AI DON'T WORK — factory floor illustration with broken assembly line, smiley-face screen robots, and a human worker with crossed arms watching it fail. Text reads: THEY SOLD YOU THE DREAM. READ THE FINE PRINT.
aidontwork.com
The argument

The AGI dream is a product.
We are paying for
the data centers.

Language models are real and genuinely useful — inside carefully constructed boundaries, grounded in source material, built into workflows with real guardrails. That's the technology that exists. Not the one being sold to your board, your investors, or your employees.

What's being sold is the dream of autonomous intelligence. An AI that reasons, understands, decides, and replaces. Companies are extracting subscription revenue to fund data centers that will — eventually, maybe, they say — close the gap between what exists and what they've promised. Meanwhile, that gap is enormous and everyone building in production knows it.

The problem isn't that AI isn't useful. The problem is that technical illiteracy is being weaponized. We've been primed by decades of science fiction to see minds in machines. We feel the fluency and mistake it for understanding. We're not wrong that something remarkable is happening. We're wrong about what it is.

What's actually true
01
Language is not knowledge.
Fluent output is not the same as understanding. A model that sounds authoritative about your documents has no idea what your documents mean. It has patterns. Patterns are useful. They are not intelligence.
02
The line stopped. They're calling it progress.
The productivity promises require infrastructure most organizations don't have and workflows nobody has designed. AI doesn't slot into broken processes. It amplifies them.
03
Agents aren't agents. They're workflows with a marketing budget.
Give a model too many tools and it gets confused. Restrict its tools and you've built a narrow workflow — the same thing you'd build without AI. The autonomy is theater.
04
Your taste buds are getting confused.
AI-generated content has a flavor. You're learning to recognize it even if you can't name it. As it saturates everything, the gap between seeming insightful and being insightful widens. That gap has a cost.
05
This shift needs to benefit all of us.
Real, economically viable automation is happening. That value should not consolidate at the top. The workers whose intellectual labor trained these systems deserve a stake in what was built with it.
06
Knowing how it works changes everything.
Once you understand what a language model actually is — a stateless pattern system, not a mind — you stop being afraid of the wrong things and start asking the right questions. That's the whole point.
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