Adam Conover

Adam Conover (born 1983) is an American comedian and television host best known for Adam Ruins Everything (truTV, 2015–2019), the myth-debunking series that made skeptical explainer comedy his brand, and for Netflix’s The G Word. He hosts the podcast Factually! and served on the Writers Guild of America negotiating committee during the 2023 strike — the first labor action anywhere to put generative AI at the center of contract negotiations.

“A.I. is B.S.”

In March 2023 Conover released a 25-minute video essay, “A.I. is B.S.,” arguing that while AI is a real field of computer science, the term had been hijacked as marketing language to inflate stock prices and justify layoffs. During the WGA strike he became one of its most visible spokespeople on AI, telling Deadline in May 2023 that the studios’ refusal to concede on AI was baffling because using AI to write Hollywood scripts “is a fad that’s going to disappear in a year and a half,” and insisting the technology could not do a writer’s job — but that studios would try to use it to degrade writers’ pay and credit anyway.

The WGA ultimately won landmark protections: AI cannot write or rewrite literary material, and studios cannot force writers to use it. Conover has continued the argument since — framing AI, like Brian Merchant, as a labor story about who profits, not a technology story about what is possible. His fad prediction, notably, has not aged well; the tools kept improving even as his critique of the hype economy around them found a large audience.