AI Hype Machine Marches on Thanks to Complicit Media

Like 2023, 2024, and 2025, 2026 is seeing people make the same old bold AI predictions like every other year.

In 2023, when the AI hype first started up, people were making bold predictions about AI. They argued that it’ll replace jobs, and fundamentally reshape the economy forever as people can just let AI do everything for them. That didn’t happen. So, they make they same predictions in 2024, saying that the predictions were a bit premature as unexpected stumbling blocks cropped up. The same predictions were made and those predictions failed to materialize. In 2025, those same people said that the technology is totally getting better and better and that year would be the year that jobs get totally replaced by AI. This time, they swear, they got it right. Like every other year, though, those predictions failed to materialize.

As for the claims that AI is getting better and better, well, those wild claims simply aren’t happening. Over the same time period, we’ve seen lawyers getting in trouble for fake AI inserted citations in legal briefs, the CNET scandal, the Gannet Scandal, bad “journalism” predictions, fake news stories, more fake stories, Google recommending people eating rocks, the 15% success rate story, bad chess tactics, the Chicago Sun-Times scandal, a Canadian team submitting fake legal citations in their legal briefs, other attorneys submitting fake citation filled legal documents, the 91% failure rate story, AI deleting user data, the lawyer who got fined $10,000 over a bogus AI written legal brief, AI killing workplace productivity with workslop, and AI having an 81% failure rate in summarizing news content. Generative AI is simply not getting better.

The reason it’s not getting better is because people make the same mistake over and over again that generative AI is just a couple of tweaks away from things like super intelligence and being able to perform reasoning tasks that exceed all human capabilities in every area AI is asked to perform in. The reality is that generative AI large language modules are little more than basic pattern recognition where facts and reality aren’t the objective. That wasn’t the case in previous years and that hasn’t changed this year either.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media keeps publishing garbage claims by the AI hype machine. The claims are thick with “this time will be different” and “we totally got it right this time” among other underlying claims. The mainstream media, with their infinite gullibility on this subject, falls for it every single time. Who is winning the “Fell for it Again” award? Apparently, CNN and Fortune. From Fortune:

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton said artificial intelligence technology will continue improving next year, enough to wipe out more human workers.

During an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, he was asked for his 2026 predictions after declaring 2025 a pivotal year for AI.

“I think we’re going to see AI get even better,” Hinton replied. “It’s already extremely good. We’re going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It’s already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it’s going to be able to replace many other jobs.”

He added that AI’s progression is such that after every seven months or so, it is able to complete tasks that took twice as long as before.

That means that on a coding project, for example, AI can do in minutes what used to take an hour. And in a few years, AI will be able to perform software engineering tasks that now need a month’s worth of labor.

Congratulations on becoming the latest recipient of this award!

Obviously, as noted above, replacing things like software engineering with AI isn’t happening. Yes, it can spit something out within minutes, but the code is going to be absolute garbage. It’s going to be full of bugs and probably not work properly. In this sector, there is the term “vibe coding” where people just use AI to write coding. People have fun with it, but the problem is that the code is awful. Yet, people insist that it’s amazing work that can be done within minutes.

The result? The apparent rise of the position of “vibe coding cleanup specialist”. From Indeed:

Carla Rover, the founder of a New York City-based predictive analytics startup, raced to build a lightweight version of her platform. The tool was meant to integrate audience analytics, revenue operations and content creation all in one place — a polished demo she could show a prospective client. After hours of piecing the system together, Rover stepped back to admire the result: crisp dashboards, clean charts and neatly packaged numbers.

It was only later that Rover discovered a potentially fatal flaw: the AI she used to speed up the process hadn’t run real calculations but instead fabricated plausible-looking numbers. Had the client found the error, it could have spelled disaster. Luckily, her son, who holds a master’s in computer science, caught the issue and was able to fix the error in the nick of time.

Vibe coding has become more and more common. And it has led to a demand for experts who can swoop in to fix bugs, remove code bloat and make applications production-ready.

Say hello to the vibe code cleanup specialist.

It’s rather hilarious that there is a whole new job category that is growing quickly that fixes all the garbage AI is leaving behind. It strongly hints that you are wasting your time and money on AI and being forced to spend even more money on hiring someone to recode the whole project anyway. This after just needing to perform the simple step of hiring someone in the first place to code these things properly – or more properly than AI could ever hope to accomplish anyway.

Of course, that is what’s happening in the real world, but back in fantasy land, you have people pushing AI hype, continuing to pretend that AI is this magical technology that can handle anything better than any human can handle it. If it’s not there yet, then it obviously is just a few tweaks away from becoming reality. This time they totally got it right. Just trust them!

The annoying thing in all of this is that the media will just carry those comments like it’s gospel. There’s no shortage of journalists that just eats it all up without question. When they publish this nonsense, others who are not in the field believe it and go around telling others how AI is taking over everything. That leads to people pumping out slop because they believed the hype. This results in massive mistakes and outright fabrications being put out into the world and, in some cases, those mistakes coming back to bite the people that believed the AI hype was real.

Probably the only silver lining in all of this is that it helps to keep me employed. I get to continue tallying all the mistakes that are made and get to make fun of the media every time they publish the hype afterwards. For not, looks like I have a never ending cycle of content to post.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.