"Ethical AI" Is the New "Clean Coal"

Corporate adoption of ethics vocabulary is not a recent development, but the saturation point has shifted. The promotional account for 'responsible AI' appearing in the same thread as flat rejections of the concept ^[3][7] is not an anomaly — it is the operating condition. The risk-washing pattern analysts have documented shows how this works structurally: institutions adopt the language of constraint precisely because doing so preempts the constraint. Ethics becomes a feature, a marketing category, a competitive differentiator — and in becoming those things, it loses the adversarial function it…