Hugh Howey

September 26, 2026

The AI Bubble Explained

Four huge misconceptions in the AI space, told not very briefly:

First misconception: AI is just doing math. There’s a quote making the rounds about how an algorithm can never gain consciousness because it’s just math describing a thing, and this would be like the formulas for gravity suddenly exerting force on mass. This is a bad take for a few reasons. To start with, we don’t know how consciousness works (or gravity for that matter), but we do know neurons work a lot like logic gates in CPUs. There are voltage differences, inputs and outputs, and emergent properties that are much more complex than its simple components. We know that increasing the number of neurons leads to vast differences in cognitive potential, and increasing the size of LLM training data did something similar. We’ve also gotten to the point where we are performing Turing tests dozens of times a day in our normal lives, asking of everything, “Is this AI?” Math has never made us ask, “is this human or synthetic?” before now. Something much deeper is happening, and dismissing it with quips might feel nice, but it doesn’t describe reality.

Another reason the “it’s just math” dismissal falls flat is that we used to pay humans to do math. These people were known as “computers.” And then we built artificial computers, which not only freed up human labor but empowered the rest of us who are bad at math to do more amazing things. Something similar happened with physical work and the combustion engine / electrification of everything. “It’s just math” doesn’t capture how useful this math is and how it’s transforming work, society, and culture. No one is arguing that we get rid of computers and hire people to do math again, the natural way, or destroy engines and rope people up to wooden wheels the natural way. At least, I hope not.

But the biggest gripe I have with this “it’s just math” meme is that yes, algorithms are math, and all of physics can be expressed in terms of math. Math describes the universe and everything in it. Calling something math isn’t the diss you think it is. Zebras are math. Love is math. Math only seems dry and cold when you don’t understand it. Same for physics and chemistry. These things are pretty much everything. I guess what I’m saying is: don’t build a mental model that requires you to hate everything. :)

Second misconception: AI is going to kill us in ten years. This is rubbish. It cropped up when a researcher who quit Anthropic said there’s a 10% chance AI kills us pretty soon. Look, we’ve been trying to kill ourselves for thousands of years. AI will one day help us get there, but it’s at least fifty years away, if not a hundred. And the way it’ll happen is a human doing more quickly what humans have been trying to do forever. We’re the problem, not AI (more on this later).

Gas was thrown on this fire recently by calls from the head of Anthropic to “slow down AI research.” Sam Altman and Elon Musk chimed in that they agreed. People are combining this with the Anthropic whistleblower and claiming that something bad is happening internally. What that bad thing is is economics. This is something very basic about AI development that everyone should try very hard to understand: The people building these admittedly very useful tools think that at some point the tool will get so useful that it will unleash infinite profits. Which justifies infinite spending.

Well, guess what? They were wrong, and they are all realizing it. The hilarious thing is that they are wrong in two ways that combine into a perfect storm for their bottom end. The first way they’re wrong is that the models aren’t scaling linearly, so they aren’t hitting AGI when they thought they might. Yes, they are making lots of money in revenue, but they are spending more than they’re making. Lots more. The ratio has gotten better for some of these companies, but the AMOUNT they are losing is unsustainable. You can’t burn tens of billions of dollars every year, thinking next year will be the year you make money, and then keep doing that while being wrong.

AI CEOs are suggesting they all take a break because nobody can keep this up, but their religious belief in the singularity makes them terrified that if any competitor keeps going, maybe THAT person will reach the holy grail they’re all after. They’re terrified of going broke but also terrified of not getting there first. They would love nothing more than to profit off inference and tokens for a few years and stop chasing AGI, which could cost a trillion bucks at this rate. But it’s the second thing which is killing them that they are all realizing: and the second thing is open weight models and local inference.

Open weight is the AI version of open source. LLMs use numerical parameters called “weights” and so open weight just means these parameters are published online for anyone to freely use. You can download the entire model, even tweak it to your liking. The big models from major players like ChatGPT, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are known as Frontier models. The problem for the frontier companies is that the open weight models are staying just a few steps behind. Today’s open weight models from Qwen and Deepseek are stronger than the frontier models were a year ago. In fact, open weight models are now lagging frontier models by roughly 4 months, and they cost one fifth as much to run! This graph is a couple of months old, but it gives you an idea of what’s happening:

The poetry in this is that the companies who built their empires on stealing data are going to go broke because someone copies their research. (Since writing my first draft of this blog post weeks ago, a new open weight model called Pixel Canary just came out that is on par with the best frontier models. How long before an open weight model makes a breakthrough that leapfrogs it AHEAD of the big frontier companies? Also since writing the first version of this blog post, THREE leading AI companies have released newer, more powerful frontier models after calling for a pause, so that call for a pause was precisely the nonsense we all thought it was).

The other threat scaring big tech is local inference. There are two main uses for AI data centers. One use is to train the next frontier model. The other use is to deliver responses to customers who are asking the AI a question or to perform a task. This latter use is called inference. And in the last few years, performing inference at home on your own hardware has become more and more viable. To the point that today, a user with a $5,000 to $10,000 home computer, can do almost unlimited AI work with a free open weight model and not send another dime to a frontier AI company. That might sound like a lot of money for hardware, but the token cost for what a home machine can do can run into the hundreds of thousands. You can now do decent inference on a laptop or smartphone for basic tasks. AI companies know this and they are terrified of it. They thought they were building moats with their training data, but they are just greasing the skids for everyone else.

A call to regulate this industry is a call to freeze development because of both of these fears: the fear that a competitor will race ahead and get to AGI first, and a fear that a Chinese open weight model will gobble them up from behind. There’s no clear path to profitability for these companies right now. They’ve known this for at least a year, probably two. They are freaking the fuck out.

Third misconception: AI is a bubble that’s about to pop. No, but close. AI is a financial bubble that’s about to pop (and crater the world economy in the process), but as a technology, AI is here to stay. The financial bubble is actually quite scary. Most AI earnings right now are a circle jerk of passing money from one player to the other until it gets back to where it started. It’s all legit; nothing illegal. But it’s all nonsense, nothing profitable. Nvidia is literally paying for datacenter construction, which means paying other companies to buy their chips. A great website to bookmark and keep an eye on is: isaiprofitable. At the bottom, you’ll see that Nvidia (selling pans, shovels, and blue jeans) is the only company making money. They are using a lot of that money to PAY companies to keep building datacenters. It’s a shell game, and it can’t go on much longer. Investors don’t have the cash, and these companies don’t have the runway. And as stated above, free at-home AI will eat away at their profit margins.

So yes to the financial bubble, and it’s going to lead to a recession (tariffs, trade wars, physical wars, fed manipulation, and general incompetence are exacerbating this). But the AI these companies created is here to stay and it will change your life in ways you can’t even imagine. Avoiding this would be like avoiding computers or smart phones in previous generations, where the new was off-putting and heads were shoved into holes in the ground hoping it would all go away. That would be a choice. But as the technology gets easier to use and the outputs become undeniably better, you will shift how you work. It’s already possible to build a home system that frees you from ever looking in your email inbox ever again. The agent sees the important things and ignores the rest and you never have to think about it. More time reading a book instead of spam. In a year or two, this will be even easier to set up. Eventually, it’ll be the default. No more email management. Unless you want to, of course. Why anyone would is a mystery.

The other side to this is that AI does not need to take over our lives; we don’t need it everywhere; people are already sick of it. If anyone launched a social media platform right now where AI was somehow not allowed (technically this is harder than you might imagine), everyone would flock to it. I don’t want to see a cute cat video and not know if it’s real. I’m sick of getting into the second part of a thread post and realizing it’s all AI-written slop. AI is useful when you need to use it, but it’s not what I’m scrolling to see. We need more of the Amish in our relationship with technology: just because something is possible doesn’t mean we should, and just because something is available doesn’t mean we ought. 90% of what AI is being used for right now could go away, and we’d all be better for it. Figuring out how to filter that in our own lives will be a very difficult challenge to solve, but it needs to happen.

The fourth misconception is that using AI is a betrayal to our human souls. I think both sides of the AI debate get this one wrong. Recently, people burned Stephen King in effigy because he shared an AI generated image. Hank Green was torn to shreds because he was using AI in his research. The idea that creators aren’t allowed to touch anything AI is wild to me. Google search uses AI. Creatives aren’t allowed to Google? They can’t use AI to navigate a foreign city? Or let a car drive for them? Can they use grammar check and spell check? The AI police aren’t doing anyone any favors. We all need to learn some nuance and use these bio-brain of ours. When I see the knee-jerk reaction from anti-AI purists, all I see is an algorithm optimized for anger.

On the other side of this crazy debate are people who think we should give up our souls to AI. Let it do everything! It’ll make all the art and we’ll just consume, consume, consume. Those folks would love to live in the world of WALL-E. Just put them in a wheelchair and shove a slurpee tube in their gullets. AI is useful in the way our phones and laptops are useful. We should only spend a little time with them to be productive in a way that gives us joy or allows us to be creative. The problem with this stance is that it allows gray areas into a debate built on cold reflex. Folks have picked a side (pro or anti AI) and are trying to toe a line that shouldn’t (and probably doesn’t) exist.

We can’t even agree on what “art” is. So it’s no wonder we can’t agree on AI’s relationship with art. But we should at least try. Is fan fiction art? I’ve always argued that it is. It requires creativity, just not as much as someone who does all the things fan fiction does PLUS also creating the underlying world, rules, and major characters. Writing the original usually requires more creativity, but that doesn’t mean fan fiction requires none. And yet it’s been dismissed as “not real writing” in some circles. It’s not that simple. Some fan fiction has more creativity than another person’s original world might. There are levels to everything, and they overlap and get messy.

Another example: An author writes a book from scratch, uses Word’s built-in grammar and spelling checker to clean up mistakes, and then they open up Photoshop to create the cover art. An hour in Photoshop playing with prompts and tweaking outputs, and they get the base image for their cover. They tweak this further and add some text layers, employing a font that someone else created, and is now a free version of a paid font that was famously stolen from another creator (see Arial and Helvetica). The end result is a book they created by themselves just how they envisioned it, but yeah they used Arial, so they supported art theft along the way. Somehow, this is seen as less creative than someone who writes a rough draft and then pays others to do the rest of the work (editing, formatting, cover art). Which hints to me that…

It’s not the creativity that people are angry about, despite the rhetoric. It’s the idea that other trades in the pipeline (cover artists, editors, formatters) aren’t getting paid. It’s a capitalist argument, not a creative argument. Or the anti-AI crowd will claim that these programs stole someone’s art for their training data. But Adobe Firefly, used in the Photoshop example above, was trained on licensed content and open copyright material alone, where stock contributors are compensated and IP is labeled appropriately. You could train a writing LLM just on books in the public domain, and people would still be reflexively angry at the mere existence of AI. It’s an emotional stance rather than a logical one. Again, it’s a capitalist argument, not a creative one.

Say I create a gen-AI cover for my novel using Adobe Firefly. We know for a fact that no artist was stolen from in the creation of this training set. But I’d be willing to wager a lot of money that almost no one in the anti-AI crowd would moderate their reflexive anger at what just happened. They are angry at something, they just don’t know what. They are angry perhaps in the way we deride paint-by-number but celebrate an original oil painting. Or the way we celebrate landscape art but look down on another painting of another bowl of fruit. Or the way we celebrate sculpture but deride someone for their avant garde “found art.” Everyone seems to have their point that art begins to make them angry. It used to be all of impressionism. It used to be anything not religious in subject matter. It used to be abstract art. It used to be a banana peel nailed to a wall. Now it’s AI.

My next project will be graced with a human-created cover from Jason Gurley (check out his work here) Jason did some of the WOOL special editions a while back, and a few other covers for me. The book will also be edited by David Gatewood, who I’ve worked with for years and can be hired here. I work with humans when I can because I enjoy it, not because it’s the only way. When I first started writing, I couldn’t afford to publish any way other than by doing everything myself. Digital photography and Photoshop for covers. My own layouts. Editing done by family and friends. No AI was used, but no one was paid, and let me tell you that it made people very, very angry. If I didn’t hire a professional editor, I was doing it wrong. My covers were crap (they were), and somehow that made my book not worth reading. It was weird. It was illogical. Lots of mean, angry folks. A lot of the same folks I see freaking out today.

Those are the four misconceptions, but I want to add something that’s related to all four, and that’s the ways creativity are going to change despite all the lack of nuance, anger, financial bubbles, false hype, etc. Real things are happening while others are either waiting on a singularity that will never come or burying their heads in the sand:

Ben Affleck has created an AI company for film studios that’s trained on the footage shot on each particular film, using no data from any other film (later sold to Netflix). That training set can then be used to get takes that were missed in the original shoot, obviating the need to reshoot scenes (which sometimes involves rebuilding sets and getting actors off other projects). Reshoots are so difficult and expensive that they are usually not done. And the final product suffers. This is a use case of AI that will become very common, and it doesn’t rely on “stealing” data from anyone. The cast and crew will usually know up-front about this technology and sign off on their likenesses to allow it to be used.

James Cameron has come out and said that AI will cut CGI costs by 50%. His goal, he says, is not about laying people off but accelerating their work so production moves more quickly. Hollywood is slowly changing course on their attitudes toward AI. It won’t be long before most projects use AI in some way (if you include Google searches and lots of AI productivity tools, this is already true). Only going to non-AI films will eventually be a kind of Renaissance LARPing act. Forgoing deodorant and walking around with a turkey leg.

But here’s the thing: I’m all for the hipsters who embrace the analog. Write in long-form! Go back to the oral tradition! See everything you can on Broadway! I support this and do some of it myself. I’m all for the anti-AI crowd doing their thing and will cheer them along. One of my favorite creators right now is a woman who tears the covers off books and replaces them with hand-glued and decorated leather covers. We need this in the world. It will coexist with AI art. All of it will make a big hodgepodge of human endeavor and creativity.

Which leads me to my final and most important thought: The true test in a world changed by AI will be our kindness, not our creativity. I delete posts and replies all the time when they are rude. It’s like picking up a piece of rubbish and putting it in the bin where it belongs. I don’t do this based on viewpoint, but rather intention. Meanness is tossed away. That’s the real human slop. Angry people are going to be angry without really knowing why, and they are going to lash out at others, and it’s a human trait that luckily our AI overlords seem to resist better than we do. Which might lead to this weird dystopian/utopian future, where we have all the true creativity but AI has all the kindness.

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27 responses to “The AI Bubble Explained”

1. Alexander Semenyuk September 26, 2026 at 1:04 pm I absolutely love this take. No hysteria, balanced and logical. Thank you! Reply 2. Vittorio Romeo September 26, 2026 at 1:16 pm Fantastic take, I find myself agreeing with almost everything you said. I really wish more people had your nuanced and healthy outlook on this awesome new technology. Reply 3. Annette Martinak September 26, 2026 at 1:21 pm You have such a unique perspective due to all of your past experiences. I love hearing your take on things. And, I almost always agree with you if you can believe that. I’ve mentioned this before…will you please run for office? any office….we need people like you to help make all the important decisions. Thanks so much! Reply 4. \-db September 26, 2026 at 1:26 pm Nailed 100%, Hugh. This was the most comprehensive and evenly-balanced overview I’ve read of where the technology, business and societal drivers are balanced at the moment. Reply 5. Gilbert Reid September 26, 2026 at 3:28 pm Dear Hugh Howey: I have read a great deal about AI – as an outsider – (I’m a writer, TV and radio producer, journalist, ex-diplomat, ex-economist, OECD Paris) – and have just delivered a manuscript on AI for the University of Toronto Press (a guide for ignoramus outsiders such as myself), and your piece is the most balanced and sane – brilliant in the present context – thing I have read. My conclusions largely coincide with yours. I am maybe more pessimistic about the impact of AI on the cognitive capacities of humans. If it can do the thinking for me, why should I think? But that too may sort itself out. I also used AI on multiple levels while writing the book on AI. This was very educational. Incidentally, I did a radio interview on AI for a local university station. It’s the September 7 program. Link below. Thanks, Gilbert Reid, Toronto, Canada <https://ciut.fm/blindedbyscience/> Reply 6. Cordia Pearson September 26, 2026 at 3:41 pm Hugh, you’d do the world a solid if you would post this piece on Substack or let one of us do it for you. There’s an ongoing discussion re AI there that this piece could bring in some sanity. Reply 7. Ken September 26, 2026 at 4:12 pm Hugh- It’s Ken from Jupiter, FL. Nice post. Regarding your financial bubble comments, I agree, but timing of that bubble deflating is the big question. What do you think, and how does this inform your investment decisions? Bubble pop>>recession>>Fed cutting rates? Time to buy bonds at current low prices/high yields? Reply

1. Hugh Howey September 26, 2026 at 8:47 pm I’ve never tried to time the market. My financial decisions have always been ridiculously conservative. The best thing I do is live well below my means (I’ve never owned a fancy car, never had a second home, have always lived in small places I paid cash for, etc). Same things I did when I was making $300 selling books and now. I’m going to keep laddering CDs to not let inflation take all my cash and have decent liquidity. Reply 8. foo September 26, 2026 at 4:35 pm \> Nvidia is literally paying for datacenter construction, which means paying other companies to buy their chips. Does Nvidia pay more than it receives from datacenter construction? \> A great website to bookmark and keep an eye on is: isaiprofitable. At the bottom, you’ll see that Nvidia (selling pans, shovels, and blue jeans) is the only company making money. Have you considered that: 1) There are many other companies making a lot of money? Examples: NVIDIA, Micron, TSMC, Broadcom, AMD, SK Hynix, ASML… 2) The hyperscalers (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) are profitable? Reply 9. T. R. Thorsen September 26, 2026 at 5:06 pm One critique, the creatives arguing against AI are not making a capitalist argument, they are making a protectionist argument (crony capitalism). It’s the same as state licensing for hairdressers or the AMA ensuring we pay for a doctor’s visit to get our $10 prescription renewal. Everybody’ whose got cheese to protect claims virtue and seeks legislation. Reply

1. Hugh Howey September 26, 2026 at 8:40 pm Valid description and very well-said. My point stands, because I don’t see any difference between capitalism and crony capitalism. The former devolves immediately into the latter. Reply 10. Patrice Fitzgerald September 26, 2026 at 8:40 pm Fascinating and thought-provoking. How I wish my Dad were still around for our burgeoning AI world. He talked about AI constantly, beginning when I was in my teens, and worked on a book about it for decades–but never finished. He would be amazed to see where we are now. Mind-blowing stuff. Thanks for sharing your usual insightful analysis. Reply 11. Peter September 26, 2026 at 10:52 pm Thanks Hugh for this write-up. I remember writing an essay on AI back in about 1985 for Uni and my conclusion at the time was that it would never happen. LOL I think back then my definition was of a self-aware entity. As a software developer (seasoned) it horrifies me somewhat, that we have something that is now far more advanced than I’d expected, and something that if not managed carefully, does indeed have the potential to create great misery in this world. I think you’re correct that on its own, and without guidance by us flawed humans, the risk would be lower. I’ve been very negative about AI as a whole thus far, and I do worry about the implications of very flawed and misguided governments/people using their own personal wealth motivated reasons for allowing AI to do whatever without any form of control. Your post was really quite helpful for me, giving me some perspective that I might not otherwise have seen as, like many, I tend to read what I agree with (which isn’t really very helpful). Balance is good. Thanks. Reply 12. bachterman September 27, 2026 at 2:14 am The underlying purpose of Al is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. That’s your answer on the economic fear. Reply

1. Hugh Howey September 27, 2026 at 11:09 am I think this is both clever and incorrect. Reply 13. Scott Jung September 27, 2026 at 5:55 am consciousness- thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions. This is a stream of consciousness. So consciousness can be realized only in particular physical systems because consciousness has properties that necessarily depend on physical constitution. Reply 14. Nicky Neau September 27, 2026 at 1:33 pm Since AI services seem to be the driver of the big data centers that are attracting so much fervor, I would like your thoughts on how (or if possible) data centers can be designed to be less invasive and more ecologically friendly. Reply 15. Chris Fairclough September 27, 2026 at 8:39 pm I’m an engineer in the games industry who since March 2026 has used AI in my work every day, it’s completely transformed the industry. What you say about Cameron is great to hear, it’s completely paralleled in games. Your take is so bang on here and those 4 points nail the situation perfectly. PS Thanks for Silo! Reply 16. Leon Aguilar September 27, 2026 at 10:07 pm I do think this is a thoughtful and nuanced take on quite an inflammatory topic, which I appreciate. I can see where, as a creative, you are trying to strike a healthy balance in the dawn of a new technological age, which is something I think we’re all trying to do these days. I also don’t think it’s fair to dismiss all arguments against AI in, say, cover art, as primarily motivated by capitalistic viewpoints. To me, it is an artistic standpoint: AI cannot make creative decisions. It cannot make any decisions at all. Human art is made with intention in every step; AI merely recognizes and imitates patterns. Sure, you can try to mitigate this by prompting and reprompting again, I suppose, but I would argue this is not the same as if you had drawn the art yourself, or hired a human artist to create it. And besides, just because people have qualms about this related to who’s getting paid, that doesn’t make them irrelevant to the conversation. We live in a capitalist society. Someone has to get paid for the work to be done. AI is undeniably a cheaper option, but that means that human artists are losing opportunities to tech megacorporations. It is understandable to be angry about that. Artists’ livelihoods are being directly affected by the rise of generative AI. AI also glorifies finished products over the process. I think it’s crucial to be able to hone a skill, to explore the process of creation at one’s own pace, to experience failures and learn from them, to find joy in slow progress. Generating an output with AI skips over that entire journey. Maybe it’s just the romantic in me, but I think the efficiency of it can rob you of significant life experiences–not to mention it feeds into the machine of instant gratification and impatience. This isn’t even getting into the environmental impacts of datacenters and how they are being prioritized over residents living around them. That being said, I appreciate your perspective on balance. I have been interested in AI as a technology for a significant portion of my life so I have to agree with you–the tech isn’t the problem, the economic machine pushing for it is. There are many useful applications for AI beyond the generative, and even moreso beyond the big companies trying to milk every last dollar out of it. Hopefully we will see an era wherein human quality of life is prioritized over relentless efficiency and engagement, and AI will be a truly innocuous tool meant to assist human efforts rather than stomp over them. Reply 17. Brody Brooks September 28, 2026 at 9:15 am Hi Huey, Love your work and appreciate this thoughtful post on the technology and its misconceptions. I wanted to step in and provide some perspective on the viewport of the detractors, as I think some of that is lost here. Like, yes, a very big part of the heated pushback is because the roll-out of prompt and diffusion models has not only trained on the work of creatives without consent, but also built to supplant the need for them. And as you know, the work of artists, musicians, and writers was already undervalued in our economic system and making a living doing those things difficult. And while you can argue that is a capitalist framing, that’s the system we’re all forced to work and survive under, so it being harder to get paid for your creative output means there will be fewer people making art. So using the major foundation models, and the models that trained on them, gives outputs only possible by scraping the works of artists without compensation in a system where that’s necessary. Another big problem right now is that the rapid build-out of the data centers used for these models is causing a huge jump in CO2 emissions from the increased demand on existing power infrastructure, plus unpermitted gas generators some companies are deploying to make up the juice gap. They’re hastening climate collapse to make train and run these things. That’s likely to settle down or go away when the financial bubble pops, but the damage has already set us way back from goals of moving away from fossil fuels. None of this is to say that the tech isn’t useful or interesting, or won’t exist in a form free of these ethical concerns in the future. I’m keeping an eye on <https://www.apertus-ai.org/> which is building a foundation model trained only on open, permitted data. But there’s no denying that in the short-term, these kinds of initiatives are just going to be less useful than the big systems like Claude or ChatGPT. So I think the consensus right now among critics is mostly that the technology itself has a lot of potential, and the major foundation models show where it could lead to at extreme scales. But in their current form, they are a major net negative for the livelihoods of creatives and the health of the climate. So it’s hard to use any of them in good conscience. Reply

1. Hugh Howey September 28, 2026 at 1:19 pm A lot to reply to (and to a couple other commenters above, but I’ll just do it in one place). Here are some thought exercises: 1 lb of beef results in 50x – 100x as much CO2 as beans. Beef is a bigger contributor to greenhouse emissions than all AI datacenters combined, by a lot. Global beef consumption is 35x – 50x the CO2 load of all AI datacenters. And for water consumption, beef is 1,500x to 3,000x AI datacenters. But we are used to eating beef, so no big revolt. AI is new, so massive freak-out. Why aren’t we all eating beans instead of beef, if we truly care about CO2 and water usage? I’ve made my stories available for free over the years. Short stories published here on my blog for free. Novels and novelettes on Amazon made free by using price-matching elsewhere. My free book means another artist isn’t making money. Is that different than a free AI book being read? Or does a paid AI book purchase feel worse somehow? Why is that? Reading is suffering globally, which makes it more difficult for authors to make a living. One of the reasons reading is suffering is the amount of time people are spending on social media reading posts. Or reading blogs like mine, which are free. Or reading comments like the ones here. Or reading someone on Threads or Facebook rage about AI. How many hours of potential reading are being destroyed by every comment about how evil AI is? It’s not zero. Every post about AI is taking some small bit of money away from a human writer. We can tell ourselves all kinds of stories to justify how we feel. Some of them will even be true! What I don’t believe is that most people even know why they are angry. They’re just angry, and they need a story to make sense of their anger. So they go buy some beef at the grocery store, write a bunch of comments on social media, and then they feel better about themselves. Or more angry, which might be the point. The last time computers got better than humans at something I followed closely, it was chess. Since that happened, more humans have gotten interested in chess and more streamers are making a living playing chess, than any time in human history. ATMs were decried when they came out, and then the number of bank tellers increased. When I started self-publishing, it was going to result in a tsunami of shit, to quote a fellow author. When I promoted paid fan-fiction, it was going to be the end of careers. It’s always a catastrophe. Maybe AI destroys art. Maybe it frees up millions of people who aren’t engaging in art at all today. There are reasons to worry about AI. I’m worried about many of them. I just don’t feel the anger that I guess I’m supposed to feel? Or I haven’t found a story that makes sense to me. I might write another story and give it away for free. Isn’t that bad, according to the arguments listed above? Reply

1. Brody Brooks September 28, 2026 at 5:21 pm I understand your view on this. I replied with my perspective as your wording made it sound like critics are mostly responding to the new technology like cavemen seeing fire for the first time and failing to be rational. But criticism about the current state of LLMs ARE coming from places of knowledge. Emissions from beef production is terrible! It’s one of the leading sources of methane and CO2 being released and needs to be reduced! But because beef is worse than data center electricity demand doesn’t mean people shouldn’t also care about a brand new source that’s adding to the problem! Both are bad! Nobody is saying that releasing writing, or artwork, or anything for free for people to peruse is bad! But what feels like a violation of the social contract is when those free works are then used to create a commercial product without permission from the original creators. If I wanted to turn Wool into an interactive fiction game, copying prose directly from the book, and then selling that without talking with you first, at the very least that would probably upset you. At worst, I could be sued for copyright infringement. I know LLMs don’t regurgitate training data – that’s not how the tech works – but a lot of people are upset that their work was quietly used as training data and these companies are now worth\* billions. My point here isn’t that you should be angry, or that you or anyone should dismiss LLMs because \evil\, or to think in a certain way to conform to an in-group. My point was just to help you understand that there are reasonable critiques about LLMs in their current form. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. We’re all free to learn how the systems work, understand the full gestalt of how they’re developed and implemented, and come to our own informed decisions about how we engage with all of it. Reply

1. T. R. Thorsen September 28, 2026 at 10:59 pm The negative reaction to LLMs reminds me of the anti-globalization wave after the financial crisis. I think it stems from concerns and fears about social and economic upheaval, with its roots in disparity, but seeks a specific motivation or activity to blame—bad guy activity—when what we’re looking at is really systemic (dare I say, inevitable—lest we wander back to free will discussions) change. No author ever wrote their novel with any concern that a future AI would learn from it. There’s no rug pull here. The Star Trek computer could quote any written work. I don’t recall any authors branding that as dystopian. I think it’s mostly sour grapes that some guys got rich off of it, mixed with paranoia about the end of art. I think it’s legitimate to be concerned about the impact and implications for social upheaval. I think it’s silly to get worked up about the fact that it read all the books. Reply

1. Hugh Howey September 28, 2026 at 11:56 pm Best take on this subject I’ve seen in a long, long time. Would love to read more of your thoughts if you’re setting these down somewhere. Maybe start a blog? :) 2. T. R. Thorsen September 29, 2026 at 12:40 am Well it’s official, I win the “Best Comment 4 Levels Nested” award! I have no time for blogging, but I’ll send along my next book when it’s out of edit :) 3. Hugh Howey September 29, 2026 at 7:35 am Just email me when it’s available and I’ll buy a copy. 2. Hugh Howey September 28, 2026 at 11:00 pm No, it wouldn’t upset me if you did that. It would upset Apple, since they have videogame rights. But if the rights were mine, I’d let anyone who wanted to create a Silo game go for it and keep all the profits. Don’t believe me? This is what I currently do with fan fiction. Authors can write any story they want in any of my worlds, charge whatever they like, and keep all the money. I’m not built with whatever component it is that makes artists freak out about things. I told a producer an idea I had for a horror film, and then a couple years later got a call from them that they’d shared the idea and someone had written up a treatment and a script without his permission. I gave them both my blessing. Don’t know what to tell you other than my attitude has rewarded me a million times over and the people I see full of anger, protectionism, fear, etc., seem to be running in quicksand. Probably dumb luck and no correlation. What I do know is that I’m making art and loving every bit of it and never thought I’d make a penny from it. Just doing what I love and trying to inspire as many other people as possible to find their creative outlet. Reply

Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey

The AI Bubble Explained

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