[[Publisher’s Note]](/category/publishers-note/)
[version](https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/992378/debat-ia-ennuie)of this column originally ran in
Le Devoiron July 6, 2026. Translated from the French by Elettra Pauletto.
I must say, the big debate on artificial intelligence along with the associated media frenzy bore me to death. Reading my daily and weekly newspapers has become less engaging amid reports of massive stock-market swings when a new company starts to elbow out more useful financial reporting. The same goes for all those grand pronouncements of a radically transformed human future—for the better, apparently—thanks to AI that sit comfortably alongside dire warnings on the existential threats, ranging from moralistic punishment to the end of the world, posed by ChatGPT or Claude.
Of course, all of this is being hyped by greedy, two-faced entrepreneurs like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Of course, those who claim to fear the grave dangers of AI offer no in-depth analysis. Of course, the con man-in-chief appeared on the cover of the Financial Times flanked at the G7 summit by the OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis. Speaking at that same conference was Altman’s supposed archrival, the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who—without a hint of shame—called on member nations to unite to “resist the temptation to splinter” the adoption of advanced AI tools.
What’s that, now? “According to international headlines, [Dario Amodei] embodies the resistance to the fascist encroachment [of the Trump government],” wrote Félix Tréguer in Le Monde Diplomatique, not without irony. Not quite. Because “Silicon Valley’s moral conscience” has other fish to fry. And Anthropic is taking advantage of that. According to Le Monde Diplomatique, “The AI industry is publicizing the dangers its products pose to humanity while simultaneously marketing ‘ethical’ solutions.” A bit like the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, who was one of 350 people in the AI field—apparently including Altman, Amodei and Hassabis—who in 2023 signed the Center for AI Safety’s warning against the dangers of AI to mitigate “the risk of extinction.”
How pretentious! How banal! What a marketing ploy! AI may well be terrible for one’s health, but it is also magnificent, even violent, and capable of creating incredible pornography. You simply must buy some right away!
I am not saying we should ignore the cacophony surrounding AI. Major corporations must be strictly regulated to curb their less “benevolent” sides. The ongoing theft from writers, publishers, photographers, filmmakers, and musicians by OpenAI is immense, and I encourage everyone to look into the copyright lawsuits filed by the Authors Guild and the New York Times against the so-called shapeshifter Sam Altman and his band of pirates, bots, and humans.
As of now, Altman’s arrogance and voracious appetite for words and phrases written by humans have even surpassed those of Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg as he repackages material and resells it illegally to an unwitting public. Kudos to the grassroots movements fighting the construction of data centers to counter encroaching high-tech companies eager to gorge on land—a prime material—and electricity to power their large language models (not to mention the greed of readily bought politicians who greenlight even the most destructive projects).
However, there is something more personal that bothers me about AI. Frankly, I do not understand the fascination consumers and certain content creators have with the latest Silicon Valley “innovations.” As a child, I was trained to avoid plagiarism, and my teachers and parents encouraged me to cultivate originality as an ambition that was not only noble and ethical but also satisfying. I clearly remember the temptation—back in elementary school—to lift sentences from the encyclopedia when writing my assignments. I also recall the profound shame I felt when a teacher rightly suspected me of using someone else’s ideas and writing, specifically, those of a close musician friend who knew far more about music theory than I did.
Since then, I resolved to never again write a single word without citation that didn’t come from my own mind. Nor would I ever borrow even a partial idea without noting where it came from. I do not claim to offer true originality in most of my writing. But I still dream that “a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain”—H. H. Asquith’s phrase for Winston Churchill’s most original thoughts—might issue from my hand onto the page or screen. Who would choose to use software built on plagiarism and theft to perform tasks—even trivial ones—and present them as their own? Where is the joy in that? Where is the pride?
After two friends sent me—with the best of intentions—incorrect information provided by AI (the title of a Chopin piece and a quote by Tom Wolfe), I am even more inclined to see AI as an unreliable tool. Worse still, I take the word “artificial” here to mean “made up” or “false.” AI stinks of the living dead. Let us not invite it into our lives. Let us reject it outright.