The A.I. “Grift Shift” Is Underway
The A.I. “Grift Shift” Is Underway
We’ve burned through a copious amount of ‘next big things’ in the last few years — and the latest one has arrived
Crypto.
NFTs.
Metaverse.
Web3/Web5.
It’s well known that technology moves at breakneck speed, but the last few years have seen the tech industry burn through copious amounts of next “big thing” at record pace. Those trying to cash in on the latest trend — the grifters — are pivoting so fast they must be suffering whiplash.
Well, prepare to pivot again.
The next “big thing” is here: A.I.
But first, a quick recap on the fate of the last few game-changing concepts.
Crypto misses the moon
Fuelled by the pandemic lockdowns and stimulus checks, cryptocurrency endured its biggest bull run yet in late 2021, touching highs of $67,567.
It caused quite a frenzy. Crypto projects popped up everywhere, and crazed investors couldn’t pump their money in fast enough. It’s going to the moon! rejoiced the hodlers and diamond hands.
But it didn’t make it to the moon. The rocket ship barely left orbit before turning back towards planet earth and crash-landing — and the repercussions were felt far and wide. The price drop had severe knock-on effects, most notably the collapse of crypto exchanges, which left billions of dollars up in smoke and shattered what little trust was left in the industry to self-regulate itself.
The so-called Crypto Winter is looking more like a Crypto Ice Age. Many who pumped the coins have gone silent. Laser eyes have been swiftly removed from Twitter profiles. Elon Musk has stopped shouting about (read: price pumping) Dogecoin. It’s already over.
Still, there were always NFTs, right?
Bored of the apes
The landscape of the online world was altered forever when Beeple’s ‘Everydays — The First 5000 Days’ digital artwork sold at a first-of-its-kind auction for $69,346,250 in March 2021. A few months later, NFT mania exploded. At its peak between August and November that year, the number of NFT sale transactions frequently topped 200,000 per day. In January 2022, sales reached an insane high of $12.6 billion.
But only 12 months later, sales had dropped 99%.
Since then, the decline has continued, and prices have fallen. Jack Dorsey’s first tweet lost 99% of its value. Jake Paul’s collection, once worth $2.8 million, is essentially worthless. Aside from a few outliers — Bored Apes and Crypto Punks — most projects have proved to be nothing but expensive status symbols that have made a handful of people filthy rich through either shrewd timing or the less-than-savory tactics of scamming or rug pulling. (A site called Web3 is going greathas been tracking this — the current figure is over $11 billion).
As the market continued to plummet, it became clear that it was a self-fulfilling ecosystem that’s stopped fulfilling itself. It’s been slowly falling apart since.
Evidence that many NFTs are sold between accounts held by the owner to pump up their price. Celebrities are facing lawsuits for bad endorsements. And the most tangible use case to date is a bad sewer game with poop jokes. The outlook is bleak, and NFTs are quickly disappearing from public view.
Meta(re)verse
Where to even begin with this one? When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was now Meta, and the focus was switching to building the Metaverse, he sold it as the future. But some 18 months later, the best we’ve seen from Meta is a 2nd-grade Wii-avatar standing in front of a pixelated Eiffel Tower.
Meta has burned billions to get to this point and will have to burn billions more to get anywhere near something that will be adopted en masse — and that’s if it doesn’t kill his company first.
Meta aside, the wider concept of The Metaverse is facing a potentially insurmountable problem; user expectation versus the reality that they can deliver at a mass scale. It’s one thing to create an engaging workplace experience with 20 employees roaming around an office. It’s another thing to build the infrastructure needed to get the entire internet-ready-population interacting in a world that’s so mind-blowingly realistic, exciting and stimulating that we want to reduce our time spent in reality — away from real life — to instead sit in an empty room with a headset on.
As the months tick on, the (virtual) reality is that the Metaverse may have just been another flashy buzzword.
But hey, at least you can visit the Wendyverse.
Web3 < Web5 < Web6
When pressed for use cases of both crypto and NFTs, many in the space cited Web3 as the foundation for the new digital future. It was touted as a decentralized internet, where crypto would be the currency, NFTs would form our digital goods, and the Blockchain would tie everything together and keep it traceable and accountable. (I should have added the Blockchain to the list — only a few months ago, VCs were frothing at the mouth to invest in any company that added blockchain technology, for… reasons.)
Then… nothing significant happened. Instead of captivating examples of the future, Web3’s image was tarnished, as it became the home for monkey profile pictures and shitcoins while failing to become decentralized. Ironically, with the influx of investor money, Web3 was the opposite of decentralized; the VCs controlled the whole concept.
And so, as quickly as it was born, people started to move on from Web3. Jack Dorsey announced the next vision of the internet — Web5. The Web5 vision would be permissionless and open, without third-party validators and tokens. As to what that means here on planet earth, your guess is as good as mine. It’s about identity. Ownership. Blockchains. Bitcoin. But, it’s different. Or entirely the same.
Whatever it is, they better hurry — Snoop Dogg announced he was building Web6.
And now, the A.I. grift shift
ChatGPT is changing the world but 99.9% of people use it wrong
A thread 🧵👇
The metaphorical ink on every VC pitch, company mission statement and creator bio hadn’t even dried before everyone was scrambling to find and replace every mention of Web3 with something buzzier.
A.I. had already disrupted the art world; with mixed reception. But the release of ChatGPT — an artificial intelligence chatbot — made an enormous splash, and the grift shift went into overdrive.
Creators pivoted to learn the system fast enough to cash in with online courses, branding themselves as “The AI guy.”
Competitors rushed out their own chatbots with hilarious and disastrous results; Microsoft’s Bing A.I. was creepy, and Google’s made so many mistakes it crashed its share price.
Meta decided to pretend that AI was always part of its roadmap — what happened to the Metaverse? — and announce that it’s adding AI features to its products. Yawn. Snapchat released a ChatGPT-based chatbot called My AI for subscribers to its $4-a-month Snapchat Plus offering. Double yawn.
Up and down the tech industry and across the creator space, the race to integrate A.I. in any possible way is underway, and with most platforms now adding API capability, more and more “revolutionary” A.I. tools will soon be thrust upon us - especially with the release of GPT-4 (and many already talking about GPT-5).
But, like every new hotshot technology, most will fail. Why? Because they are not created to solve real, tangible problems; they are created for no other reason than to capitalise on the trend while it’s still hot. That’s not revolutionary; that’s predatory.
By this time next year, we’ll have moved onto whatever the next fad is (I’m taking bets, leave your suggestion in the comments), and most of this A.I. stuff won’t be here. The creators behind them will jump ship. The VCs will pretend they weren’t dumb enough to fall for another false dawn and throw their money at something else.
And the grift-shift cycle will repeat.
Again.
And again.