December 8, 2021DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSEThis article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. It presents AI as an entity, as superhuman, and as inevitable—while erasing a history of scholarship and critique of AI technologies that demonstrates their limits and inherent risks, the irreducible labor required to sustain them, and the financial incentives of tech companies that produce and profit from them. This time, however, we need to call the bluff, rejecting the mystified portrait of AI that is central to this agenda, and naming related influence campaigns for what they are