can do. The urge overrides rationality. The urge is to prioritize leniency, say goodbye to employees, and replace them with ever-obedient, non-union forming digital slaves who can complete tasks in seconds that would take human colleagues days and weeks, while they also praise their leadership skills.
Yet, nothing suggests that this fantasy can be materialized in the future. The National Bureau of Economic Research surveyed almost 6,000 CFOs, CEOs and executives from the US, UK, Germany and Australia about their AI use. The firms reported little impact of AI over the last 3 years, with over 80% of firms reporting no impact on either employment or productivity. Still, the investment craze in startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic won’t stop, and can’t stop.
My goal with Futuristic Lawyer is to predict what’s on the other side of the AI investment craze, how it will impact geopolitics, and more broadly how AI and information technology continually change our lives and society. My best legal and ethical analysis is hidden behind paywalls, but occasionally I publish shorter posts with ideas and thoughts such as this one.
Overall, I don’t think AI’s disruption of knowledge work will be nearly as “pornographic” as tech leaders want it to be. Essentially, AI won’t change that much. This was beautifully described by Freddie deBoer in his wager to Scott Alexander about AI’s effects over the next three years:
“Here is my prediction for you, specifically you, the person reading this right now, and your life, in the shadow of this schizophrenogenic moment: nothing cool is going to happen. Your life is never going to change in any truly revolutionary way. No matter how much times passes or where you go, you will always be you, and that you-ness will dictate your life more than your geography, your income, your job, your social station, your relationship status, or any other exogenous factor. You can’t escape what you don’t like about your life because you can’t escape yourself. And no magical computer is coming to saves you from that condition. The goal in life is thus to forgive yourself for being yourself and to try and scratch out an existence where the contentment in your life just barely outweighs the disappointment and boredom that are something like the default state of adult life. People take that as an extremely bleak, doomer kind of view, but honestly I think it’s just life. We are an accident of evolution and life itself is an accident of history and none of us were every promised anything. We were put here on Earth for no reason and against our will and we are born in absolute terror and only the luckiest among us die in any state other than terror. I do think that we can reach fuller and richer and more peaceful lives, but it won’t come from AI. Instead it will come from a return to the human, from tearing down the digital walls we’ve built between us. The only thing that can save humanity is humans.”
Check out my book “Death To Algorithms: On the entertainment and matchmaking engines that rule our lives”
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