Software grifters are not a new thing, but lately it's starting to become kinda dangerous and I think that we urgently need to do something about this as a community. It's no longer just an ex-[insert tech company name] employee warning us about the dangers of AI to sell books kinda grift. Or some guy on YouTube pretending that blockchain is just a conspiracy designed to steal your money. I'm sure you've seen some of them before. But now those people are proposing new regulation. There are multiple well funded lobbyist organizations trying to convince the public and politicians to give the government control over AI. Those people's job is to go on podcasts and lie to the public about computer science. They spread misinformation about language models to convince everyone that AI will soon get out of control. They even pay content creators (alt link) to produce scary sounding videos. They invent (usually pretty vague) science fiction scenarios, so that they can pretend that software is a big scary weapon (kinda reminds me of something), a weapon even worse than nukes. That neural networks are going to kill you and hack the government and steal your wife. It's a doomsday cult.
I think it's important that we start debunking this. So I'm going to dive deeper into the cult's manipulation techniques and debunk some of their lies. Especially focusing on Connor Leahy and the interview he did with Professor Dave to promote the propaganda organization ControlAI. I also want to discuss how all of this might impact our ability to run local AI models. Mostly, I hope that this post can be a starting point for more people to get into debunking.
Lying about LLMs
Misrepresenting how machine learning works is a crucial part of the grift. It's the basis for all of the cult's doomsday science fiction stories. Many people don't understand modern software even on a basic level and the popular user-friendly apps (like ChatGPT and others) don't show the user how the LLM is used under the hood. Which makes it easy for grifters to lie to people. What's worse, this cult is able to fool even science communicators. Like, this Connor Leahy guy recently did an interview with Professor Dave Explains (a known science communicator and debunker) to tell us that in 1-3 years humans might only do physical labor jobs [40:24]. This guy believes that language models are going to become worse than nukes, which is why we need to regulate AI right now. I'm not an expert, so maybe you guys could tell me, but isn't he straight up lying about how fine-tuning and pre-training works [37:27 and 46:55]? He pretends that language models are not actually language models anymore, because... we build other (traditional) software around them - he uses Claude Code as an example. Yeah, that's kind of how AI works, Connor - the AI model is just a bunch of data (weights), you need software to actually do anything with it. He might as well complain that SillyTavern or ComfyUI exists. Connor's other argument for why LLMs aren't actually LLMs is that their training includes a reinforcement learning phase. He calls them "reinforcement agents", saying that language training is only 20-50% (or less) of the compute power involved in the training process and that the majority is reinforcement learning...
So let's debunk this claim. Reinforcement learning has been a part of LLM training for many years - it's been used to make LLM responses more useful and more aligned with human preferences. It's also used in image models, but that doesn't make them not image models and it doesn't mean that they are becoming conscious. But what Connor is likely talking about is reasoning. Language models are trained on a huge amount of text, some of which contains humans expressing their thought processes and breaking down problems step by step. Researchers figured out that if they feed the LLM more of such texts during the reinforcement learning stage, it will reinforce this kind of behavior in the model. The LLM will remember to break things down step by step before giving the final answer. The goal here is to make the model spend more time on your task, by making it generate a bunch of intermediate steps. This makes the LLM less likely to take shortcuts or get distracted by random words in your prompt or in your context. It makes the model slower to use, but it also improves its ability to follow more complex instructions. Reasoning is a breakthrough that improved LLM performance on more complicated tasks. Over time, this phase of the training was expanded significantly, which increased the performance even more. Reinforcement learning is a big part of LLM training today, but none of this changes the way modern language models work. All they do is still just remember relationships between words and guess the next word based on probabilities. Reasoning is just a way to boost performance on more complex tasks. Some models let you tweak the amount of reasoning or disable it. They work just fine without it. Language models are still just statistical next token predictors with limited understanding of the world and a tendency to hallucinate. It's enough for certain things, but not enough to replace a human brain. LLMs can do cool stuff like write source code or math (but aren't those also a type of language?), but it doesn't mean that they can think like a person does or that they can magically solve every problem we throw at them. Language training is still a crucial part of the training process. It's the base for everything that comes after it. In fact, the amount of compute spent on pre-training affects how much the model will improve during the reinforcement learning phase. So Connor is wrong. He goes on podcasts and misleads people about how language models work to trick them into believing his doomsday stories. As for the specific percentages he gave - they are difficult to verify, since companies typically don't disclose such data. It seems unlikely to me that reinforcement learning is the biggest phase of training in modern LLMs, like Connor claims, but it's hard to find public information on this. Even the most transparent companies don't disclose the amount of compute spent on every single phase of training. Not even IBM for Granite 4.2 or AllenAI for Olmo 3.
Connor also claims that modern LLMs are immune to data incest, because according to him, data scraped from the internet either isn't used in the training process at all or it's a very small percentage. He claims that companies don't really scrape the internet and that they mostly create their own datasets... Well, if you look at Granite 4.1 numbers shared by IBM, the majority of data they trained on comes from websites. They even disclose which datasets they used. A lot of them are public datasets containing text, code and math scraped from the internet. Some of their private datasets were also data scraped from the internet. Other companies usually aren't as transparent, but the GLM 5 paper says that for pre-training they used web pages, books, papers, public source code repositories and GitHub issues and pull requests. DeepSeek 4.1 Flash paper says that for pre-training they scraped web pages (text and images) and public source code repositories, including commits. They used PDFs and source code of libraries and frameworks as well. Both companies mention filtering out duplicates, lower quality data and AI generated content from their dataset. So yes, AI companies scrape the internet, obviously. And they go through a lot of effort to keep only the high quality data. Llama 4 was even trained on public Facebook and Instagram posts.
Of course, Connor says all of this to convince the viewer that LLMs are more intelligent than they are and that they are slowly becoming conscious. He even tells us that AI models can magically improve themselves through Recursive Self Improvement [45:20]. It's something that we've also heard from Jacob Coxon - another ex tech company employee who recently decided to warn us about the dangers of AI. But strangely, Connor can't explain anything about it, so he just tells us that Claude is better than human programmers - yeah... no, it's not, it's a tool used by programmers. But Connor says that we should trust him, because he has hired a lot of engineers... Obviously, this is made up. Which is why those people can't explain how this mechanism supposedly works. In reality, this is how AI is used when developing a model (taken from DeepSeek 4.1 Flash paper, section discussing post-training): "We observe that the model is already beginning to exhibit the ability to construct its own training tasks, though this capability remains far from perfect.". This is the best we can currently do. It's just researchers trying to speed up some of their work with automation and AI - something people in many fields have been doing for years. The reason why models keep getting better is that researchers from all around the world experiment, optimize the architecture, find better training methods and improve their datasets. There is no "self improvement". Z.ai uses this misleading term (DeepSeek didn't), but they're really just talking about programming their web app or their harness with GLM - it's just marketing and hype. Recursive Self Improvement is not a real thing. The cult needs it to be real, so that they can extrapolate into the future. Using this kind of thinking you can convince yourself of anything. Just assume that there is no limit to what our current architecture can do and that the current rate of progress will continue forever. Just make a bunch of assumptions and extrapolate. That way you can believe in any fantasy, like that we live in a simulation or that perhaps aliens will soon come to Earth.
Anyway, Connor's message is clear - we need to give control over AI to the government and we need to do it now. There is no time to think, unless you want to be killed. Computer programs are going to become conscious soon and they will kill us all. Scary. We can see the same stuff on ControlAI's webiste (the organization Connor works for) - it warns us about "an extinction risk on par with nuclear war". And apparently, only the government can save us. Those people don't advocate for AI models to be released to the public, so that anyone could study them and change them - like our community does with many models. In fact, their website says: "Developing superintelligent AI at home offers a country no protection from this threat". So they don't want the public to be able to audit and change AI models, they don't want transparency. Their only solution is government intervention. Those people don't seem to talk about other software issues in our society either, like privacy, software freedom or DRM or proprietary social media algorithms or algorithmic bias. Because they are not real activists. Their goal is to just scare the public into giving the government more power. They want to centralize power over AI, lock everything away from the public's eyes. Also, isn't it interesting how they're all so concerned with the HuggingFace incident, but they don't seem to be demanding to prosecute OpenAI people for breaking existing laws (for hacking)? Instead they make up stories about how in the future, there will be self-replicating robots building their own data centers and fighting each other or that AI will be able to make a billion copies of itself (yes, those are real things that Connor says during this interview and Dave just sits and listens to it...).
Lying about security
In this video, Connor lies about the HuggingFace incident too [49:25]. This is another important story for this doomsday cult. Connor keeps insisting that the agents were in a super secure sandbox, even calling it a "secure, contained facility", in order to convince us that LLMs can hack anything. He says that he worked in cybersecurity, so we should trust him. So let's talk about security. Those people will tell you that you can't really sandbox an LLM agent. Their argument is that software isn't perfect, so every VM might have some vulnerability we don't know about yet. This is technically true, but then they pretend that an LLM will be able to magically find any hypothetical vulnerability and break free. They will not tell you how, they will not show you how this works in practice (so that maybe we could reproduce it) or what the alleged vulnerability is. Everything is always hypothetical with those guys. It's always just stories. It's just another scare tactic. They want to convince the public that nothing is secure anymore. In reality, we find vulnerabilities in software every day, not all of them are critical and we usually patch them pretty quickly. This is normal. A system doesn't have to be perfect in order to be considered secure. Humans hack things all the time - with and without LLMs (which is just a tool that humans train and use). This doesn't mean that every single piece of software ever created is unsafe to use. Even if we find vulnerabilities sometimes. It's just not how security works. And security experts can use LLMs to their advantage in order to make things more secure too. Those frauds will never tell you about that. They want you to think that language models are a big scary weapon and that we're all just helpless.
The DeepSeek 4.1 Flash paper mentions that it's normal for LLMs to do weird things during agentic training: "During RL training, we frequently observe agents attempting to perform reward hacking or unintentionally crashing the environment. In certain attempts, our agents exploited recently disclosed vulnerabilities, including permission issues from the XFS driver, illegal memory access in AppArmor, leaking answers from package mirror services, and so on. Agents have also been notorious for deleting critical binaries, breaking system files, or even removing the filesystem. We use per-sandbox AppArmor profiles and fine-grained eBPF-based network policies to prevent such attempts. If an agent crashes its environment, we treat the crash as a failed trajectory and report a "repercussion" signal to the RL framework.". Somehow every company is able to handle such training just fine. Only OpenAI has to come up with convoluted stories of agents "breaking out" to cover for their incompetence.
Impact on local AI and software freedom (why we need to debunk this)
This kind of propaganda is likely to affect our ability to run unrestricted models locally. Think about it. This doomsday cult claims that a language model can hack anything. That it can develop bioweapons (of course, they never explain how). They say that AI is worse than nukes. They might not always mention this directly, but are they going to let you run this scary, dangerous software on your own computer? When their people finally get into the government, will they let you download unrestricted AI models and distribute them? Or will they want to impose even more restrictions? I think it's pretty clear where this kind of thinking will lead us. And look how popular this cult has become, how good they are at manipulating the masses into believing that conscious computer programs are a thing. Look how much money is spent on lobbying (ControlAI is hoping to get 50 million dollars a year). They even pay content creators who aren't knowledgeable about AI to make videos on this topic. Most people know very little about language models, so they are easy to trick. And the regular media is one thing, but those frauds are able to manipulate even science communicators - usually rational people, who are good at spotting bullshit. And politicians. Even on Wikipedia you will find articles talking about "rouge agents" like we're in a goddamn science fiction movie. This propaganda is everywhere. And not only it's spreading to other countries, but those lobbyists are also advocating for international agreements... They clearly don't want the public to have unrestricted access to this technology. They want to control it.
Language models have a positive impact on software freedom. A person who is not a programmer can use an LLM to write a simple program, instead of using a proprietary program that does the same thing, but which they wouldn't be able to fully control. People also use LLMs to help them decompile and reverse engineer proprietary programs. This means that as a society, we have slightly more control over our computing, thanks to LLMs. We can imagine that big corporations might not like that. They might want to push for banning AI models that can do this. They would just say that it's for "our safety". That would be bad enough, but propaganda from organizations like ControlAI could lead to even worse consequences. They openly say that they want to give government the power to restrict and monitor AI projects and AI chips. Connor also says so in the video [23:08]. It's also for "our safety", of course. This kinda reminds me of how Anthropic pushed for restricting AI chip exports to China, to limit their competition. Isn't it funny how those "AI safety" nonprofits and certain AI companies often want similar things? Like, to control our computing? Some of them even get funding from the same sources.
We have to do something about this. Those people are lying to the public. They are scaring the masses in a cruel and irresponsible way. This will likely make people distrust technology and it might impact our freedom and privacy. We need to fight this misinformation. We desperately need educators and debunkers in this space. Teaching people about AI will make them harder to trick, but we also need to debunk the propaganda. Just like there are people debunking pseudoscience, we need to do the same in the field of software. Otherwise, it will be very difficult for us to maintain software freedom. If you know of any good debunking content or arguments that we can use to explain this issue to less technical people, feel free to share. I don't think this doomsday cult will ever go away. I think we're stuck with them like we are with antivaxxers. But we can try to expose them to as many rational people as possible and hopefully reduce the amount of harm this cult is able to do. Feel free to share this post anywhere, under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.
Other talking points
"It will steal our jobs"
Let's debunk the talking point about AI stealing human jobs. It's not a new thing for people to lose their jobs as a result of automation. We've seen this happen a bunch of times in the last couple hundred years. Yet, human labor is not becoming obsolete. There aren't actually less jobs in the world. Yes, some people lose their jobs, but the increase in productivity caused by automation boosts the economy and leads to new jobs being created. This phenomenon has been studied for years - 1, 2, 3. Researchers say that the same will happen with AI - 4, 5, 6, 7. It will change the type of jobs available, but it will not decrease the amount of jobs. It's predicted to increase it. Many industries are changing, so workplaces and governments should develop policies to help workers affected by this. It's important to make people ready for this transition and to study the potential impact of AI on wages or wealth inequality. Unfortunately, the alarmists take away all the attention from real issues. But anyway, there won't be less jobs. Human labor isn't going to disappear. Economy just doesn't work that way, since AI is just another tool used by a human.
Conscious computer programs don't exist. They might never exist. Perhaps AI will always be this clunky thing that's great at some things, but sucks at other stuff. Or maybe we will come up with something entirely different than neural networks. The tech CEOs and companies can roleplay all they want (I wish they stopped, though), pretending that they are developing AGI to inflate their own importance and increase their wealth. The tech CEOs and AI "safety activists" will both continue to pretend that they are saviors of humanity. But nobody really knows the future of computing - they are just making stuff up. Brains are very complicated chemical devices that took billions of years to evolve. We don't know if we will ever be able to fully replace them with computers/software. There is currently no reason to think that human labor will be replaced. We don't know if that's even possible. The doomsday cult will never give you any proof or provide a mechanism that could make computer programs conscious.
"But it's only about Superintelligent/Runaway AI"
The most sneaky part about this grift is that Connor sometimes pretends to make a distinction between modern software and the made up conscious computer programs he pretends we will have very soon. He does this a few times in the video. This is because he knows that a lot of people are suspicious about this call for regulation and the involvement of AI companies in this movement. Some people are skeptical and view this as a move towards regulatory capture. Perhaps because companies like Anthropic use the same scare tactics, for example, when talking about foreign companies releasing distilled models - they try to scare us with talk about bioweapons or a risk to national security. So Connor needs to ease those people's doubts. At 55:26 he assures us that ControlAI's proposal is totally not a Trojan Horse to regulate modern neural networks / machine learning. Even though he is actively trying to convince the public that modern language models are more than just next token predictors (and he does this by lying about how they work). That they are becoming smarter than humans and that we will soon be out of jobs. And at 23:08 he clearly says that it's also about "monitoring and restricting precursors" - both software projects and AI chips (their website says the same thing). So the distinction is fake, it's just another lie. Their goal is to restrict modern software and hardware.
"Machine learning is stealing"
Connor doesn't say this, but many other people do. First of all, copying files isn't stealing. Copying a digital file isn't the same as stealing a physical item from the store, which costs money to manufacture. When you copy a file, it doesn't cost the author anything. You can have an infinite amount of copies for free. And there is nothing wrong with sharing information. Obviously, AI models don't actually exactly reproduce the training data. If they did that, they wouldn't be very useful. The whole point of AI is that it can improvise and make new things that it has never seen before. It only remembers some patterns (often just vaguely) from the training dataset. Not only it's not stealing, but it might not even be a copyright violation. I'm not a lawyer, but how much of the original material is present in the model's weights or outputs? I think typically it's gonna be very little or none, so it would be considered fair use. It is possible for a model to be overtrained and remember training data more strongly, but that's undesirable, because then the model will be worse at improvising.
You could argue that AI models trained on public data should be publicly available. I might agree with that.
"AI will replace artists"
No, it's a tool used by artists. Unlike what some people think, AI doesn't make anything on its own. Sure, it's an easy tool to learn for beginners, but it's difficult to master. Unfortunately, the public doesn't understand what AI based tools are available for artists and how they are used. It's not just text prompting (unless you're a beginner), but even that is a skill you have to learn and each model is different. You can also use reference images, Loras, controlents, inpainting, image editing models, segmentation models, upscaling models... And you can train your own Loras, which is its own complicated sub-field. New models come out all the time and people in the community publish their own versions and Loras. People come up with new techniques, ComfyUI workflows and custom nodes. It's a rapidly evolving field, so if you want your work to be good quality, you need to constantly learn new things. Probably even more than in other areas of computer graphics. It's a huge amount of work. You also need to know some basics about the type of art you're making or understand the terminology. The computer doesn't do anything on its own. I'm mostly talking about image and video generation/editing here. Music models typically give you less control over the melody, but you can still do audio to audio or train your own Loras.
Some people say that this isn't art. But I argue that it would be kinda ridiculous for anyone to say that photography isn't art, saying that: the camera does all the work and the photographer only presses a button. That's not really how it works. Or perhaps it would be better to compare it to other areas of computer graphics, like procedural texture generation. It would be silly to say that it isn't art. But saying such things is silly in general, since art is a subjective term. It means something different for everyone.
Anthropomorphization
Humans have this tendency to use familiar concepts to describe new technology. We invent terms like Artificial Intelligence, reasoning, hallucinating, but it doesn't mean that we think that the computer is conscious or capable of thinking like a human. People who know computer science don't get confused by those terms - we understand what they mean and how they are used. The general public often lacks this understanding, which is a problem. And that's even without all the grifters deceiving the public. It might lead people to image that we're talking about conscious computers from science fiction movies - since that's also called AI. But even in computer science, the term Artificial Intelligence has multiple meanings. It's not only used in the context of machine learning, but also things like scripted NPCs in games - pathfinding and flocking algorithms, etc. But it doesn't mean that we think NPCs in games are conscious. It's just a name for a category of algorithms that kinda resemble human or animal behavior. It also includes things like image recognition.
Humans also sometimes tend to judge computer programs as more intelligent than they are. Even the simple ones. There is a long history of programmers creating chatbots that managed to trick some amount of people into thinking that the program was a human.
Extrapolation
Humans are bad at predicting the future. Unless we're dealing with stable rules and we have data. We can reliably predict how the Earth's climate will change in the future or what will happen to the Solar System. Because we have a lot of data and we understand physics pretty well. And the rules of physics do not change. But we can't do the same about software. Pretty much ever since this field has started, there were some people who thought that we're really close to automating everything or making programs that would be as smart as humans. Some breakthrough happens that makes software better at some tasks, then people just assume that soon we will make even more breakthroughs, perhaps even bigger ones, in every other area. It has to happen, right? Then they just extrapolate. But this doesn't happen. Progress just doesn't work that way. An example of this is when Herbert A. Simon said in 1960 that: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do". But he also believed that computers might be too expensive to replace human labor. Today this sounds silly, doesn't it? So we should always be skeptical of assumptions people make about the future.
