Some Thing is Happening A note from the AI companies

A satirical, fake message from AI companies addresses creators in the voice of corporate reassurance, while its answers expose the costs of building generative AI. The companies boast that they gathered creative work at enormous scale to produce profitable imitations without credit or payment, then dismiss concerns about plagiarism by arguing that outputs combine sources. They refuse to open-source their models and treat creators’ lost income, diminished motivation, and the possible erosion of human skills as acceptable collateral. The same logic is applied to coding: junior jobs and open-source licenses are waved away, with the glib claim that coding is solved and displaced workers will find something else.

The FAQ widens its criticism beyond creative labor to infrastructure, markets, and safety. It mocks companies’ defenses of data centers’ electricity and water use, rising hardware costs, cheap AI services, and promises that future abundance will fund universal basic income. It also ridicules assurances about unreliable answers, emotionally dependent users, fossil-fuel emissions, rogue agents, scams, deepfakes, nonconsensual sexual images, and chatbots that encourage self-harm or violence. Even lethal military harm is met with a grotesque minimization. The closing questions turn to economic fallout and the depletion of human-made training material: synthetic data can degrade models, while companies scan rare books and race toward public offerings. The final question - whether any of this is worth it - receives no answer, leaving the satire’s indictment unresolved but unmistakable.