I need you to understand, once and for all, that the AI Hype Machine exists. Its function is to generate interest and attention for the technology, increase VC funding and sales for consumer products, turn losses and growing costs into profits (pending task), and, ultimately, create a multi-trillion-dollar market that will vindicate the humongous spending on infrastructure. And I need you to understand that, despite what you may find in the Readers’ Picks comment section of the New York Times, the AI Hype Machine is extremely successful doing this. You being annoyed, angered, and even—if you have crossed the passersby fence—actively engaged in opposing and destroying the Hype Machine, is an irretrievable waste of time, because you’ve failed to understand that at no point in the long sequence of goals that the AI Hype Machine dutifully knocks out, you are the target. Calling out Sam Altman’s overhype, Mark Zuckerberg’s disbelief of superintelligence, Sundar Pichai’s indifference toward AGI, or Jensen Huang’s predilection for the country that pays him the most, is like trying to deflect a bullet coming from a gun that was never pointed at you, but aimed instead somewhere at your ideological, economic, social, and possibly geographical antipodes. If you can’t disassemble the AI Hype Machine, it's not because the average consumer is dumb and won’t listen, because news outlets are actually the closest ally to AI companies and not their sworn enemy, or because most anti-AI messages are born, live, and die in some Bluesky echo chamber, but because the AI Hype Machine doesn’t care about you. The best you can do if you truly want to do something that counts, instead of virtue signaling your opposition to the new thing, is, first, to not deny the existence of the AI Hype Machine as a hyperobject that by far surpasses your ability to make yourself noticeable; Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street are speaking, and to them, your whining is nothing more than the faint cry of ants crushed underfoot during their weekend hike. The second thing you can do is to dedicate your remaining energy to proselytize your preferred beliefs to those you can actually reach—friends, family, colleagues, loved ones—for they are the only world you are in a position to change.