I do not at this point think I need to read anything else about AI in its modern iteration. However, I excitedly stop what I am doing for Cory Doctorow. I have really come to like the guy and everything he stands for, and so I decided I could squeeze in one more book on AI. This is despite the fact that I don’t really think I am going to learn anything else about the subject, nor is my opinion on the subject going to change any time soon, and nor do I think that I will have anything interesting to say on the subject.
This could have gone poorly. Part of how Doctorow manages his prolific output is by being repetitious, and I had already read the original article from his website where he first coins the term “reverse-centaur.” I also watch his do the press-release rounds for this book before and after its publication. This actually sucked out the joy of my reading his “The Internet Con”. No fault of Doctorow, it was just a lot I had heard before.
In some other review I have compared myself to the choir actively being preached at, wondering why I read books when I know that I will largely just agree with them. One reason is simply for the enjoyment (members of a choir must at least enjoy choir music). Doctorow has a gift for explaining complicated things very well, and he brings in a lot of humor. Blessedly for this particular subject, Doctorow is not in the doomer camp (like Yudkowsky and Soares) of the subject, while still pointing out how utterly terrible the technology is in terms of environmental and community damages. Because we live in an information deluge, I also finds book like this are great at reminding me about all those anecdotes regarding how utterly fucking terrible the AI industry is. They come at you in torrents, and I’m not making a spreadsheet to track them all.
Even further to Doctorow’s credit, some of the more interesting arguments in this are the expressly anti-doomerism parts, and you can kind of see that Doctorow is brining a lot of original thoughts and research to it. For instance, I myself was convinced that AI was going to seriously start damaging the arts. My reasoning was “why is anyone going to pay for art if we all have the tools to churn it out ourselves?” But Doctorow points out that almost everywhere you look every creative industry is having an unwarranted fucking panic over long lasting IP’s, which is why Marvel and DC have movie studios and are still churning out superhero mediocrity, and why it seems like every contemporary fiction author is releasing a god damned 12 part series. AI art is currently in-copyright-able, and until that changes those holders of art pursestrings will likely not care too much about AI. Doctorow’s thoughts on this alone are worth going through this book.
Anyway, I think that is enough fawning. I do think this one is worth a read if you happen upon it.
I will lay down one minor criticism before leaving this review behind. The conception of a reverse centaur as laid out here is slight wrong. Doctorow imagines it as the body of a human with the head of a horse, while I imagine it as the body of a human crowned with the ass of a horse. That’s 50% of a joke, and 50% not. As I am sure everyone else has been doing in 2026, I have been following what people have been doing with AI. Particularly watching people try to churn out ‘AI art’, I find it just a to be a bunch of horseshit.
