AI Has Arrived in American Life as a Giant Turd Mountain

Source: AI is making everything worse — Garrett Graff, Doomsday Scenario (August 20, 2026)

Filed to: AI Has Arrived in American Life as a Giant Turd Mountain

The metaphor

AI has arrived in American life as a giant turd mountain. No one wants it; it makes everything worse when it arrives; and it's been pushed and backed and cheerled by the absolute worst people in modern American life.

Graff's central comparison: after the invention of electricity, if every factory worker had been assigned to start each workday by receiving an electric shock, and newly founded electrical companies had gone around to rural farms tasering farm children and dropping a dead electrocuted hog down the family water well, Edison might have struggled popularity-wise.

The crimes

• It pillaged everything. The backbones of frontier AI models were built by thieving everything ever written, said, or created. The internet is now a "giant fetid wasteland of slop, scam websites, and wooden-sounding LinkedIn posts."
• It hallucinates constantly. A BBC-led study found AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time, regardless of language or territory.
• It doesn't deliver. The "10X" productivity boosts are vaporware. It's more like 10%. Maybe an hour a week. For every useful output, an employee spends hours cleaning up the slop their coworkers generated.
• It was pushed by the worst people. Graff compares the AI industry's confusion to Robert Moses's ministers wondering why New Yorkers don't appreciate him.

The boosters' response

Students booed AI at commencement ceremonies across the country. Commencement — the one event where you're legally required to be optimistic. Meanwhile, AI boosters are confused about public reception, comparing themselves to Robert Moses wondering why New Yorkers don't appreciate him.

Verdict: The best thing written about AI in 2026. The turd mountain metaphor isn't a prediction — it's a description. Everyone has stepped in it.