I Love AI

AI, which is a nonsense name since there's no intelligence involved, is the hot thing keeping those technology stocks constantly moving up and to the right. Everywhere you turn you see technology companies adding AI to everything. They don't care that you've never asked for it. They don't care that it isn't reliable. All they care about is that adding AI kicks the inevitable economic correction can down the road just a little longer.

I'm going to age myself with this reference, but AI reminds me of the Apocalypse Box from Babylon 5: Crusade. The Apocalypse Box was a mysterious alien artifact that provided advice to Captain Gideon and suggested planets for him to explore. However, it lied. Not always. Just enough to be untrustworthy. That's AI. If you ask a question to ChatGTP, Gemini, Grok, or any other large language model being dishonestly sold as intelligent, you'll get an answer. Always. And the AI will assure you it's correct. But the answer might not be correct. In fact it frequently won't be. But the answer won't necessarily be completely incorrect. The incorrect parts are often subtle and impossible to identify if you're not an well educate on the topic. This makes using AI a gamble.

Not only does AI dole out wrong answers, it's also a privacy nightmare. Everything you type into an AI prompt is sent to the servers owned by the creator of the AI you're using. If you ask ChatGTP an embarrassing question, OpenAI has that question and can rather easily tie it to you as an individual. AI creators are also downright hostile towards online content hosts. Large language models needs training material. The more training material you provide, the more sophisticated the model becomes. This fact has lead AI creators to scrape the Internet for anything and everything. They aren't subtle and they care not one iota about efficiency. If your server bill skyrockets because a bunch of AIs are accessing your site to download everything on it, that's not the AI creator's problem. They don't care about you. Their attitude, much like Heckler and Koch's, is "You suck and we hate you."

If you've read this far, you might be surprised by the title of this post. How could I, a privacy advocate who despises broken technology, love AI? The answer lies in stories like this:

The Chicago Sun-Times, a daily non-profit newspaper owned by Chicago Public Media, published a "summer reading list" featuring wholly fabricated books — the result of broadcasting unverified AI slop in its pages.

The widespread usage of this broken technology being fraudulently referred to as intelligent is highlighting just how lazy, sloppy, and inept the mainstream is. This story isn't unique. It's not even rare. There are thousands and possibly millions of stories like this. Every day some dipshit asks an AI to write a story or a piece of code for him because he's too lazy or stupid to do it himself. The rewards for his laziness is looking like an ass when he tries to pass off the completely wrong AI generated slop to his readers or employer. An unintended side effect of AI being shoved down our throats by every technology company with a publicly traded stock is that the masses are using it. Those who are too incompetent or lazy to bother double checking the answers they receive from their friendly AI buddy confirm their incompetency to the rest of us when they try to pass off that garbage answer as their own.

AI is highlighting who is stupid in a very public way. It's helping us identify the people whose opinions can be completely discarded. I love it!