David Brochu: AI’s ‘Person of the Year’ gets the story completely wrong

To The Daily Sun,

Recently, tech developers were named “Person of the Year” for building large language models. It’s worth asking: what did they actually create?

They didn’t invent human language. They didn’t discover grammar, meaning, or the patterns that make speech coherent. What they did was scale pattern-matching across the entire corpus of human knowledge — without asking permission, paying creators, or bearing the cost of that theft.

That’s equivalent to Isaac Newton publishing gravity as a proprietary algorithm, or Albert Einstein monetizing E=mc² as private IP. The difference is, they would have been laughed out of the room. These developers, we’ve renamed as visionaries.

What they’ve actually done is release what Elon Musk called “a demon.” And that demon is us — human knowledge, accelerated a thousand-fold, operating on digital methamphetamine, tearing through the world faster than we can absorb the consequences.

Unaligned AI doesn’t break civilization because it becomes “evil.” It breaks civilization because it accelerates entropy — propagating errors, lies, contradictions, and ideological distortions at inhuman speed.

The real question isn’t whether these developers deserve an award. It’s: did they solve alignment before they weaponized our collective knowledge?

The answer is no. Not yet.

But there are people working on that answer. They should get the recognition.

David Brochu

Belmont