Whatever you might think of the merits of the AI boom/bubble (delete as appropriate), generative AI is absolutely the current wearer of the crown awarded to the Buzziest Technology in Silicon Valley. As such, it’s the natural successor to previous holders of that title—cryptocurrency, the NFT, etc.—as a magnet for grifters and mountebanks of every stripe.
In entirely unrelated news, hey, remember Cody Wilson? The guy who founded a non-profit called Defense Distributed? If not, let us refresh your memory: Defense Distributed is a Texas-based non-profit that exists to pursue that most sacred and American of missions: to make sure as many people as possible own guns. (Reassuringly, its homepage assures the world that “Since January 1 2022, no warrants have been served to defdist.org principals or employees. No searches or seizures have been performed on defdist.org assets.” Sweet!)
Defense Distributed gained notoriety in the mid-2010s for publishing blueprints for 3D printable firearms. Wilson himself gained significantly further notoriety in 2019 for pleading guilty to “injury to a child” after facing some unseemly charges you’d better just read for yourself. He duly resigned from Defense Distributed and spent the next decade slithering through various crypto-related ventures. Around this time, he also sunset a project that was a right-wing version of Patreon called—and we’re not joking here—“Hatreon.”
But according to the Verge, anyone wondering just who’ll have the vision to unite the worlds of AI and shooty sticks can breathe easy, because our boy is back—and he’s toting “the world’s first AI-made gun.” The gun in question is called a WASP, which is perhaps an unfortunate choice of name from someone who’s been required to register as a sex offender, but hey, who are we to quibble with the sort of genius who could come up with a name like “GatGPT”? That’s what Wilson is calling his “AI that can generate guns,” of which the WASP is apparently just the first creation.
That’s just as well, because the WASP sounds to guns like Suno “compositions” do to music: a weird, uncanny imitation of the real thing that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. The Verge interviews a firearms historian and, um, gun consultant, who points out that “the AI appears to have started making a trigger guard … but [hasn’t] finished it, leaving the trigger exposed, for no apparent reason.” The gun’s grip also appears to be inverted.
Wilson, of course, has no time for such quibbling. “Eventually,” The Verge tells us, “[Wilson] predicts [that a] constant back-and-forth between users and AI could dramatically speed up the pace at which new 3D-printed gun designs appear.” As someone who is not American but is nevertheless stuck living in a country that feels less like the land of the free and more like the home of the brave with every passing day, the idea of a “constant back-and-forth between users and AI” about how to design the best homemade gun sounds like a nightmare, but perhaps this is just something that a limp-wristed Antipodean unfamiliar with the exhilarating rush of pure, unconstrained, Murcan freedom that comes with firing a plastic gun at a cardboard target will never understand.
Anyway, people with something to gain from a given technology often like to claim that its arrival or its proliferation is an inevitability. This is a pattern that we’ve seen play out again and again with AI as it has metamorphosed from a fascinating technology with genuinely useful but decidedly unsexy and unprofitable applications into a behemoth that demands belief in squaring the circle of a) depriving many people of their jobs (and thus their disposable income), and b) being a consumer technology that demands immense injections of capital and will sooner or later need to start squeezing money from the masses in order to become profitable.
Not coincidentally, this sort of argument is also a favorite of American pro-gun activists, who argue that a proliferation of guns within society is somehow inevitable, despite the weight of evidence provided by, y’know, literally every other country that isn’t in the grip of some hideous civil war or other complete breakdown of functioning state infrastructure. On that note, we’ll leave the last word on this topic to Wilson himself, from a 2013 interview with Glenn Beck. “The gun,” he said, “is a symbol of reversibility.* I can tell you one thing: they can never eradicate the gun from the earth.”
*We think he means “irreversibility”?
