Can you name nine billionaires?
Apparently, the anonymous organizers behind the March for Billionaires cannot without the help of AI.
The March for Billionaires, scheduled for this Saturday at Alta Plaza Park in (natch) Pac Heights, is against "vilifying" billionaires, explicitly calling out a growing movement surrounding the “Billionaire Tax Act” that is sending the Google founders to the far ends of the world (mostly Texas and Florida). The proposed bill would compel anyone with a net worth over $1 billion to pay a one-time tax. SEIU-UHW West, or United Healthcare Workers West, the union calling for the tax, says that only 200 Californians with a combined $2 trillion among them would have to pay.
The event’s website, whose creators are anonymous, looks to have been created with generative AI tools, which is definitely one way to support beleaguered billionaires. Pangram Labs, an AI text detection service, found that a key section of the website where they list important “value creators” (read: rich people) is more than likely all AI-generated.
Many of the billionaires listed are the ones that probably come to mind when you think of the obscenely rich: Jeff Bezos, Taylor Swift, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Roger Federer, and the Google co-founders. Some others were peculiar choices: vacuum and bladeless fan mogul James Dyson, Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya, and Broadcom chairman Henry Samueli. “These billionaires didn't steal from you,” the website reads. “They created products, services, and experiences that millions of people freely chose.”
Only a handful of these billionaires even live in California. There is little rhyme or reason to the picks (no Zuckerberg? Thiel? Musk? Kardashian? Jenner? Bieber?), as if someone told an LLM to name nine rich people who aren’t hated by the masses.
The descriptors are a key tell, according to Pangram Labs CEO Max Spero.“These descriptions contain common trivia of the nature an LLM would surface from its weights,” Spero wrote in an email. He described the copy as “very basic and sanitized.”
Other portions of the website, Spero said, were AI-assisted, meaning that AI was used in some part of the process but had human editing or tweaking.
In a message to Gazetteer SF, the folks behind the March for Billionaires explained that the text was “written by humans with feedback from AI,” but did not specifically mention that one section is almost fully AI-generated. The website was also vibe coded, according to the organizers who said that “the website source code was written by AI guided by human design prompts.” (No word on whether that answer was, too.)
When pressed about the billionaire blurbs, they assured that “everything was verified manually.”
The organizers insisted that the march is legit, telling Mission Local that they “think most American billionaires have had greatly positive societal impacts, directly and indirectly.”
But if they love billionaires enough to rally for them, wouldn’t the organizers at least be able to rattle off nine of them (and how they got their billions) without the help of AI?
