A few weeks ago, Michelle Celarier wrote an article about what she called the “grift shift” phenomenon, a “rogue shift” by venture capital and tech firms that make their investments based on crypto hype and all that quietly now pump the fizzled metaverse into AI start-ups. The big beneficiary of this AI grift shift is Nvidia, which concludes million-dollar deals for graphics processors with these companies, in which Nvidia in turn invests. Nvidia invests primarily in companies that use the investment to buy GPUs from Nvidia in order to jump on the AI hype train.
So Celarier’s model example is a start-up that renamed itself a few years ago as a penny stock company from Applied Sciences to Applied Blockchain and now operates AI hosting as Applied Digital, with well-known AI brands such as Character.ai and Stability, two of the largest Player in the generative AI business, signed contracts worth millions and, of course, ordered no less than 26,000 GPUs from Nvidia worth over a billion dollars.
Piqd colleague Jannis Brühl had already pointed out articles about the AI bubble that was forming in August – and this text by Michelle Celarier provides some very illuminating figures and background information.
However, the text by Jürgen Geuter that I have quoted is not about this grift shift in the tech sector, in which companies cobble together contracts with each other behind the scenes in order to keep the hype boiling, even if he uses Celarier’s text as a starting point for a to examine a more fundamental issue with the seriousness of tech discourse, which has been infested by influencers whose primary goal is to deliver content and, much like VC firms, jump on all the hype.
Geuter defines this discursive grift shift as follows:
The Grift Shift is a new paradigm of debating technologies within a society that is based a lot less on the actual realistic use cases or properties of a certain technology but a surface level fascination with technologies but even more their narratives of future deliverance.
Within the Grift Shift paradigm the topics and technologies addressed are mere material for public personalities to continuously claim expertise and “thought leadership” in every cycle of the shift regardless of what specific technologies are being talked about.
According to Geuter, these influencers, who are primarily influenced by YouTube, do not take their respective subjects seriously and these primarily serve to create the illusion of non-existent expertise that is extremely familiar with blockchains, the metaverse, artificial intelligence or even superconductors at room temperature, depending on the case.
Geuter states that the tech discourse, which shrugs off these discursive-morphing grifters or even ennobles them as serious conversation partners (i.e. all of them), has an advanced stage of “content creator brain” that forms the antithesis to a serious discussion of a respective topic, and he has Right.
Seriousness in the general AI discourse on social media would very quickly put an end to debates about consciousness or creativity in statistical models – and put questions about the political and social effects of these technologies and their regulation at the center of the debate.
I’m always up for a new seriousness in tech discourse: the title of my very first self-made and written digital magazine, which I invented at the tender age of 16 and ran for a sensational two issues on the C64 through the release group Amok published was at least: Serious.