AI Bros Are Speedrunning Apocalypse for Profit

Guillermo del Toro recently articulated what should be obvious to anyone paying attention. At the Palm Springs International Film Festival, he asked, "When they tell you it doesn't matter, when they tell you a fucking app can do art, you say, 'Well, if it's that easy and if it's that unimportant, why the fuck do they want it so bad?'" He answered his own question: "The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human."

Corporations deploying artificial intelligence want the world to believe art holds no value. It doesn't add up. If creative expression truly means nothing, why mobilize vast resources to replicate it? Why dedicate billions in venture capital, computational power, and engineering talent to producing synthetic imitations of something supposedly worthless?

The answer is something darker than just wanting money.

These men cannot create. They possess neither the capacity for genuine artistic expression nor the biological ability to generate life itself. Ira Levin's 1967 novel "Rosemary's Baby" explores this terror through horror, but the psychological concept predates gothic fiction by millennia. Womb envy describes men confronting what they cannot do. Women carry the singular power to create human existence. Men do not. Throughout history, this reality has spawned violence, subjugation, and systematic oppression as compensation for what cannot be possessed.

Artificial intelligence represents the latest manifestation of this ancient anxiety.

Anyone can make art. The barrier to creative expression has never been lower. Children draw. Grandmothers doodle on old receipts. Teenagers scribble in their notebooks while teachers lecture. Art is a human being living life. Yet laziness erodes even the most basic human capacity. Rather than learn to create anything themselves, they would rather burn it all down than admit they can't.

Aside from envy, money makes it worse. Let's not forget that men still get paid more than women for the same art. Historically speaking, they've even taken credit for their wives' work, erasing women's contributions entirely. That legacy hasn't disappeared. Now they're doing the same thing with machines.

Calling AI "creative" is insulting. These systems don't generate anything. They steal existing work, shuffle the pieces, and spit out derivative garbage. Singing karaoke isn't the same as writing the song. One requires following instructions. The other demands imagination, skill, and actual creative vision. Pretending they're the same is either ignorant or deliberately dishonest.

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, stated plainly that artificial intelligence will "probably most likely lead to the end of the world." He continued without apparent irony that "in the meantime, there will be great companies created." This is not speculation. The man steering one of the world's most influential AI companies has acknowledged his technology will likely destroy human civilization. His response amounts to extracting maximum profit before the collapse.

Altman and his cohort are prepared to immolate Earth for quarterly earnings. They will eliminate most human life while ensuring sufficient wealth to insulate themselves temporarily from consequences. The calculation is explicit. Billions in personal fortune justify planetary annihilation. Those without resources can burn.

Real human creativity threatens them because it exposes how empty they are. They can't create life. They can't make genuine art. They built elaborate machines to hide that fact, and they'll destroy everything rather than admit they have nothing to offer.

They've convinced themselves that scale equals substance. More data, more processing power, more computational brute force will somehow transmute theft into creation. It won't. No amount of aggregated plagiarism produces originality. They know this. Everyone knows this. But acknowledging that truth means confronting their own uselessness, and their egos cannot survive that reckoning.

These men have chosen apocalypse over humility. They would rather end the world than admit they can't create anything beautiful and they are prepared to take everyone down with them before they accept that some things cannot be bought, stolen, or automated. Altman already confessed the ending. He's just determined to get rich enough to escape to the moon when Earth collapses.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.