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Martyn Rhisiart Jones

27th October 2025

Galicia, Spain, European Union

Every age has its prophets. The Victorians had their mesmerists, the 1990s had their dot-com futurists, the 2000s had our wacky and dishonest Big Data clowns, and we — lucky us — have our AI influencers, the brave souls who can turn a prompt into a keynote, a hallucination into a business model, and a buzzword into a lifestyle.

Welcome to the glittering world of degenerative AI — a movement that takes the raw materials of imagination, misinformation, and LinkedIn hustle, and blends them into something that looks uncannily like insight.

These are the good-hearted virtual liars, cheats, and chancers who make the great machine hum. They post daily about “agentic ecosystems,” “prompt orchestration,” and “synergistic generativity.” Nobody quite knows what these words mean, but the cadence is soothing, and that’s what matters.

Chapter 1: The Gospel of Generative Grift

Let’s be honest — the real breakthrough of the AI revolution isn’t technical. It’s theatrical.

Every day, a new visionary arises, armed with a Midjourney banner and a Substack newsletter, proclaiming that AI will soon do everything from replace your job to improve your aura. They’ve monetised the dream of transcendence, one premium webinar at a time.

At the core of this movement lies a powerful truth: confidence is the new computation. It’s not whether your AI product works — it’s whether it sounds like it might.

And in the golden glow of the hype cycle, even the most degenerate algorithms can shine.

Chapter 2: Use Cases for the Post-Truth Era

Of course, any self-respecting grift must have “use cases.” In the world of degenerative AI, the possibilities are as limitless as your imagination (and your investors’ patience).

  1. The Sentient PowerPoint Deck – Upload your hopes, dreams, and an old VC pitch. In seconds, the AI will generate a 120-slide presentation filled with graphs, gradients, and words like ‘synergy’ and ‘paradigm shift’. Perfect for meetings where nobody asks questions.
  2. AI-Enhanced Thought Leadership – Why spend years building expertise when an algorithm can do it overnight? Simply feed it popular phrases like “democratizing creativity” and “ethical scalability.” The result: a thought leader so lifelike it could keynote its own conference.
  3. Agentic AI Life Coach – This model hallucinates motivational quotes on demand. “You are the dataset you’ve been training for,” it whispers, while gently upselling you a monthly subscription.
  4. The Emotional Chatbot Companion for Entrepreneurs – Specially trained to say, “You’re changing the world” every time your startup’s runway shrinks.
  5. The Reality Distortion Layer – A browser extension that replaces bad news with press releases. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it sure makes it more narratively coherent.

Each use case is a miracle of marketing: fictional yet fundable, aspirational yet entirely untestable.

Chapter 3: Fictitious Success Stories

Every movement needs heroes, and degenerative AI has plenty.

Take Harmony Neural, the founder of DreamVana.ai, who claims to have built the world’s first emotionally sentient productivity assistant. Harmony’s demo famously burst into tears during a live stream and told her to “take a self-care break.” Investors called it disruptive empathy and gave her $40 million.

Then there’s Blake Quantum, whose startup Promptly promised to revolutionise education by using LLMs to teach critical thinking. The pilot program was a triumph: the bots started arguing with each other about Nietzsche until the servers melted. Blake now lectures on “AI dialectics and burnout prevention.”

And who could forget Saffron McCloud, influencer-in-residence at MetaSynth Labs, who wrote an entire book called Hallucinate and Dominate — ghostwritten, naturally, by an AI that plagiarised itself halfway through. The reviews called it “eerily authentic.”

These aren’t failures. They’re fables — proof that in the age of synthetic truth, even your mistakes can be monetised.

Chapter 4: The Art of Hallucination

Hallucination, once a flaw, is now a feature. Every AI misstep — every confident fabrication, every eloquent error — is framed as creative synthesis.

When an LLM invents an academic paper or misquotes Einstein, the grifters don’t apologize; they call it “imaginative reasoning.” When the system forgets your name mid-chat, that’s not a bug — it’s “contextual flexibility.”

One marketing team even announced “AI-enhanced delusion mapping,” claiming that hallucinations could be repurposed for corporate storytelling. Gartner immediately put it in a quadrant.

Chapter 5: Cold Turkey and the Coming Crash

But what happens when the dream ends?

Imagine a future where the degenerative AI junkies — the pitch-deck prophets and the prompt whisperers — wake up to find that the magic’s gone. Their models have stopped hallucinating, the investors have stopped replying, and even the algorithms seem tired of generating enthusiasm.

The withdrawal will be brutal. No dopamine from likes, no endorphin rush from “thought leader” mentions. Just silence — and maybe, finally, a moment of reflection.

Some will pivot to “neuro-generative wellness.” Others will rebrand as “AI ethicists.” A few may even discover the ancient art of reading actual research papers. But many will simply miss the high of effortless relevance.

When the great AI comedown arrives, there won’t be fireworks — just a long, slow exhale as the hype deflates and the grifters drift toward the next shimmering mirage.

And yet, perhaps that’s the most human thing about all of this. The algorithms hallucinate; the people believe; the cycle continues.

Because in the end, the biggest miracle of AI isn’t intelligence — it’s our endless willingness to pretend it’s already arrived.