Meanwhile, neck-deep in AI slop and surrounded by bots, the uncanny valley of people that aren't people with unknowable intentions may turn out to be the most resonant.
Arguably, nothing has a motive. Just natural selection favors mutations that improve procreation.
What skeptics don't get is that AI will be subject to natural selection. Maybe it's too obvious that things that stick around tend to stick around, but the implications are interesting. Without any real intelligence, we may see AI evolve in ways that aren't useful to us but increase its propensity to stick around — like COVID19 becoming less lethal over time.
Where would we get our daily fix of uncanny valley photos without AI?