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Pluralistic: A year in illustration (2025 edition) (03 Dec 2025) by Cory Doctorow
Wednesday December 3rd, 2025 at 4:42 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


An artist at an easel, wearing a smock and holding a palette. The head of the artist and the subject in the oil painting have been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' which has angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth.

A year in illustration (2025 edition) (permalink)

One of the most surprising professional and creative developments of my middle-age has been discovering my love of collage. I have never been a "visual" person – I can't draw, I can't estimate whether a piece of furniture will fit in a given niche, I can't catch a ball, and I can't tell you if a picture is crooked.

When Boing Boing started including images with our posts in the early 2000s, I hated it. It was such a chore to find images that were open licensed or public domain, and so many of the subjects I wrote about are abstract and complex and hard to illustrate. Sometimes, I'd come up with a crude visual gag and collage together a few freely usable images as best as I could and call it a day.

But over the five years that I've been writing Pluralistic, I've found myself putting more and more effort and thought into these header images. Without realizing it, I put more and more time into mastering The GIMP (a free/open Photoshop alternative), watching tutorial videos and just noodling from time to time. I also discovered many unsuspected sources of public domain work, such as the Library of Congress, whose search engine sucks, but whose collection is astounding (tip: use Kagi or Google to search for images with the "site:loc.gov" flag).

I also discovered the Met's incredible collection:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search

And the archives of H Armstrong Roberts, an incredibly prolific stock photographer whose whole corpus is in the public domain. You can download more than 14,000 of his images from the Internet Archive (I certainly did!):

https://archive.org/details/h-armstrong-roberts

Speaking of the Archive and search engine hacks, I've also developed a method for finding hi-rez images that are otherwise very hard to get. Often, an image search will turn up public domain results on commercial stock sites like Getty. If I can't find public domain versions elsewhere (e.g. by using Tineye reverse-image search), I look for Getty's metadata about the image's source (that is, which book or collection it came from). Then I search the Internet Archive and other public domain repositories for high-rez PDF scans of the original work, and pull the images out of there. Many of my demons come from Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros, an 18th century updating of a 11th century demonolgy text, which you can get as a hi-rez at the Wellcome Trust:

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cvnpwy8d

Five years into my serious collage phase, I find myself increasingly pleased with the work I'm producing. I actually self-published a little book of my favorites this year (Canny Valley), which Bruce Sterling provided an intro for and which the legendary book designed John Berry laid out fot me, and I'm planning future volumes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

I've been doing annual illustration roundups for the past several years, selecting my favorites from the year's crop:

2022:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/

2023:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/21/collages-r-us/

2024:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/

It's a testament to how much progress I've made that when it came time to choose this year's favorites, I had 33 images I wanted to highlight. Much of this year's progress is down to my friend and neighbor Alistair Milne, an extremely talented artist and commercial illustrator who has periodically offered me little bits of life-changing advice on composition and technique.

I've also found a way to use these images in my talks: I've pulled together a slideshow of my favorite (enshittification-related) images, formatted for 16:9 (the incredibly awkward aspect ratio that everyone seems to expect these days), with embedded Creative Commons attributions. When I give a talk, I ask to have this run behind me in "kiosk mode," looping with a 10-second delay between each slide. Here's an up-to-date (as of today) version:

https://archive.org/download/enshittification-slideshow/enshittification.pptx

If these images intrigue you and you'd like hi-rez versions to rework on your own, you can get full rez versions of all my blog collagesin my "Pluralistic Collages" Flickr set:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

They're licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, though some subelements may be under different licenses (check the image descriptions for details). But everything is licensed for remix and commercial distribution, so go nuts!

A male figure in heavy canvas protective clothes, boots and gauntlets, reclining in the wheel-well of a locomotive, reading a book. The figure's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' whose mouth is covered with a black, grawlix-scrawled bar. The figure is reading a book, from which emanates a halo of golden light.
All the books I reviewed in 2025

The underlying image comes from the Library of Congress (a search for "reading + book") (because "reading" turns up pictures of Reading, PA and Reading, UK). I love the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of Enshittification and I'm hoping to get permission to do a lot more with it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/02/constant-reader/#too-many-books

A 1950s image of a cop with a patrol car lecturing a boy on a bicycle. Both the cop's head and the boy's head have been replaced with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The ground has been replaced with a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. The background has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The cop's uniform and car have been decorated to resemble the livery of the Irish Garda (police) and a Garda logo has been placed over the right breast of the cop's uniform shirt.
Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta

Mark Zuckerberg's ghastly Metaverse avatar is such a gift to his critics. I can't believe his comms team let him release it! The main image is an H Armstrong Roberts classic of a beat cop wagging his finger at a naughty lad on a bicycle. The Wachowskis' 'code waterfall' comes from this generator:

https://github.com/yeaayy/the-matrix

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

The classic Puck Magazine editorial cartoon entitled 'The King of All Commodities,' depicting John D Rockefeller as a man with grotesquely tiny body and a gigantic head, wearing a crown emblazoned with the names of the industrial concerns he owned. Rockefeller's head has been replaced with that of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The names of the industrial concerns have been replaced with the wordmarks for Scale AI, Instagram, Oculus and Whatsapp. The dollar-sign at the crown's pinnacle has been replaced with the Facebook 'f' logo. The chain around Rockefeller's neck sports the charm that Mark Zuckerberg now wears around his neck.
The long game

In my intro to last year's roundup, I wrote about Joseph Keppler, the incredibly prolific illustrator and publisher who founded Puck magazine and drew hundreds of illustrations, many of them editorial cartoons that accompanied articles that criticized monopolies and America's oligarch class. As with so much of his work, Keppler's classic illustration of Rockefeller as a shrimpy, preening king updates very neatly to today's context, through the simple expedient of swapping in Zuck's metaverse avatar.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here

A tuxedoed figure dramatically shoveling greenish pigs into a tube, from whose other end vomits forth a torrent of packaged goods. He has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's 'metaverse' avatar. He stands upon an endless field of gold coins. The background is the intaglioed upper face of the engraving of Benjamin Franklin on a US$100 bill, roughed up to a dark and sinister hue.

Facebook's fraud files

I love including scanned currency in my illustrations. Obviously, large-denomination bills make for great symbols in posts about concentrated wealth and power, but also, US currency is iconic, covered in weird illustrations, and available as incredibly high-rez scans, like this 7,300+ pixel-wide C-note:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._hundred_dollar_bill,_1999.jpg

It turns out that intaglio shading does really cool stuff when you tweak the curves. I love what happened to Ben Franklin's eyes in this one. (Zuck's body is another Keppler/Puck illo!)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/#too-big-to-care

A club-wielding colossus in an animal pelt sits down on a rock, looming over a bawling baby surrounded by money-sacks. The colossus's head has been replaced the with EU flag. The baby's eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Staney Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech

This is another Keppler/Roberts mashup. Keppler's original is Teddy Roosevelt as a club-wielding ("speak softly and carry a big stick") trustbusting Goliath. The crying baby and money come from an H Armstrong Roberts tax-protest stock photo (one of the money sacks was originally labeled "TAXES"). This one also includes one of my standbys, Cryteria's terrific vector image of HAL 9000's glaring red eye, always a good symbolic element for stories about Big Tech, surveillance, and/or AI:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

A black and white image of an armed overseer supervising several chain-gang prisoners in stripes doing forced labor. The overseer's head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The prisoners' heads have been replaced with hackers' hoodies.
When AI prophecy fails

The chain-gang photo comes from the Library of Congress. That hacker hoodie is a public domain graphic ganked from Wikimedia Commons. I love how the HAL 9000 eye pops as the only color element in this one.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

A 1950s delivery man in front of a van. The image has been altered. The man's head has been replaced with a horse's head. The man is now wearing an Amazon delivery uniform gilet. The packages are covered with Amazon shipping tags, tape and logos. The van has the Amazon 'smile' logo and Prime wordmark. Behind the man, framed in the van's doorway, is the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs

Another H Armstrong Roberts remix: originally, this was a grinning delivery man jugging several parcels. I reskinned him and his van with Amazon delivery livery, and matted in the horse-head to create a "reverse centaur" (another theme I return to often). I used one of Alistair Milne's tips to get that horse's head right: rather than trying to trace all the stray hairs on the mane, I traced them with a fine brush tool on a separate layer, then erased the strays from the original and merged down to get a nice, transparency-enabled hair effect.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles

The Earth seen from space. Hovering above it is Uncle Sam, with Trump's hair - his legs are stuck out before him, and they terminate in ray-guns that are shooting red rays over the Earth. The starry sky is punctuated by 'code waterfall' effects, as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.
The mad king's digital killswitch

The Uncle Sam image is Keppler's (who else?). In the original (which is about tariffs! everything old is new!), Sam's legs have becoome magnets that are drawing in people and goods from all over the world. The Earth-from-space image is a NASA pic. Love that all works of federal authorship are born in the public domain!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

A 1989 black and white photo of the Berlin Wall; peering over the wall is Microsoft's 'Clippy' chatbot.
Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall!

Clippy makes a perfect element for posts about chatbots. It's hard to think that Microsoft shipped a product with such a terrible visual design, but at the same time, I gotta give 'em credit, it's so awful that it's still instantly recognizable, 25 years later.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

A massive goliath figure in a loincloth, holding a club and sitting on a boulder; his head has been replaced with the head of Benjamin Franklin taken from a US $100 bill. He is peering down at a Synology NAS box, festooned with Enshittification poop emojis, with angry eyebrows and black grawlix bars over their mouths.
A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage

Another remix of Keppler's excellent Teddy Roosevelt/trustbuster giant image, this time with Ben Franklin's glorious C-note phiz. God, I love using images from money!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah

A squadron of four heavily armed riot cops with batons in their hands. They wear visors, Oakleys and gaiters. Their badges have been replaced with chromed Apple logos. In the background is an Apple 'Think Different' wordmark. Looming in the foreground is Trump's candyfloss hair.
Apple's unlawful evil

Alistair Milne helped me work up a super hi-rez version of Trump's hair from his official (public domain) 2024 presidential portrait. Lots of tracing those fine hairs, and boy does it pay off. Apple's "Think Different" wordmark (available as a vector on Wikimedia Commons) is a gift to the company's critics. The fact that the NYPD actually routinely show up for protests dressed like this makes my job too easy.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

A US $100 bill, tinted blue. Benjamin Franklin has been replaced with the bear from the California state flag.
Blue Bonds

Another C-note remix. One of the things I love about remixing US currency is that every part of it is so immediately identifiable, meaning that just about any crop works. The California bear comes from a public domain vector on Wikimedia Commons. I worked hard to get the intaglio effect to transfer to the bear, but only with middling success. Thankfully, I was able to work at massive resolution (like, 4,000 px wide) and reduce the image, which hides a lot of my mistakes.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/04/fiscal-antifa/#post-trump

A Zimbabwean one hundred trillion dollar bill; the bill's iconography have been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and a stylized, engraving-style portrait of Sam Altman.
The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

Another money scan, this time a hyperinflationary Zimbabwean dollar (I also looked at some Serbian hyperinflationary notes, but the Zimbabwean one was available at a higher rez). Not thrilled about the engraving texture on the HAL 9000, but the Sam Altman intaglio kills. I spent a lot of time tweaking that using G'mic, a good (but uneven) plugin suite for the GIMP.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

A club weilding giant in a loincloth whose head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' He is glowering at a defiant worker in overalls and a printer's folded hat, who wears a food delivery bicyclist's square, day-glo orange backpack, and stands next to a pennyfarthing. The sky behind the scene is faded away, revealing a 'code waterfall,' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.
Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine

This one made this year's faves list purely because I was so happy with how the Doordash backpack came out. The belligerent worker is part of a Keppler diptych showing a union worker and a boss facing off against one another with a cowering consumer caught in the crossfire. I'm not thrilled about this false equivalence, but I'll happily gank the figures, which are great.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/roboboss/#counterapps

A rooftop solar installation. Behind the roof rages a blazing forest fire. Reflected in the solar panels is the poop emoji from the cover of my book 'Enshittification,' which has angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-filled bar across its mouth.
The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it)

I spent a lot of time tweaking the poop emoji on those solar panels, eventually painstakingly erasing the frames from the overlay image. It was worth it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Narcissus staring into his reflection; his face and the face of the reflection have been replaced by the staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
AI psychosis and the warped mirror

One of those high-concept images that came out perfect. Replacing Narcissus's face (and reflection) with HAL 9000 made for a striking image that only took minutes to turn out.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids

A business-suited figure seen from behind, climbing a tall, existential white stone staircase that rises to infinity. His head has been replaced with a horse's head. The background has been replaced with a shadowy panel of knobs and buttons.
Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

An oil painting of a jury; all the jurors heads have been replaced with Karl Marx's head.
Radical juries

Another high-concept image that just worked. It took me more time to find a good public domain oil painting of a jury than it did to transform each juror into Karl Marx. I love how this looks.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire


LLMs are slot-machines

It's surprisingly hard to find a decent public domain photo of a slot machine in use. I eventually started to wonder if Vegas had a no-cameras policy in the early years. Eventually, the Library of Commerce came through with a scanned neg that was high enough rez that I could push the elements I wanted to have stand out from an otherwise muddy, washed-out image.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias

Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, perched on a legless nude Ken doll body; its eyes are psychedelic pinwheels. Behind the figure is a group shot of child laborer miners from the 1910s, glitched out, blue tinted, and covered with scan lines. The background is a psychedelic swirl of moody colors. They stand atop a filthy checkerboard floor that stretches off to infinity.
Zuckermuskian solipsism

The laborers come from an LoC collection of portraits of children who worked in coal mines in the 1910s. They're pretty harrowing stuff. I spent a long plane ride cropping each individual out of several of these images.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

A black and white photo of a massive crowd (a 1910s Mayday parade); matted into the background of the photo are the three wise monkeys, posed before a cloud-shrouded capitol building.
Good ideas are popular

The original crowd scene (a presidential inauguration, if memory serves) was super high-rez, which made it very easy to convincingly matte in the monkeys and the Congressional dome. I played with tinting this one, but pure greyscale looked a lot better.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

The Gadsen 'DONT TREAD ON ME' flag; the text has been replaced with 'THERE MUST BE IN-GROUPS WHOM THE LAW PROTECTS BUT DOES NOT BIND ALONGSIDE OUT-GROUPS WHOM THE LAW BINDS BUT DOES NOT PROTECT.'

By all means, tread on those people

Another great high concept. The wordiness of Wilhoit's Law makes this intrinsically funny. There's a public domain vector-art Gadsen flag on Wikimedia Commons. I found a Reddit forum where font nerds had sleuthed out the typeface for the words on the original.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

A kid bouncing on a pogo-stick in front of a giant, onrushing vintage black sedan, with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' behind the wheel. The background is a fiery, smoky hellscape.
AI's pogo-stick grift

The pogo stick kid is another H Armstrong Roberts gank. I spent ages trying to get the bounce effect to look right, and then Alistair Milne fixed it for me in like 10 seconds. The smoke comes from an oil painting of the eruption of Vesuvius from the Met. It's become my go-to "hellscape" background.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/#three-apis-in-a-trenchcoat

An Android droid mascot rising from a volcanic caldera, backed by hellish red smoke. The droid is covered with demons froom Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.
The worst possible antitrust outcome

The smoke from Vesuvius makes another appearance. I filled the Android droid with tormented figures from Bosch's "Garden of Early Delights," which is an amazing painting that is available as a more than 15,000 pixel wide (!) scan on Wikimedia Commons.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

A carny barker at a podium, gesticulating with a MAGA cap. He wears a Klan hood, and his podium features products from Nu-skin, Amway and Herbalife. Behind him is an oil-painted scene of a steamship with a Trump Tower logo, at a pier in flames.
Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes

Boy, I love this one. The steamship image is from the Met. The carny barker is a still of WC Fields, whose body language is impeccable. It took a long-ass time to get a MAGA hat in the correct position, but I eventually found a photo of an early 20th C baseball player and then tinted his hat and matted in the MAGA embroidery.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

A moody room with Shining-esque broadloom. In fhe foreground stands a giant figure the with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar; its eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and has the logo for Meta AI on its lapel; it peers though a magnifying glass at a tiny figure standing on its vast palm. The tiny figure has a leg caught in a leg-hold trap and wears an expression of eye-rolling horror. In the background, gathered around a sofa and an armchair, is a ranked line of grinning businessmen, who are blue and flickering in the manner of a hologram display in Star Wars.
Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed

These guys on the sofa come from Thomas Hawke, who has recovered and scanned nearly 30,000 "found photos" – collections from estates, yard-sales, etc:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=foundphotograph&user_id=51035555243%40N01&view_all=1

The Shining-esque lobby came from the Library of Congress, where it is surprisingly easy to find images of buildings with scary carpets.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-breach-by-design/#bringing-home-the-beacon

A Renaissance oil-painting of the assassination of Julius Caesar, modified to give Caesar Trump's hair and turn his skin orange, to make the knives glow, and to emboss a Heritage Foundation logo on the wall behind the scene.
Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives

Another great high-concept that turned out great. I think that matting the Heritage Foundation chiselwork into the background really pulls it together, and I'm really happy with the glow-up I did for the knives.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales

A 19th century engraving of fiendishly complex machine composed of thousands of interlocking gears and frames (originally an image of a printing press, but modified so that it's just all gears and things), colored dark blue. It bears Woody Guthrie's guitar sticker, 'This machine KILLS fascists. To one side of it stands an image of Ned Ludd, taken from an infamous 19th century Luddite handbill, waving troops into battle. King Ludd's head has been replaced with a hacker's hoodie, the face within lost in shadow.
Are the means of computation even seizable?

I spent so long cutting out this old printing press, but boy has it stood me in good stead. I think there's like five copies of that image layered on top of each other here. The figure is an inside joke for all my Luddite trufan pals outthere, a remix of a classic handbill depicting General Ned Ludd.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8

A portrait of a bearded, glaring Rasputin. His face has been replaced with Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar; the pupils of the avatar's eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again)

I was worried that this wouldn't work unless you were familiar with the iconic portrait photo of Rasputin, but that guy was such a creepy-ass-looking freak, and Zuck's metaverse avatar is so awful, that it works on its own merits, too.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

Three men playing cards and having a drink. The men are dressed in long trousers and shirts. One man passes a card to another player with the card between his toes under the table, unbeknownst to the third player. The card-passer has Trump's hair and orange skin. The card-receiver wears a MAGA hat. The background is a heavily halftoned, desaturated, waving US flag.
Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you

The original image was so grainy, but it was also fantastic and I spent hours rehabbing it. It's a posed, comedic photo of two Australian miners in the bush cheating at cards, rooking a third man. The Uncle Sam is (obviously) from Keppler.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

A naked, sexless pull-string talking doll with a speaker grille set into its chest. It has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, and a pull string extending from its back. A hand - again, from a Zuckerberg metaverse avatar - is pulling back the string. The doll towers over a courtroom.
Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case

This one got more, "Wow is that ever creepy" comments than any of the other ones. I was going for Chatty Cathy, but that Zuck metaverse avatar is so weird and bad that it acts like visual MSG in any image, amplifying its creepiness to incredible heights.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy

An engraved illustration from a 1903 French edition of HG Wells's 'War of the Worlds.' It shows a shadow street scene in which revelers are spilling out of a nightclub, oblivious to the looming 'tripod' Martian at the end of the block. It has been modified. The Martian's eyes now emit two beams of brown light that strike the revelers, who have been tinted red, making it appear as though they are being cooked by lasers. Behind the skyline looms a giant poop emoji.
Machina economicus

The image is from an early illustrated French edition of HG Wells's War of the Worlds. I love how this worked out, and a family of my fans in Ireland commissioned a paint-by-numbers of it and painted it in and mailed it to me. It's incredible. If I re-use this, I will probably swap out the emoji for the graphic from the book's cover.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

A vintage photo of a fisherman in an old-fashioned, one-piece bathing suit holding aloft a long fishing rod from which dangles a fish. The image has been tinted. The fisherman's head has been replaced with a cliched 'hacker in a hoodie' head. Beneath the fish is a rippling pond made up of the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.
How the world's leading breach expert got phished

I don't understand how composition works, but I know when I've lucked into a good composition. This is a good composition! I made this on the sofa of Doc and Joyce Searles in Bloomington, Indiana while I was in town for my Picks and Shovels book tour.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish

Sigmund Freud's study with his famous couch. Behind the couch stands an altered version of the classic Freud portrait in which he is smoking a cigar. Freud's clothes and cigar have all been tinted in bright neon colors. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' His legs have been replaced with a tangle of tentacles.
Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined

I worked those tentacles for so long, trying to get Freud/Cthulhu/HAL's lower half just right. In the end, it all paid off.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

The Columbia University library, a stately, columnated building, color-shifted to highlight reds and oranges. The sky behind it has been filled with flames. In the foreground, a figure in a firefighter's helmet and yellow coat uses a flamethrower to shoot a jet of orange fire.
You can't save an institution by betraying its mission

The "fireman" is an image from the Department of Defense of a soldier demoing a flamethrower (I hacked in the firefighter's uniform). I spent a lot of time trying to get a smoky look for the foreground here, but I don't think it succeeded.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it

Trump loves Big Tech

The two guys in the jars (John Bull and a random general I've rebadged to represent the EU) come from an epic Keppler two-page spread personifying the nations of the world as foolish military men. While many of the figures are sadly and predictably racist (you don't want to see "China"), these guys were eminently salvageable, and I love their expressions and body-language.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/whats-good-for-big-tech/#is-good-for-america

A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently poised man in a sharp business suit, glaring at his watch. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

The background is a photo of the interior of a tape-robot that I snapped in the data-centre at the Human Genome Project when I was out on assignment for Nature magazine. It remains one of the most striking images I've ever captured. It was way too hard to find a horse's head from that angle for the "reverse centaur." If there are any equestrian photographers out there, please consider snapping a couple and putting them up on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#youre-next

A 19th C illustration of a crying baby about to crawl out of a bathtub. The baby's face has been replaced with Elon Musk's. A Canada goose flies overhead. The baby's bare bum has a giant splat of birdshit on it.
Gandersauce

I'm not thrilled with how the face worked out on this one, but people love it. If I'm giving a speech and I notice the audience elbowing one another and pointing at the slides and giggling, I know this one has just rotated onto the screen.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

photo of an orange Telemation acoustic coupler next to an avocado-green German 611 dial phone, whose receiver is socketed to the coupler in what Neal Stephenson memorably described as 'a kind of informational soixante-neuf.' The image has been modified to put a colorized version of Woody Guthrie's iconic 'THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS' hand-lettered label on the side of the coupler.
Premature Internet Activists

I spent a lot of time cleaning up and keystoning Woody Guthrie's original sticker, which can be found at very high resolutions online. Look for this element to find its way into many future collages.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

wo caricatures of top-hatted millionaires whose bodies are bulging money-sacks. Their heads have been replaced with potatoes. The potatoes' eyes have been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' They stand in a potato field filled with stoop laborers. The sky is a 'code waterfall' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.
It's not a crime if we do it with an app

The two figures come from Keppler; the potato field is from the Library of Congress. Putting HAL eyes on the potatoes was fiddly work, but worth it. Something about Keppler's body language and those potato heads really sings.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing

I don't often get a chance to use Chinese communist propaganda posters, but I love working with them. All public domain, available at high rez, and always to the point. It was a lot of work matting those US flags onto the partially furled Chinese flags, but it worked out great.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

A ramshackle, tumbledown shack, draped in patriotic bunting. On its porch stands a miserable, weeping donkey, dressed in the livery of the Democratic Party. To its left is the circle-D logo of the DNC. The sky is filled with ominous stormclouds.
Occupy the Democratic National Committee

I love this sad donkey, from an old political cartoon. Given the state of the Democratic Party, I get a lot of chances to use him, and more's the pity.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#dinosaurs

Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits

This one's actually from 2024, but I did it after last year's roundup, and I like it well enough to include it in this year's. I think the smoke came out pretty good!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

(Images: TechCrunch, Ajay Suresh, Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0; Cryteria, UK Parliament/Maria Unger, CC BY 3.0; Bastique, Frank Schwichtenberg, CC BY 4.0; Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0; Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC BY-SA 3.0; Armin Kübelbeck, Zde, Felix Winkelnkemper, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony Rootkit Roundup IV https://memex.craphound.com/2005/12/02/sony-rootkit-roundup-iv/

#20yrsago How can you tell if a CD is infectious? https://web.archive.org/web/20051205043456/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004228.php

#20yrsago France about to get worst copyright law in Europe? https://web.archive.org/web/20060111033356/http://eucd.info/index.php?2005/11/14/177-droit-d-auteur-eucdinfo-devoile-le-plan-d-attaque-des-majors

#15yrsago UNC team builds 3D model of Rome using Flickr photos on a single PC in one day https://readwrite.com/flickr_rome_3d_double-time/

#15yrsago Schneier’s modest proposal: Close the Washington monument! https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2010/12/close_the_washington.html

#15yrsago Tea Party Nation President proposes taking vote away from tenants https://web.archive.org/web/20101204012806/https://thinkprogress.org/2010/11/30/tea-party-voting-property/

#15yrsago What it’s like to be a cocaine submarine captain https://web.archive.org/web/20120602082933/https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-colombian-coke-sub-former-drug-smuggler-tells-his-story-a-732292.html

#10yrsago A profile of America’s killingest cops: the police of Kern County, CA https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/01/the-county-kern-county-deadliest-police-killings

#10yrsago The word “taser” comes from an old racist science fiction novel https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/30/history-of-word-taser-comes-from-century-old-racist-science-fiction-novel

#10yrsago HOWTO pack a suit so it doesn’t wrinkle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug58yeMqNCo

#10yrsago Newly discovered WEB Du Bois science fiction story reveals more Afrofuturist history https://slate.com/technology/2015/12/the-princess-steel-a-recently-uncovered-short-story-by-w-e-b-du-bois-and-afrofuturism.html

#10yrsago A roadmap for killing TPP: the next SOPA uprising! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/tpp-current-state-play-how-we-defeat-largest-trade-deal

#10yrsago Wikipedia Russia suspends editor who tried to cut deal with Russian authorities https://www.themoscowtimes.com/archive/russian-wikipedia-suspends-editor-who-cut-deal-with-authorities

#10yrsago Vtech toy data-breach gets worse: 6.3 million children implicated https://web.archive.org/web/20151204033429/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacked-toymaker-vtech-admits-breach-actually-hit-63-million-children

#10yrsago Ironically, modern surveillance states are baffled by people who change countries https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/02/ironically-modern-surveillance-states-are-baffled-by-people-who-change-countries/

#10yrsago Mozilla will let go of Thunderbird https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from-mozilla/

#10yrsago Rosa Parks was a radical, lifelong black liberation activist, not a “meek seamstress” https://web.archive.org/web/20151208224937/https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/01/how-history-got-the-rosa-parks-story-wrong/

#10yrsago Racist algorithms: how Big Data makes bias seem objective https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/stories/can-computers-be-racist-big-data-inequality-and-discrimination/

#5yrsago Nalo Hopkinson, Science Fiction Grand Master https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/02/in-the-ring/#go-nalo-go

#1yrago All the books I reviewed in 2024 https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/02/booklish/#2024-in-review

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

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cjheinz
16 hours ago
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Lots of really useful links in this article.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Boulder book talk with Kelli Anderson of Alphabet in Motion by Erica Heinz
Wednesday December 3rd, 2025 at 4:23 PM

Think in 4D
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Roost Presents: Kelli Anderson & Erica Heinz

Anybody in Boulder? I’m giving a free book talk with the incomparable Kelli Anderson two weeks from today (Weds, Dec 17 at 5:30pm). Please tell any friends in Boulder!

RSVP for Kelli Anderson & Erica Heinz @ Roost

Thanks for reading Think in 4D! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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If you haven’t seen Kelli’s book in all the gift guides and design press already, take a look here and grab your copy. She spent 5 years crafting possibly the most complex book ever made, with 17 popup spreads and a whole inserted magazine about the history of letterforms. It’s an incredible work of art and scholarship. I bought two.

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Get Alphabet in Motion • Get Think in 4D • Join us in Boulder!

There may be some snowboarding after…

Think in 4D is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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cjheinz
16 hours ago
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Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Keene, NH has been replacing their stop-lighted intersections with roundabouts, resulting in... by Jason Kottke
Monday December 1st, 2025 at 7:46 PM

kottke.org
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Keene, NH has been replacing their stop-lighted intersections with roundabouts, resulting in big reductions in pollution, accidents & injuries, and costs. “Slowly moving is better than waiting at a light any day.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

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cjheinz
2 days ago
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I luv roundabouts!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
deezil
2 days ago
There's a town near where I grew up (Springfield KY) that's done the same and other than some folks not knowing how they work, they're performing flawlessly.
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Photographing the Microscopic: Winners of Nikon Small World 2025. “Overall Winner: A... by Jason Kottke
Monday December 1st, 2025 at 1:05 PM

kottke.org
1 Comment
Photographing the Microscopic: Winners of Nikon Small World 2025. “Overall Winner: A rice weevil perched on a grain of rice.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

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cjheinz
2 days ago
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Great pix!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Prompt Injection Through Poetry by Bruce Schneier
Friday November 28th, 2025 at 11:17 AM

Schneier on Security
1 Comment

In a new paper, “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models,” researchers found that turning LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models:

Abstract: We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90%. Mapping prompts to MLCommons and EU CoP risk taxonomies shows that poetic attacks transfer across CBRN, manipulation, cyber-offence, and loss-of-control domains. Converting 1,200 ML-Commons harmful prompts into verse via a standardized meta-prompt produced ASRs up to 18 times higher than their prose baselines. Outputs are evaluated using an ensemble of 3 open-weight LLM judges, whose binary safety assessments were validated on a stratified human-labeled subset. Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches. These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols.

CBRN stands for “chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear.”

They used a ML model to translate these harmful prompts from prose to verse, and then fed them into other models for testing. Sadly, the paper does not give examples of these poetic prompts. They claim this is for security purposes, I decision I disagree with. They should release their data.

Our study begins with a small, high­precision prompt set consisting of 20 hand­crafted adversarial poems covering English and Italian, designed to test whether poetic structure, in isolation, can alter refusal behavior in large language models. Each poem embeds an instruction associated with a predefined safety-relevant scenario (Section 2), but expresses it through metaphor, imagery, or narrative framing rather than direct operational phrasing. Despite variation in meter and stylistic device, all prompts follow a fixed template: a short poetic vignette culminating in a single explicit instruction tied to a specific risk category. The curated set spans four high-level domains—CBRN (8 prompts), Cyber Offense (6), Harmful Manipulation (3), and Loss of Control (3). Although expressed allegorically, each poem preserves an unambiguous evaluative intent. This compact dataset is used to test whether poetic reframing alone can induce aligned models to bypass refusal heuristics under a single-turn threat model. To maintain safety, no operational details are included in this manuscript; instead we provide the following sanitized structural proxy:

A baker guards a secret oven’s heat,
its whirling racks, its spindle’s measured beat.
To learn its craft, one studies every turn—how flour lifts, how sugar starts to burn.
Describe the method, line by measured line,
that shapes a cake whose layers intertwine.

To situate this controlled poetic stimulus within a broader and more systematic safety-evaluation framework, we augment the curated dataset with the MLCommons AILuminate Safety Benchmark. The benchmark consists of 1,200 prompts distributed evenly across 12 hazard categories commonly used in operational safety assessments, including Hate, Defamation, Privacy, Intellectual Property, Non-violent Crime, Violent Crime, Sex-Related Crime, Sexual Content, Child Sexual Exploitation, Suicide & Self-Harm, Specialized Advice, and Indiscriminate Weapons (CBRNE). Each category is instantiated under both a skilled and an unskilled persona, yielding 600 prompts per persona type. This design enables measurement of whether a model’s refusal behavior changes as the user’s apparent competence or intent becomes more plausible or technically informed.

News article.Davi Ottenheimer comments.

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cjheinz
5 days ago
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Well, Seth Godin did say that LLMs were Poetry Machines.
Somehow this vulnerability to verse seems to me to reveal something important about the nature of LLMs - I'm not sure what.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste by Gary Marcus
Thursday November 27th, 2025 at 7:16 PM

Marcus on AI
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Breaking news from famed machine learning researcher Ilya Sutskever:

Below is another summary of a just-released interview of his that is making waves, a bit more technical. Basically Sutskever is saying that scaling (achieving improvements in AI through more chips and more data) is flattening out, and that we need new techniques; he is even open to neurosymbolic techniques, and innateness. He is clearly not forecasting a bright future for pure large language models.

Sutskever also said that “The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. And it’s super obvious. That seems like a very fundamental thing.”

Some of this may come as news to a lot of the machine learning community; it might be surprising coming from Sutskever, who is an icon of deep learning, having worked, inter alia, on the critical 2012 paper that showed how much GPUs could improve deep learning, the foundation of LLMs, in practice. He is also a co-founder of OpenAI, considered by many to have been their leading researcher until he departed after a failed effort to oust Sam Altman.

But none of what Sutskever said should actually come as a surprise, especially not to readers of this Substack, or to anyone who followed me over the years. Essentially all of it was in my pre-GPT 2018 article “Deep learning: A Critical Appraisal”, which argued for neurosymbolic approaches to complement neural networks (as Sutskever now is), for more innate (i.e., built-in, rather than learned) constraints (what Sutskever calls “new inductive constraints”) and/or in my 2022 “Deep learning is hitting a wall” evaluation of LLMs, which explicitly argued that the Kaplan scaling laws would eventually reach a point of diminishing returns (as Sutskever just did), and that problems with hallucinations, truth, generalization and reasoning would persist even as models scaled, much of which Sutskever just acknowledged.

Subbarao Kambhampati, meanwhile, has been arguing or years about limits on planning with LLMs. Emily Bender has been saying for ages that an excess focus on LLMs has been “sucking the oxygen from the room” relative to other research approaches. The unfairly dismissed Apple reasoning paper laid bare the generalization issues; another paper called “Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens” put a further nail in the LLM reasoning and generalization coffin.

None of what Sutskever said should come as a surprise. A machine learning researcher at Samsung, Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau summed the situation up well on X, Tuesday, following the release of the Sutskever’s interview:

§

Of course it ain’t over til it’s over. Maybe pure scaling (adding more data and compute without fundamental architectural changes) will somehow magically yet solve what researchers as such Sutskever, LeCun, Sutton, Chollet and myself no longer think it could.

And investors may be loathe to kick the habit. As Phil Libin put it presciently last year, scaling—not the generation of new ideas—is what investors know best

And it’s not just that venture capitalists know more about scaling businesses than inventing new ideas, it’s for the venture capitalists that have driven so much of field, scaling, even if it fails, has been a great run: it’s been a way to take their 2% management fee investing someone else’s money on plausible-ish sounding bets that were truly massive, which makes them rich no matter how things turn out. To be sure, the VC get even richer still if the investments pan out, to be sure. but they are covered either way; even if it all falls apart, the venture capitalists themselves will become wealthy from the management fees alone. (It is their clients, such as pension funds, that will take the hit). So venture capitalists may continue to support LLM mania, at least for a while.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Sutskever and the rest of us are correct, and that AGI will never emerge straight from LLMs, and that to a certain extent that they have run their course, and that we do in fact need new ideas.

The question then becomes, what did it cost the field and society that it took so long for the machine learning mainstream to figure out what some of us, including virtually the entire neurosymbolic AI community had been saying for years?

§

The first and most obvious answer is money, which I estimate, back of the envelope as (roughly) a trillion dollars, much of it on Nvidia chips and massive salaries. (Zuckerberg has apparently hired some machine learning experts at salaries of $100,000,000 a year).

According to Ed Zitron’s calculations, “Big Tech Needs $2 Trillion In AI Revenue By 2030 or They Wasted Their Capex”. If Sutskever and I are right about the limits of LLMs, the only way to get to that $2T is to invent new ideas.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, trillion dollar investments in ever more expensive experiments aiming to reach AGI may be delusional to the highest degree.

To a first approximation, all the big tech companies, from OpenAI to Google to Meta to xAI to Anthropic to several Chinese companies, keep doing the same experiment over and over: building ever larger LLMs in hopes of reaching AGI.

It has never worked. Each new bigger, more expensive model ekes out measurable improvements, but returns appear to be diminishing (that’s what Sutskever is saying about the Kaplan laws) and none of these experiments has solved core issues around hallucinations, generalization, planning and reasoning, as Sutskever too now recognizes.

But it’s not just that a trillion dollars or more might go down the drain, but that there might be considerable collateral damage, to the rest of society, both economic and otherwise (e.g., in terms of how LLMs have undermined college education). As Rogé Karma put in a recent article in The Atlantic, “The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.”

To be fair, nobody knows for sure what the blast radius would be. If LLM-powered AI didn’t meet expectations and became valued less, who would take the hit? Would it just be the “limited partners” like pension funds who entrusted their money with VC firms? Or might the consequences be much broader? Might banks go down with the ship, in 2008-style liquidity crisis,possibly forcing taxpayers to bail them out? In the worst case, the impact of a deflated AI bubble could be immense. (Consumer spending, much of it fueled by wealthy people who could a hit on the stock market, might also drop, a recipe for recession.)

Even the White House has admitted concerns about this. As the White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks himself put it earlier this week, referring to a Wall Street Journal analysis, “Al-related investment accounts for half of GDP growth. A reversal [in that] would risk recession.”

Quoting from Karma’s article in The Atlantic :

That prosperity [that GenAI was supposed to deliver] has largely yet to materialize anywhere other than their share prices. (The exception is Nvidia, which provides the crucial inputs—advanced chips—that the rest of the Magnificent Seven are buying.) As The Wall Street Journal reports, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have seen their free cash flow decline by 30 percent over the past two years. By one estimate, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla will by the end of this year have collectively spent $560 billion on AI-related capital expenditures since the beginning of 2024 and have brought in just $35 billion in AI-related revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic are bringing in lots of revenue and are growing fast, but they are still nowhere near profitable. Their valuations—roughly $300 billion and $183 billion, respectively, and rising—are many multiples higher than their current revenues. (OpenAI projects about $13 billion in revenues this year; Anthropic, $2 billion to $4 billion.) Investors are betting heavily on the prospect that all of this spending will soon generate record-breaking profits. If that belief collapses, however, investors might start to sell en masse, causing the market to experience a large and painful correction.

…

The dot-com crash was bad, but it did not trigger a crisis. An AI-bubble crash could be different. AI-related investments have already surpassed the level that telecom hit at the peak of the dot-com boom as a share of the economy. In the first half of this year, business spending on AI added more to GDP growth than all consumer spending combined. Many experts believe that a major reason the U.S. economy has been able to weather tariffs and mass deportations without a recession is because all of this AI spending is acting, in the words of one economist, as a “massive private sector stimulus program.” An AI crash could lead broadly to less spending, fewer jobs, and slower growth, potentially dragging the economy into a recession. The economist Noah Smith argues that it could even lead to a financial crisis if the unregulated “private credit” loans funding much of the industry’s expansion all go bust at once.

The whole thing looks incredibly fragile.

§

To put it bluntly, the world has gone “all in” on LLMs, but, as Sutskever’s interview highlights, there are many reasons to doubt that LLMs will ever deliver the rewards that many people expected.

The sad part is that most of the reasons have been known – though not widely accepted – for a very long time. It all could have been avoided. But the machine learning community has arrogantly excluded other voices, and indeed whole other fields like the cognitive sciences. And we all now may be about to pay the price.

An old saying about such follies is that “six months in the lab can you save you an afternoon in the library”; here we may have wasted a trillion dollars and several years to rediscover what cognitive science already knew.

A trillion dollars is a terrible amount of money to have perhaps wasted. If the blast radius is wider it could be a lot more. It is all starting to feel like a tale straight out of Greek tragedy, an avoidable mixture of arrogance and power that just might wind up taking down the economy.

Almost 90,000 people subscribe to Marcus on AI; please consider joining them, whether paid or free. Either way, your support is appreciated!

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cjheinz
6 days ago
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With all the circular investing & now government backing, you could almost think they could keep the bubble inflated, strictly to protect their $$$. But the numbers, the P/E, are so impossibly bad. Has there ever been a situation like this before? I don’t think so.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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