Pundit ClaimsAI claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, with the evidence

Claims that can’t be checked by Ed Zitron, page 12 of 14

Deadlines are judged as of 2026-10-29. About Ed Zitron and the sources covered.

Claims that can’t be checked by Ed Zitron (1320)

Public evidence cannot settle these claims, so they are recorded and attributed, not scored. Most were screened out: both AI providers read the claim on its own and found it a value judgment, rhetoric, hedged, too vague to test, or about something no public evidence could show. The rest were found to be recommendations or too open to test in a full review.

Page 12 of 14: claims 1101 to 1200 of 1320, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “These are not things that you can train in a dataset, because they're derived from experiences inside and outside of the creative process.”

  2. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Without a real, tangible breakthrough — one that would require them to leave the world of LLMs entirely, in my opinion — it's unclear how generative AI companies can survive.”

  3. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “LLMs are entirely different pieces of technology to that of "an artificial intelligence" in the sense that the AI bubble is hyping, and it's disgraceful that the AI industry has taken so much money and attention with such a flagrant, offensive lie.”

  4. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Perhaps Sam Altman's energy breakthrough could be these fucking AI companies being made to pay for new power infrastructure.”

  5. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And once they do, the real fun will begin, as big tech reconciles with a lack of innovation”

  6. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Altman himself is a seedy charlatan, one that’s grown incredibly powerful in the Valley despite never really having done anything”

  7. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It’s almost a little too on the nose — a tool that only seems revolutionary to people that haven’t written, or coded, or drawn, or sang, or created anything in years.”

  8. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “They don’t care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable, that there is a quickly-approaching wall that generative AI can’t leap over as it runs out of training data, or that the transformer-based architecture of Large Language Models has hard limitations that are impossible to overcome.”

  9. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It doesn’t matter that data centers might end up using as much power as India by 2034, or that generative AI isn’t actually that useful.”

  10. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It doesn’t matter that data centers might end up using as much power as India by 2034, or that generative AI isn’t actually that useful.”

  11. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In some respects, generative AI is morally worse than Welch’s odious anti-worker philosophy.”

  12. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “When you have a society and economy dominated by people who neither create nor understand the things they’re selling, people that don’t experience or respect labor, their natural thought will be that any form of creativity or “work” can (and should) be automated.”

  13. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “There is no prompt that could have told a generative AI to write what I’ve written”

  14. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Generative AI is an act of theft in and of itself, perpetuated by people that have stolen innovation in the name of Shareholder Supremacy, creating a degenerative form of innovation that optimizes the tech industry to create things that sound cool rather than actually help people.”

  15. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “OpenAI is run by Sam Altman, an unqualified non-technical founder who has conned his way to the heights of Silicon Valley.”

  16. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The law, I note, tends to regard actual contracts more seriously than unspoken (and, let’s face it, imaginary) social contracts, and I desperately look forward to the day when Suleyman’s ideas are tested in court. I don’t fancy his chances.”

  17. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The AI bubble has been inflated by people excited about the prospect of not having to deal with those filthy “laborers” that “do work,””

  18. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Sam Altman gave them something to do, and he packaged it in a way that told them how to think about it — and, of course, lie about it.”

  19. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Generative AI is exciting to the disconnected business freaks running our economy because it’s a way to abstract and outsource even more forms of labor.”

  20. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It’s also a genuinely dangerous deal for OpenAI, and shows that while Sam Altman might be capable of swindling Silicon Valley startups, he doesn’t have what it takes to bend Apple to his will.”

  21. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This deal is equal parts perilous and hilarious, and something that could genuinely end up hurting OpenAI, all while insulating Apple.”

  22. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “While Sam Altman is regularly described as a tier-one operator and a superior intellect, this is one of the single-worst deals I’ve seen in my life, one that shows that while it might have domain over the startup world, OpenAI lacks any real leverage.”

  23. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “While it remains to be seen exactly how often you’ll be prompted to use it, ChatGPT’s addition to Apple products feels far more like something cooked up to please Wall Street rather than address a specific need”

  24. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Apple has decided that ChatGPT is a feature, not a product, and one that isn’t trustworthy or useful enough to run without a user’s permission, or even pay for.”

  25. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Apple can (and likely will) dump ChatGPT at a moment’s notice, replacing it with another generative AI, or ripping the feature out entirely thanks to the fact it introduced it as a feature at the end of a presentation of better, more useful features.”

  26. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This was a humiliating moment for the generative AI movement, and especially so for OpenAI, a company that desperately needs good news at a time when the world has become deeply suspicious of its product and its CEO.”

  27. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “While this might not kill OpenAI immediately, it’s a brutal moment that proves how little the world actually cares about ChatGPT.”

  28. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “especially as I imagine most users will only ask it the occasional question and find no reason to opt for a $20-a-month subscription.”

  29. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If Apple iced out OpenAI or Anthropic, they could conceivably complain to the European Commission, who might rule in favor of them and order Apple to start supporting their models, in addition to levying a huge multi-billion Euro fine.”

  30. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “These are not world-changing integrations, but useful ones”

  31. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Apple likely hopes that its privacy-focused media blitz will hide the fact that it’s ripping off everybody’s work just like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic”

  32. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Despite this ostensibly being Apple’s big AI play, CEO Tim Cook and SVP of Engineering, Craig Federighi spent far more time explaining how much Apple loved privacy, before clunkily launching into a series of product updates that appear to both sound useful and heartily suggest that Apple is intentionally trying to distance itself from the AI bubble.”

  33. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I’d also speculate that Apple likely requires some sort of Service Level Agreement for its partners — meaning that OpenAI has to dedicate resources to maintain uptime for Apple devices, which will in turn be incredibly expensive to maintain, burning money with every query on a product that Apple will offer only when Apple’s services can’t do the job.”

  34. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Altman has taken advantage of the fact that the tech industry might not have any hyper-growth markets left, knowing that ChatGPT is, much like Altman, incredibly adept at mimicking depth and experience by parroting the experiences of those who have actually done things.”

  35. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The tech industry has craved a messiah since the death of Steve Jobs, but in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman they’ve discovered more of a false prophet — a seedy grifter that uses his remarkable ability to impress and manipulate Silicon Valley’s elite to mask a total lack of technical or business acumen.”

  36. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “When Altman says something genuinely, truly insane — like how he wants to raise $7tn, which is the combined GDP of Germany and France, to build up a dedicated AI semiconductor manufacturing capacity — the response isn’t to immediately dismiss it with a chorus of derisive laughter, but to actually discuss it with a level of seriousness that isn’t even remotely warranted.”

  37. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “My hope is that venture capital finally learns to back companies that make a profit building software and hardware that actually helps people.”

  38. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “While there are genuine safety issues with artificial intelligence to consider, these people are desperately afraid of the computer coming alive and killing them when they should fear the non-technical manipulator getting rich making egregious promises about what AI can actually do.”

  39. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And I’d argue that this is exceedingly dangerous for Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large as executives disconnected from the process of creating software follow another non-technical founder hocking unprofitable, unsustainable and hallucination-prone software.”

  40. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Sam Altman is dangerous to artificial intelligence not because he’s building artificial general intelligence — a kind of AI that meets or surpasses human cognitive capabilities, and potentially mimics human sentience, a bit like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation — but because Sam Altman’s focus is on what Sam Altman can build to grow the power and influence of Sam Altman.”

  41. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “While ChatGPT isn’t inherently useless, Altman realizes that it’s impossible to generate the kind of funding and hype he needs based on its actual achievements, and that to continue to accumulate power and money, he must speciously hype it to wealthy and powerful people who don’t participate in the creation of anything.”

  42. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The tech industry has spent years pissing off customers, with platforms like Facebook and Google actively making their products less useful in the pursuit of perpetual growth, unashamedly turning their backs on the people that made them rich and acting with such contempt for users that I truly believe society will turn on the tech industry.”

  43. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It won’t, however, be the apocalypse. It’ll just be a brutal realignment for an industry that has needed one.”

  44. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It's the same reason that Sundar Pichai and Liz Reid are forcing generative AI into Google Search even as it actively misinforms their customers, recommending people introduce glue and rocks to their diet, claiming former U.S. President Barack Obama is a muslim, and regurgitating stories from satirical news outlet The Onion as indisputable fact.”

  45. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “When the bubble bursts, I imagine these firms will be absorbed by the massive tech companies that have put billions of dollars into them in exactly the same way that Microsoft absorbed Inflection, quietly hiding their shameful failures and repurposing the massive compute investments to bolster the already-existent cloud infrastructure.”

  46. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin both raised incredible sums of capital based on the vaguest of ideas — that people feel overwhelmed by their smartphones — to build products that range from extremely bad to potentially fraudulent, failing to build a product that nobody asked for based on some combination of ignorance and ambivalence.”

  47. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I just don't think that anyone in big tech is prepared for the bubble to burst.”

  48. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And now, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office — the nation’s privacy watchdog, with powers to impose steep fines on violators — is probing whether the technology presents an unacceptable risk to consumers. Which, as anyone with a modicum of common sense can confirm, it does.”

  49. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “They can generate images, quickly query datasets (albeit with no guarantees of accuracy), and craft poetry, but there is no endearing reason to pick up one of them every day and use them.”

  50. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Every single company chasing the generative AI dragon is hoping that it's the next Amazon Web Services — the ubiquitous cloud product that went from a side project to a bigger revenue-driver than Amazon's store, and today underpins much of the Internet — because it sort of, kind of seems like it's "the next big thing in cloud," even if it doesn't actually seem to do anything useful, let alone incredible.”

  51. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “For the best part of 15 years we've assumed that the tech industry would always have something up its sleeves, but what's become painfully apparent is that the tech industry might have run out of big, sexy things to sell us, and the "disruption" that tech has become so well-known for was predicated on there being markets for them to disrupt, and ideas that they could fund to do so.”

  52. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “He’s the archetypal Rot-Com CEO — an unqualified lobbyist pretending to be a technologist and abusing anyone he needs to in the pursuit of growth.”

  53. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Sam Altman isn't asking Microsoft for a $100 billion supercomputer because generative AI is going to get better — he's doing it because what we have today isn't the world-changing boondoggle that the tech industry needs it to be, and his only prospect of fulfilling the lofty promises he’s made is with a tech industry equivalent of the Marshall Plan.”

  54. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The use cases they enable are neither exciting nor ubiquitous, nor are they, if we're honest, anything like what tech executives are trying to sell us, and the problem might not be that it's useless, but that as a piece of technology, it just isn't a hyper-growth market or industry-changer, no matter how many hundreds of billions we put into it.”

  55. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “On top of that, nobody really seems to be able to explain why or how generative AI is the next big thing.”

  56. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It doesn’t matter that those “things” are useless, harmful, or profoundly intrusive.”

  57. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And they’re running absolutely rampant on the platform, all because Meta has no duty toward its users.”

  58. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “it's time for artificial intelligence companies to start showing us something, and it's time for OpenAI to stop being given any credit or quarter to tell us what it "will" do until it shows us.”

  59. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Failing to interrogate these people will cause immeasurable harm to the creatives they're stealing from, and anyone in the media that believes that Altman and his ilk won't come for their work is living in a fantasy land.”

  60. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “where products are built upon a foundation of stolen content interpreted by a model that doesn’t actually know anything — because AI can’t, by definition, know anything.”

  61. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It's time to actively push back on Altman when he says that GPT-5 will be "similar to a virtual brain," or a "super smart person who knows absolutely everything about your life," or a "super-competent colleague," or that it'll "replace 95% of marketing tasks,"”

  62. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The AI reality distortion field feels like a giant con, used to keep media attention (and traffic) flowing to ChatGPT so that Altman can continue claiming that "generative AI is the future" when it's yet to prove itself necessary, essential, or capable of overcoming its massive energy, compute and training data needs. Or, for that matter, a financially-viable service.”

  63. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Yet they will fail to perpetuate further misery if they are interrogated with the suspicion they deserve.”

  64. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The second possible explanation — and the most plausible in my opinion — is that OpenAI simply pirated her likeness and then tried to bring her onboard in a failed attempt to eliminate any potential legal risk.”

  65. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Push back against the vague promises of artificial intelligence.”

  66. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “He needs us to humor — even if he rejects the notion — the idea that AI could be considered a "creature" because doing so allows him to add further mystique and hype to distract from the fact that he doesn't seem to know anything and OpenAI doesn't seem to be innovating.”

  67. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I'll cut to the chase: it's time to stop listening to anything that Sam Altman has to say.”

  68. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This is not a person that should be making decisions about the future of the tech industry, nor should he be allowed to spout fan fiction and automatically have it covered as gospel.”

  69. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Questions must be asked of these founders, and follow-up questions asked based on what they say, and their reckless, stupid ideas must be faced with suspicion and a complete lack of the benefit of the doubt.”

  70. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Sam Altman is full of shit, and his reign at OpenAI has been defined far more by its empty promises than any realized dreams.”

  71. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It’s time — it’s been time for a while — to accept that artificial intelligence isn’t the digital panacea that will automate our entire lives, and that reality may be far more mediocre than what Sam Altman and his ilk have been selling.”

  72. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Venture capital investment is at a five-year-low because an alarming amount of VCs don’t seem to understand technology or business, and seem entirely married to hype cycles.”

  73. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “but the thing that I think he’s leaving out is that it may take an energy breakthrough (and more chips) for generative AI to approach any level of necessity”

  74. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “because something that can automate your calendar, your emails, your music and your travel in a way that you can actually rely on requires operating system-level access and processing of information that may never exist.”

  75. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Sora’s problem isn’t really the amount of time it takes to generate a shot, but the imprecision that comes from using a generative artificial intelligence that doesn’t really know anything.”

  76. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Companies like Google, OpenAI and Rabbit should be treated with suspicion when they make flowery promises, and derision when they continually fail to do anything useful.”

  77. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Or perhaps the truth was a little simpler: there wasn’t much artificial intelligence happening at all.”

  78. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The tech industry needs to start building things for real people again.”

  79. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Sora hasn’t even been launched, save to a few hand-picked companies that got to test an early version, meaning that the 10-to-20 minute wait between generations is something that’s likely to increase once more people use the product, and that’s before you consider how incredibly expensive it is to run a significantly more complex model than ChatGPT, which is already unprofitable for OpenAI to run.”

  80. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Companies that deliver features late should not get credit for features they are yet to deliver, and companies like Rabbit that engage in the language of science fiction to paper over their lazily-developed half-solutions should get buried for doing so.”

  81. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Though I am not a tax attorney or an accountant, nor do I have any insight beyond what’s publicly available, this highly suggests that Rabbit Inc cannot currently do business in the State of California, where it is headquartered.”

  82. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I also want Lyu to apologize to anyone who invested in GAMA, and the multiple people he has attempted to gaslight by suggesting he had no relationship with the company.”

  83. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I also believe that Jesse Lyu owes reporters he has talked to and users that have paid him money thorough explanations as to what happened to his previous ventures, what happened to the funds raised by said ventures, and why he has so thoroughly sought to obfuscate their existence.”

  84. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “At the very least, Jesse Lyu should comprehensively explain what has happened here and be honest and forthright with his explanations.”

  85. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Yet because Altman — like every manager — is so thoroughly divorced from actual production, he’s only succeeded in generating unsustainable hype and making vague promises that the people who do the actual work at OpenAI likely know they can’t keep.”

  86. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Much like ChatGPT, Altman is capable only of loosely approximating the output requested, because at his core he lacks any of the substance or technical history required to do so.”

  87. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If left unchecked, OpenAI will perpetuate one of the largest thefts in history, looting the internet and using it to train models that have yet to prove their necessity other than as a symbol that Silicon Valley can still innovate.”

  88. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Generative AI's energy demands are unsustainable, as are its compute demands”

  89. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The answer is obvious: because they believe it'll make them money.”

  90. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And when you have an industry piloted by people who don't make products for people, you don't create anything useful, and you're doomed to make the same stupid, obvious mistakes.”

  91. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Even the claims of what generative AI has done need to be taken with a grain — or a spoonful — of salt.”

  92. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Nothing — and I repeat, nothing — good will come from this.”

  93. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The generative AI boom has exactly the same stench as the metaverse, and it's happening for exactly the same reason — the people making the products are not building things for human beings, but to show the markets that they'd continue to grow.”

  94. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Every single tech company making a LLM is stealing, justifying it by using the previous model of the internet where everything published online was there for the taking and conflating access to content with ownership in the process.”

  95. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “LLMs are a globally-perpetuated act of theft taking place in broad daylight, to the point that OpenAI has told England's House of Lords that "it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials."”

  96. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “OpenAI is no different. After all, it’s effectively a subsidiary of Microsoft.”

  97. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “While OpenAI, Google and Meta would like to claim that these are "publicly-available" works that they are "training on," the actual word for what they're doing is "stealing."”

  98. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Yet I believe that they're all disconnected from any actual value creation.”

  99. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I’d say it has the engineering ability of a first-year CompSci undergraduate, but that would be unfair to first-year CompSci undergraduates.”

  100. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The article is vague, likely because building Stargate is at this point somewhat theoretical.”