This post has been percolating for a while, and I received an email today that finally helped crystalize some thoughts. The email, titled "We asked ChatGPT what makes the perfect charger", made me wonder: "who even cares?"

(btw the image for this post is shitty on purpose, so you know a human made it)

Fuck AI

It isn't like ChatGPT actually reasons or even thinks, as much as the apparent majority of people want to believe that it does. Barring any such genuine thought, why should anybody care what ChatGPT has to say? At best, "AI" mashes up sentiment from various corners of the internet (and other plagiarized sources; pls @me, Zuck) and vomits out seemingly coherent slop that tricks readers into placing some level of importance on its output. But hey, thanks for sending me an email with a bulleted list that your product happens to satisfy. So cool. #unsubscribe

Could "AI" be more useful than a search engine someday? Maybe. Especially given the SEO hell that we've been enduring for some time now. Thanks for sucking, Google. But do I trust "AI" in its current iteration? Not even a little.

I can't stand when people try to parrot an "AI Summary" at me like it's an authoritative source. The vast majority of questions that I've posed to AI have yielded incorrect answers. I tried my hand at "vibe coding" last weekend (what a rush!), and ChatGPT was wholly ineffective at resolving my issues. They were issues that it even created! It turned out there was a whole separate library that ChatGPT did not know to reveal, but which Google readily surfaced.

Could it be my own personal failing as a reluctant "prompt engineer"? 🤮 Perhaps, at least in that instance.

Other "AI" failings include incorrectly listing product specs when asked to compare different binocular offerings (what a challenging problem), manufacturing textual excerpts of website "sources", and providing an incomplete answer when asked for a bike tyre recommendation (i.e., only offering a strong recommendation for a specific rubber compound at the very end of the chat; where was that insight earlier!).

But does any of this even matter? The public, AI companies, and especially company execs, are blindly forging ahead. Racing, allegedly, ever closer to AGI. So, so magnificent. "It will save time but it still needs human supervision," they say. "Everyone else is doing this, so we must, too."

To which I says: a tool that is right only 99% of the time is still fundamentally worthless, at least in some applications, as humans will be lulled into a sense of complacency. Either people will not fully appreciate the limits of the tool or they will be too time-constrained to properly review the output, ultimately inadvertently introducing (subtle?) errors into the world. Made all the more dangerous by the heady façade of genuine conception.

Case in point: people blindly relying on AI summaries; chatting with AI on a daily basis and taking its slop as gospel; or extolling its virtues and claiming it engaged in actual innovation (I had someone tell me they asked it to invent a dog poop removal device). Sure.

AI slop is also particularly insidious. It is so, so easy to generate an incredible amount of content. Content that is then much more slowly consumed (I absolutely cannot stand that term; that's been a potential post topic for some time). It's basically a DDOS attack, but for the human attention span.

Why do people pass along content that they themselves likely haven't taken the time to fully digest? (In stark contrast to human-produced content, where the author actually bears the disproportionate burden of creation; btw you're welcome for this absolute gem of a post, and I haven't even been drinking... yet).

Fuck Donald

Eerily, all of this seems to mirror the current political climate, where a certain orange and not-yet-Luigied snowflake frames anything negative as a hoax, a political hit job, or just plain nasty. Please, slurp down a gigantic bowl of dicks, Donald. Really swish them around on their way down your turkey neck. And maybe give me a mean nickname. That'll really show me.

The shear amount of shit produced by this administration has been incredible. We are only six months in, and every day feels like we are plumbing new depths, delving ever deeper into the pit of despair.

Even in spite of Donald's Daily Deluge of Dogshit™, half of the country is still apparently happy to take what he and his other complicit shitbags say as gospel, having no question as to veracity. By contrast, anything from the "legacy media" must be approached with cRiTiCaL ThInKiNg. But yes, please, let's all defer to the octogenarians, pedophiles, influences, and whatever the hell the manosphere is. Praise be, thank God for the new media!

And Fuck All This Shit

All that to say: there is one population of people who are happy to have AI lube them up in slop, greasing their eyeballs until their brain is numb with content in an effort to stave off boredom from real life, and there is another population of people who have been diverging from our formerly shared political reality, guzzling down asinine falsehoods from our Pedo in Chief (and Karoline Leavitt, what an abhorrent human) and begging for more. These populations are certainly not mutually exclusive.

I hope there are still (many?🤞🏼) people who fall outside these circles and that actually apply critical thinking, and not in the "Take America Back" (from what, liberty? freedom?) sense of the term.

Sadly, it is easier to take both ChatGPT's extreme indifference toward accurate/inaccurate statements (again, it can't think; it doesn't know what is true) and Donald's chronic NPD-riddled version reality (he does not know Truth™, either) at face value. To actually interrogate and engage with statements takes time, effort, and care, and sadly most people just don't seem to have that to give. Especially not when faced with the sheer volume of utter tripe that roams the Internet and spews from Donald's gullet.

I feel like this post has big "old man yells at cloud" energy (BOM-YACE, not to be confused with BDE), and maybe I'm just getting old. But I make no apologies: I don't think this iteration of "AI" is it, and I really don't think subsequent iterations will manifest AGI (as much as Sam, Elon, and Zuck want us all to believe that).

All that notwithstanding: please, MechaHitler, tell me what to feel.