AI, propaganda, and the market: a pile of thoughts.  by Kevin Patrick Fitzgerald, originally published on substack, September 2026, reissued by Mnoty Press October 2026.

I still kind of don't care about AI in itself. I don't think it is a doomsday device, and I don't think it will solve our most fundamental problems.

Even if it helps us cure cancer, I suspect most people will be unable to afford the cure. And if it turns into a 'Terminator' kind of 'kill all humans' type of thing, it still won't really be able to think, so we'll be able to destroy it without too much fuss, as long as we're willing to work together.

So, these are deeper issues: economic equality and petty rivalry. And so far, AI seems to be making them worse; not because it's designed that way so much as because people are using it to make money and to support their chosen political movement.

I was reading the comments on an article about AI recently and saw a comment that I've seen before in a different setting on roughly the same topic. It was phrased a bit differently, but the point was the same.

My first thought was that this is an old professor who had the same idea as dozens of others, because sometimes old professors have trouble thinking outside the box. My second thought was that this was an AI talking point, followed by the thought that whether this comment was written by a real person or not, this was likely an AI generated comment.

And, so, well, shit.

Maybe the original article was AI generated. I'm not all that good at spotting it. I would rather not waste my time reading AI generated writing, but reading a bunch of (possibly AI generated) writing about how to spot AI generated writing is not how I'm looking to solve that problem.

And yes, it matters. If I'm researching about the war in Sudan, and I'm reading an AI generated piece, the author of which does not care about the people of Sudan, then I'm spending time that I could be spending reading a human-generated piece, the author of which does care. Caring matters.

It also can't think outside the box. It can't come up with new solutions. It can compile solutions, which can be helpful, but it can't think of new ones. It doesn't actually think, and despite what the grifters keep promising, I don't believe it ever will, because people are irrational and a computer can't mimic irrationality.

Anyway, there's an economic disconnect in the conversation about AI generated textual content. And I hadn't seen it for a while. I was focused more on the intellectual value of historical discourse.

I was concerned about how writing critical history, which is already an uphill struggle, would be more-so as we are increasingly met with an avalanche of regurgitated 'facts' from the past. I was right about this concern, yet my focus on it obscured how this process fit in the larger economy of content creation.

The disconnect in the conversation is about chronic poverty. It's the desperation and the opportunity that content creation seems to offer people to make what in some parts of the world seem like a small amount of money, and in other parts of the world seems like a lot of money.

There seems to be an opportunity, a wealth of opportunities, to making enough money to put a new tin roof on a house in Kolkata for one's family, if one of them tries hard enough.

As such, the hope of making money on content is a way of exploiting the desperation of chronic poverty and the very best of humanity: the compassionate connection.

It ends up functioning like a pyramid scheme where people at the bottom hustle and struggle to make content designed for the market. Their content is commoditized from the start, and they don't reap the financial benefits.

I feel some criticism; in some ways this is capitalism in itself; the rich get richer by exploiting the poor. I think the general argument against capitalism misses the point, though, by referring it to a system. The system is fine. We simply need to care more for each other and share more of our wealth.

Returning to the problem at hand, what we have are a bunch of desperate people trying frantically to make money online through content creation, and those who are using AI are flooding the market, making it more difficult to find sincere, meaningful, and human content.

I think that when people comment on such content, and get hostile toward the person who is using AI, this hostility is misguided. The hostility should be geared toward the people at the top of the pyramid who are exploiting the workers, and who make more money when chronic poverty is widespread and systemic.

Another thing, while I'm on the topic, is that I've been accused of being a bot once on a comment section for a political video. I made what I well knew to be an unpopular statement, and I got a response that simply said 'bot'.

I've never used any sort of AI to create any kind of content. I've started using the AI at the top of the google searches a bit for quick research. For example, I forgot the new spelling of Kolkata, so I googled it with the old spelling, and the AI gave me the new spelling. I hope this doesn't use too many data center resources.

But, yeh, I don't think I was called a bot because I was lazy with my grammar on a one sentence post. I think I was called a bot because my reader decided to attack my unpopular statement without engaging with the statement itself.

And this brings me to the propaganda aspect of the present idea-pile. It's not simply that people are using AI and bots, if there's a difference, to promote their own ideas, which is dishonest and anti-democratic; it's also that people are using this type of accusation without taking the time to investigate in order to cut down arguments without actually dealing with the content itself.

It seems to be on a lot of levels making things worse for internet discourse, but not because of the technology itself. They call it AI as a marketing ploy. They keep saying they are going to give it consciousness, but they can't. It's an absurd promise. What they call AI is just information processing on another level.

The problem is how it's being used to bolster exploitation and to continue the trends of ignoring situations such as the war in Sudan or poverty in Kolkata. The collective blinders of the international community are amplified by AI marketing and propaganda campaigns.

I trust that after enough people try to make money creating content with AI and find that it doesn't work, then that labor resource will dry up, and then that the industry elites will find a way to automate it on another level, and that the deluge of delusion will continue. Hopefully those who are presently being exploited will have better opportunities for real financial improvement in the near future.

Anyway, thank you for reading. I hope you are well and healthy and that you and yours have a good, sturdy roof. If you are a writer, I hope you are not discouraged by the present situation. Our work is worth it. Please take good care and keep the faith.

Power to the People.

Freedom of the Soul.