@cstross oh, right. Just clicked in a new way for me. You can imagine an AI future where artificial agents supplant humans because they're more efficient, better at tasks, etc. Fine, I was a SF nerd, I can imagine.
But there's a shortcut. AI-assisted marketing just has to get good enough to convince decision-makers that "AI" is better, screw the actual performance on novel inputs.
And, uh, oops our economy is structured to enable that?