AI Is Being Used to Cut Wages, Not Expand Possibility

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 Much of the public conversation about artificial intelligence treats it as a creative breakthrough or a new form of intelligence. A more sober analysis suggests something far less inspiring. AI is being adopted primarily as a labor strategy. Its main appeal to corporations is not innovation or delight, but the ability to reduce wage costs by eliminating or devaluing human workers.

This framing matters because it cuts through the hype. When companies talk about AI as inevitable or transformative, they are often masking a much simpler goal. They want fewer people on the payroll.

The Myth of Inevitability

Large tech firms consistently present AI adoption as unavoidable, as if there were no viable alternatives. This rhetoric echoes an older political move that insists there is no alternative to the current system. Framing AI this way shuts down debate before it begins and discourages exploration of different economic or technological paths.

Even the branding around AI reinforces this narrative. Corporate labels suggest openness and intelligence while delivering tightly controlled systems designed to extract value and consolidate power.

Monopolies, Markets, and Inflated Valuations

AI also plays a crucial role in sustaining tech monopolies. Companies like Meta, Google, and Apple use AI to deepen their control over data, platforms, and markets. Fees such as Apple’s thirty percent cut of app store transactions are justified by claims of technological inevitability and scale.

At the same time, AI is used to prop up stock valuations. By promising domination of vast or speculative markets, companies justify price-to-earnings ratios that would be indefensible for mature firms. This pattern looks familiar. Crypto, blockchain, and Web3 followed the same script.

Automation Without Augmentation

The promise of AI is often framed as human augmentation. In practice, it looks more like human replacement. Corporations openly pursue visions of production without workers and creative industries without creators.

Layoffs across logistics, retail, and tech point in this direction. Workers are not always replaced directly by machines. More often, they are replaced by other workers forced to use AI tools to produce more, faster, and cheaper. The result is less autonomy, lower quality, and greater precarity.

This dynamic accelerates enshittification. As labor is deskilled and squeezed, products degrade and accountability disappears.

Quality Breaks First

The risks are not abstract. Recent examples of AI-generated media errors, including fabricated content attributed to real authors, show how quickly quality collapses when speed and cost-cutting dominate. Freelancers are pressured to produce massive volumes of work using unreliable tools, shifting risk onto individuals while corporations pocket the gains.

Once again, the incentives favor quantity over trust and extraction over care.

A Bubble With Lasting Damage

The financial side of this story is just as troubling. AI investment increasingly resembles a speculative bubble. When the flow of money slows, the fallout will not be limited to stock prices. Skilled workers pushed out of industries may never return. Institutional knowledge will be lost. Rebuilding could take decades.

The damage may linger long after the hype fades, not unlike other technologies that were deployed recklessly and left society to deal with the consequences.

Why This Path Is a Choice

The most important point is that none of this is inevitable. AI is not forcing these outcomes. Corporate strategy and permissive policy are. The same forces that enable enshittification elsewhere are at work here: monopoly power, weak labor protections, and a lack of meaningful accountability.

Seeing AI clearly means rejecting the story that this is the only possible future. It is one future, chosen because it concentrates wealth and power. Different choices would produce different results. Recognizing that is the first step toward resisting the worst outcomes and insisting on something better.

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