Colombian essay questions AI apocalypse and marketing hype

This column from a major Colombian paper captures a growing global backlash against apocalyptic AI narratives. By arguing that “AI” is mostly a marketing term and that systems like Claude do not have independent desires, the author redirects attention toward the human institutions building and deploying these models. In that framing, the real risks come less from rogue intelligences and more from incentives, concentration of power and the way corporate leaders use fear or hype to shape regulation and public opinion. ([elespectador.com](https://www.elespectador.com/el-magazin-cultural/la-inteligencia-artificial-es-un-termino-de-marketing-sobrepensadores/))

For the Race to AGI audience, the significance is that this is not a niche tech‑blog debate; it is entering mainstream cultural discourse in Latin America. That matters for legitimacy. If publics outside the U.S. and Europe start to see existential‑risk talk as cover for corporate positioning, they may push their governments toward a more hard‑nosed focus on near‑term harms, labour impacts and monopoly power. That, in turn, could affect how frontier labs negotiate market access, data rules and safety obligations in large emerging markets.

Epistemically, the piece is a reminder that anthropomorphising current systems can obscure where agency actually sits. Whether or not one agrees with the author’s tone, unpacking “AI” as a socio‑economic project rather than a mysterious entity is healthy for policy debates.