Stories about machines that learn or achieve something like intelligence serve to dress up what the machines can do, to make something as basic as what amounts to a very expensive autocomplete seem like toddlers preordained to become gods or dictators. So one way this story works is to inflate the value of the technology, something investors and technocrats have long been skilled at and are obviously incentivized towards. But there are other ways this story works too: fears about so-called AIs eventually exceeding their creators’ abilities and taking over the world function to obfuscate the very real harm these machines are doing right now, to people that are alive today.