My latest *Locus* column is "Reverse Centaurs," and it sets out to unravel a paradox: how is that some AI's users describe their experience as a hellish ordeal, while others delight in the ways that AI is changing their lives for the better?
locusmag.com/2025/09/commentar…
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vul…
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Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Reverse Centaurs
Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does i…Locus Online
Cory Doctorow
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The answer is contained in the concept of "centaurs" and "reverse centaurs," found in automation theory:
pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/ran…
A "centaur" is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).
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Cory Doctorow
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Let me give you an example: remember at the start of the summer, when Hearst published a summer reading guide that was full of nonexistent books that had been "hallucinated" by a chatbot?
npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-54050…
404 Media's Jason Koebler got in touch with the guy whose byline appeared on the list, and he was hugely embarrassed and contrite:
404media.co/chicago-sun-times-…
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Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist
Jason Koebler (404 Media)Cory Doctorow
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In a followup story, Koebler noticed something that the first round of dunks and memes about this poor guy had missed: this same writer had his name on *many* of these "best of the summer" lists in this supplement. He was practically the sole author of an entire 64-page insert:
404media.co/viral-ai-generated…
And that's where it gets interesting. Koebler got his start in journalism as an intern at the *Washington Monthly*, where he worked on lists like these:
404media.co/podcast-ai-slop-su…
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Podcast: AI Slop Summer
Joseph Cox (404 Media)Cory Doctorow
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When Koebler was doing this work, he'd be part of a team of three interns, overseen by an experienced journalist, backstopped by an extensive fact-checking department. Those little lists take a surprising amount of work, if you really care about their quality.
The freelance writer who authored this giant summer reading guide with all its lists had been tasked with doing the work of literally *dozens* of writers, editors and fact-checkers.
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Cory Doctorow
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We don't know whether his boss told him he had to use AI, but there's no way one writer could do all that work *without* AI.
In other words, that writer's job wasn't to write the article. His job was to be the "human in the loop" for an AI that wrote the articles, but on a schedule and with a workload that precluded his being able to do a good job. It's more true to say that his job was to be the AI's "accountability sink" (in the memorable phrasing of Dan Davies).
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Cory Doctorow
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He was being paid to take the blame for the AI's mistakes.
He was, in other words, a reverse centaur.
I am a freelance writer as well, and not so long ago, I wanted to quote something smart I'd heard on a podcast in an article, but I couldn't remember where I heard it. So I downloaded Whisper, an open source AI transcription model from Openai, to my laptop. I threw the last 30 hours' worth of audio that I'd listened to at it, and worked away on other stuff for an hour or two.
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Cory Doctorow
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When I checked again, I had a folder full of pretty reliable transcripts. I searched the text, found the quote, and opened the audio to the supplied timecode to double-check it. I was a centaur. I got to decide how to use the AI, and I only had to use it in ways that made my work better and more satisfying.
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Cory Doctorow
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This, I think, is the explanation for the paradox of AI: the AI users who are being immiserated and precaratized by bosses who have been convinced to fire their colleagues and pile their work on the terrorized survivors of the layoffs *hate* the AI, because it makes their life worse in every way.
Whereas the people who choose when and how to use AI - the centaurs - are only using AI to the extent that it is *useful*, and throwing it away when it's not.
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Cory Doctorow
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They may make poor choices about the AI, but those choices are *theirs*, they are not imposed from on high. A bicyclist who chooses to commute on two wheels can have a glorious ride, or they can ride like a maniac and end up eating dirt, but they are having a fundamentally different experience from, say, a gig delivery platform rider who has been given an impossible quota and is having their pay eroded by algorithmic wage discrimination:
pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geo…
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Cory Doctorow
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I was happy to put this in the pages of *Locus*, the trade magazine for the science fiction field. The job of a science fiction writer is only incidentally to describe what a technology *does* - at its best, science fiction interrogates who the technology does it *to* and who the technology does it *for*.
This is a political act of resistance. Margaret Thatcher's motto, after all, was "There is no alternative," by which she meant, "Stop trying to think of alternatives."
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Cory Doctorow
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The bully's trick is to present your defeat as a fait accompli: "Resistance is futile."
Tech bosses practice a form of vulgar Thatcherism all the time: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think there's no way to talk with your friends without letting him listen in; Sundar Pichai wants you to think there's no way to search the web without being spied on.
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Cory Doctorow
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Tim Cook wants you to think there's no way to have a safe and reliable computing experience without giving him a veto over which software you install; Satya Nadella wants you to think there's no way for you to edit a Word file without letting your boss compare your keystrokes-per-minute to your co-workers:
pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb…
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Cory Doctorow
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And AI bosses want you to think that the only way to use these tools is to displace and immiserate labor, because that's the promise they raise investment capital on:
pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-…
AI is a bubble. If it wasn't a bubble - if it was just a bunch of computer scientists and product teams tinkering with possible uses for advancements in back-propagation, generative adversarial networks and machine learning - there wouldn't be any controversy here.
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Cory Doctorow
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A programmer who uses a chatbot to autogen a bunch of cross-browser CSS stylesheets that mostly work, after some tinkering, would maybe mention that fact over beers - but they wouldn't get sucked into a cult obsessed with outlandish scenarios in which the chatbot wakes up and turns us all into paperclips:
firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/…
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Cory Doctorow
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AI is a bubble. Bubbles burst. We're in for a near-total collapse of the AI investment mania. Most of these companies will fail. Many planned data-centers will never be opened. Many existing data-centers will be shuttered. When that happens, what will be left?
AI is a bubble, and when bubbles burst, they sometimes leave behind a productive residue.
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Cory Doctorow
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At home, I enjoy 2GB symmetrical fiber optic internet, because AT&T was able to light up some of the dark fiber that Worldcom fraudulently raised billions for. Worldcom's CEO died in prison after scamming the finances of ordinary people, and the world would be a better place if that had never happened, but there was some productive residue left behind, and many of us are reaping the benefit today:
locusmag.com/2023/12/commentar…
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Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
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Contrast that with the cryptocurrency bubble. When that bursts, we'll still have a smattering of programmers who've had a subsidized education in cryptography and secure programming in Rust, but mostly what crypto will leave behind is bad Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs. Like Enron, crypto will leave nothing much behind of any value.
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Cory Doctorow
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All bubbles are bad, but some are more productive than others. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be *stellar* bargains on GPUs (it would be ironic if scientists snapped them up at pennies on the dollar and used them for climate modeling). We'll have a lot of technical people who are *much* better at applied statistics than they were a decade ago. And there will be the open source models, like Whisper, the tool I used to transcribe all those podcasts.
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Cory Doctorow
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These open source models run on commodity hardware, and while the climate costs of *creating* those models is terrible, they're here now, and operating them isn't especially energy-intensive. When I used Whisper to transcribe 30 hours' worth of podcasts, my laptop's fan didn't even switch on.
What's more, open source hackers are doing *amazing* things with these tools - far more than the giant corporations that released them ever anticipated.
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Cory Doctorow
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These "toy" models were released as a way to entice programmers into specializing in cloud systems operated by the big tech companies, but it turns out that these standalone models can do amazing things, and aren't just a demo for a big, doomed foundation model:
pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/ope…
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Cory Doctorow
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It doesn't matter what happens to Openai; Whisper is here to stay. It's already being rolled into other standard tools - the latest version of ffmpeg integrates Whisper and can autogen captions:
theregister.com/2025/08/28/ffm…
The things these open source standalone models can do will only expand, and they will become a given for our computing applications.
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Whisper it: FFmpeg 8 can now subtitle your videos on the fly
Liam Proven (The Register)Cory Doctorow
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Your computer or phone will be able to transcribe audio and do cool image-editing stuff like erasing strangers from the background of a photo as a standard feature.
That's the good news. The bad news is all the damage the bubble is doing now and all the further damage that will come from its collapse.
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Cory Doctorow
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Today, we're getting the climate impact, obviously, and the immiseration of all those workers who are being reverse-centaured by an AI that can't do their job, but whose manufacturer's salesforce convinced their boss to fire them and replace them with an AI anyway.
After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters.
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Cory Doctorow
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And long after that, there will be the terrible impact on our society's ability to do things, as defunct foundation models grind to a halt, after the people they replaced are long gone and can't step in to pick up the work they fumble. We are busily filling the walls of society with digital asbestos and we'll be digging it out for generations to come.
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Cory Doctorow
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Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible. That's how I came to spend the summer writing a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux with the working title *The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI*, whose goal is to improve the quality of AI criticism so that it inflicts maximum damage on AI swindlers and their terrible investment bubble.
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Cory Doctorow
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It'll be out in 2026, but for now, you can have a look at my *Locus* column:
locusmag.com/2025/09/commentar…
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Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Reverse Centaurs
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
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The most enshittification-proof way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do an end-run around the Amazon/Audible audiobook monopoly and disenshittify your audiobook experience in the process:
disenshittification.org
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Cory Doctorow
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Image:
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File:Modular synthesizer - "Control Voltage" electronic music shop in Portland OR - School Photos PCC (2015-05-23 12.43.01 by djhughman).jpg - Wikimedia Commons
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