AI profiteering is now indistinguishable from trolling (www.bloodinthemachine.com)

A wave of viral stunts, provocative ad campaigns, and product‑less moonshots has exposed a new dynamic in the generative-AI boom: trolling and narrative engineering are often indistinguishable from legitimate fundraising and product strategy. Examples range from Artisan’s “STOP HIRING HUMANS” billboards (a viral marketing stunt that preceded a $25M Series A) to Friend’s controversial wearable ads that were vandalized in NYC, and headline-grabbing founder antics — Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines raising $2B before launching Tinker (an AI-to-build-AI model) and Ilya Sutskever’s $3B Super Safe Intelligence — alongside younger figures like Leopold Aschenbrenner turning a viral manifesto into $1.5B in capital. Many of these outfits don’t even train core models; they package existing LLMs into SaaS, or sell narratives more than technology. For AI/ML practitioners and investors this signals structural risk: capital is rewarding storytelling and founder pedigree over rigorous technical validation, accelerating misallocation, hype-driven productization (e.g., model-creation tools or repackaged LLM services), and public backlash against surveillance‑adjacent products. The result is a bubble shaped by social virality and rhetorical claims about transformative capability rather than reproducible engineering or safety proofs — raising practical concerns about infrastructure, talent incentives, regulation, and the credibility of AI risk discourse.