> a nebulous conspiracy by a cabal of elites

You are reading way too much into it. The truth is far simpler: when someone's salary depends on AI being a success, you'll have a really hard time getting them to openly say anything negative about AI.

A huge portion of those "well-respected software engineers" work at companies which have pivoted to make AI an essential part of their strategy - because every company has. We're seeing companies where leadership explicitly says that anyone not enthusiastically making AI a core part of their workflow will get fired. It is literally forbidden to doubt AI. Want a promotion? Better start tokenmaxxing - your manager will be looking at your usage stats!

And it's going to be the same at the higher levels. A "CTO of $company says $100M AI investment was a massive waste" headline is obviously unacceptable. You've already burned the money, so why ruin your stock price by being "the only company too incompetent to properly use AI" rather than slowly and silently scaling it down while pretending everything is fine and parroting all the buzzwords your peers are using on LinkedIn?

The actual results are irrelevant. It does not matter if your AI results are mediocre, or "good in some edge cases", or "can speed up some easier work". The market has decided that AI is huge and a massive success, so anyone not adopting it and having extreme successes with it is a failure and will be punished.

There's no need to invent a conspiracy here. Simple self-preservation will do.