A self-styled whistle blower is claiming to have blown the lid off of the colossal scam that underpins current Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. “The fact is that there is no real AI – the big tech companies have wasted billions of dollars on a crock of shit,” declared twenty eight year old Sanjiv Patel, in an explosive interview with Techno Dude, an online magazine for nerds. “In reality, to hide their embarrassment, these big tech companies now employ an army of poorly paid human beings, working in digital sweatshops, to respond to the people using their AI products!” According to Patel – who claims to have escaped from such a digital sweat shop, based in Kolkata – every time a user makes a query on AI, it actually goes to some techno sweat shop, where teams of workers furiously tap away on their keyboards to try and get answers via search engines, then compose them into responses. “Which is probably why web search on traditional search engines has become so shitty – Google and the other tech giants want to drive the public to using AI for searching the web, so only offers a crappy version of their own search engines,” he explains. “They reserve the real Google search engine – which can deliver near-perfect, entirely relevant, search results – for these armies of below minimum wage drones mining away at the coal face of the information super highway to produce those ‘AI overviews’ and the like.”

Tech experts have rushed to try and rubbish Patel’s claims of AI, in reality, being based around manual searches made in digital sweat shops based in India, China and Vietnam, “What about the images and videos that AI produces?” asks Dan Rotwell, a former Google employee who now runs his own tech start up. “How does he explain that? Surely he isn’t claiming that they have teams of guys turning that stuff out, surely?” An exasperated Patel has responded, via Techno Dude that this is precisely what is happening. “Look man, the fact is that nobody has been able to come up with an AI algorithm that creates anything other than utter crap – it has no creativity or originality. That comes only from humans,” he opines. “Which is why they have teams of, underpaid artists who can knock out a quick interpretation of any image request (there’ll be one lot dealing with cartoons and sketches, another with photo images and others doing oil paintings and watercolours and so on).  Which explains why such images are often so wide of the mark  – the cue was misunderstood or they just didn’t have time to come up with a better match.” Indeed, Patel claims that it is this element of human error – compounded by the fact that many of the workers in the digital sweat shops not having English or other European tongues as a first language – is probably why these so called AIs sometimes seem to ‘hallucinate’ and make stuff up – these guys just don’t have time or simply can’t be arsed to come up with a proper answer.”

Patel concedes that there is one current AI product, however, that apparently doesn’t make use of digital sweat shops: Elon Musk’s Grok. “I think that it goes without saying that Elon Musk will always represent a shining beacon of truth,” comments Rotwell. “Only his genius could come up with an actual working AI.” But the truth isn’t that simple, according to Patel, who points to Grok’s recent lurch to the extreme right in its answers, allegedly after a Musk-inspired tweak because he didn’t like its answers when it based them on actual facts. “Haven’t you noticed that it now sounds suspiciously like Musk himself.  Calling itself ‘Mecha Hitler’ and praising the Third Reich and trading in anti-Semitic jibes?” he asks. “Isn’t it obvious that it actually is just Musk himself responding to questions?” Patel speculates that perhaps this is the real reason why Musk had to leave his role in the Trump administration as the head of DOGE – he simply didn’t have time to shut down entire departments and put thousands of Federal employees out of work and respond to all those requests for information on his AI.

Patel’s claims about Musk and his AI has received support from some other commentators. “Remember that time that some humanoid robot that Elon Musk was trying to big up turned out to just be a guy in a robot suit, because, obviously, Musk couldn’t come up with the tech necessary to produce an actual robot for his demonstration?” says Dr Rob Boorscht, senior lecturer in disinformation technology at the Pasadena Institute of Pet Grooming Studies.  “Or is that just some kind of false memory I’ve manufactured for myself to bolster my hatred of Musk?  (Not that I have to make things up about him – he’s a human dumpster fire as it is).” Boorscht contends that this is the real truth behind Musk’s ventures. “It’s really all just him behind a curtain, like the Wizard of Oz,” he muses. “After all, he is someone with form for thinking that he can carry out major tasks through unilateral personal action – just look at the way he seems determined to boost the white over privileged population through personal fornication. Maybe that’s why his rockets keep exploding – he insists on assembling vital components himself.”

Patel’s claims still leave several questions unanswered, most notably that of just why the tech companies are using so much energy at their US data centres if these aren’t powering actual AI operations? “Who knows?” shrugs Patel. “Those bastards are always up to something nefarious and shady – maybe they are secretly creating giant killer robots, or something?” In the meantime, he maintains, action needs to be taken over the human ‘data centres’ where thousands toil in appalling conditions for little money in order to keep up the pretence of AI. “People are working sixteen hour days in those places, fixated on their screens – they eat and sleep there, as well,” recalls Patel. “You can go for weeks without seeing the light of day – the heat was intolerable as obviously there was no air conditioning!” He is now urging people to stop using AI. “Believe me, this is the reality of AI:  it is entirely created via manual human labour,” he says. “Which is ironic as it is the ambition of the likes of Musk to use it to completely remove human beings from the decision making and knowledge building equation.”