are the authors genuinely or merely performatively ignorant?
Ignorant, to be precise, of the often comical extent to which they very obviously construct—to their own specification and for their purposes—the object of their hostility...?
While dismissing—in a fashion that renders their reasoning vacuous—the wearying complexity of the actually-observable complex reality they think they are attacking?
One of the most obvious "tells" in this sort of thing is the breezy ease with which abstract _theys_ are compounded and then attacked.
I'm sorry, Anthony; there is no they. There is a bewildering and yes, I get it, frightening and all but inconceivable number of actors, each pursuing their own aims, sometimes in explicit or implicit collusion, sometimes competitively or adversarially...
...and that is but the most banal of the dimensions within which one might attempt to reason about "AI."
Frustration is warranted; hostility towards the engines of surveillance capital and its pleasure with advancing fascism is more than warranted; applications of AI within this domain and services rendered by its corporate builders—all ripe and just targets.
But it is a mistake that renders the critique and position dismisable to slip from specifics to generalities and scarecrows.