it's kind of like saying like you could replace a king with an AI. the position is a relationship to power more than it is a function with a productive output.
a bad king and a bad CEO could be replaced with a spinning top with no loss in productivity (and maybe some gain).
I still remember when I used ChatGPT the first time to write an email. I thought to myself “Oh. This sounds like 99% of the corporate communication from above”. We were joking that corporate had BossGPT for years and just didn’t tell anybody.
It also made me realize that most the so called “creatives” in marketing and PR also just repeat variations of the same few templates. Not much real creativity there.
Who takes responsibility when the AI does something unethical or illegal? Do we put the computer in jail? Or do we just look the other way like we do with human CEOs?
I think Grok on x.com is a reasonable case study. There’s the stuff we heard about and then there’s a separate category of things that weren’t newsworthy, and only the newsworthy things prompted changes to be made.
My charitable word would be average. AI means average. And an average CEO isn’t that bad. It’d be a deliberate trade in exchange for less spending on salaries. (just one very large salary)
I reckon such AIs are already in place, but by proxy. There must be CEOs somewhere who have completely offloaded what meagre amount of thinking they needed to do to some bespoke AI setup while they LARP around convincing people they are the one running things.
Weirdly enough, I'd take the robot. At least we can pretend the robot doesn't know any better. The human is actively choosing to be a dick and profiting off it.
The flesh sack is choosing to be an insufferable twat, and the robot either doesn't have any choice or has a decent statistical justification for what it does.
It's pretty disappointing that people on this site of all places have no idea what CEOs do. Many of them are certainly overpaid, and like any other profession, many are not good at their jobs, but they aren't sitting around drafting memos and coming up with deciding who to fire all day.
