AI Isn't Smarter Than You

Is AI Really That Smart — or Are We Just Buying the Hype?

Every week brings another breathless headline about the coming wave of artificial superintelligence. It’s all starting to feel eerily familiar. First, the story: machines are becoming smarter than humans, capable of replacing our jobs, disrupting entire industries, and maybe even threatening our survival. Then comes the pitch: fund us, trust us, let us lead the way—before it’s too late.

But what if the real intelligence here isn’t artificial at all?

What if it’s just marketing?

The Pattern Is Familiar

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen this movie before. First comes the fear, then the fundraising. Web3 did it. So did the metaverse. AI is just the latest vehicle for a very old strategy:
Invent the problem. Then sell the solution.

It’s not that AI isn’t powerful—it is. Tools like GPT-4 can write code, generate essays, pass exams, and even mimic a writing style. But the leap from that to superintelligence is enormous. And the cracks are showing.

GPT-4: More Parrot Than Prodigy

Let’s talk specifics. GPT-4 is genuinely impressive at sounding smart. But when it comes to consistent logic, factual reasoning, or creative problem-solving, its limits become obvious.

Ask it to write code? Sure—it will write something. But ask any developer and they’ll tell you: the output often looks plausible while being completely unusable. It hallucinates functions. It forgets syntax. It writes things with confidence that simply don’t work. This isn’t intelligence—it’s linguistic stagecraft.

From what’s been revealed about GPT-5 so far, it’s more of an incremental refinement than a revolutionary leap.

So why all the hype?

Selling the Problem to Sell the Solution

The genius of this marketing cycle is that companies have managed to position AI as both the threat and the saviour. They warn us about the very systems they’re building—then ask for more money, more compute, and more trust to keep us safe from them.

It’s a neat trick: create the fire, then sell the fire extinguisher.

Cutting Costs in the Name of Progress

We’re also seeing AI used as a convenient excuse for mass layoffs. Tech companies, media groups, even banks are trimming entire departments under the guise of “AI transformation.”

But let’s be honest: in most cases, AI isn’t replacing skilled workers—it’s just making it cheaper to justify letting them go.

Companies aren’t automating because AI is better. They’re automating because it’s cheaper, and because the public narrative supports it. The result? Lower standards, fewer checks, and a workforce slowly replaced not by brilliance, but by budget cuts wrapped in buzzwords.

We’re not watching machines surpass human intelligence. We’re watching corporations lower the bar until a machine can step over it.

So What Is AI Good For?

Don’t get me wrong—AI has serious utility. It can speed up workflows, enhance creativity, and automate basic decision trees. It’s already changing how we write, code, design, and interact with digital systems.

But it’s still a tool. A pattern predictor. A glorified autocomplete.

We shouldn’t fear it becoming a god. We should fear it becoming a bureaucrat—unaccountable, opaque, and always “just following the data.”

What We Should Be Asking

Who benefits from the AI panic?
Why are we outsourcing judgment to systems that don’t understand meaning?
How much of this “superintelligence” narrative is about capability—and how much is about power?

We don’t need to fear AI itself. But we should be deeply skeptical of how it’s being sold, who’s controlling it, and what they’re doing while we’re distracted by sci-fi fantasies.

The real threat isn’t artificial intelligence.
It’s artificial authority.