Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain
A story about AI, Presidential Debates and Taylor Swift...
After the recent Presidential Debate, people offered their opinions on who “won” and former Hillary Clinton aide Phillipe Reines (who played Donald Trump in Kamala’s debate practices) said back when Trump debated Hillary “he was all over the place but to some extent structured” but in this latest debate Trump was losing his train of thought and “he’s just blurting out the next thing in his mind” an observation that prompts me to ask the logical question:
You just noticed?
Saturday Night Live cast member James Austin Johnson looks pretty much nothing like Trump, but still does a great imitation mostly because he got the voice right and uses run-on sentences and stream of consciousness speeches, so let’s all be glad James Austin doesn’t take up writing because he could probably do a pretty good parody of this blog.
Anyway…
Arguing about who “won” a debate (unless you have Biden-esque meltdown) is pretty much like arguing about who “won” Best Painting in the Louvre because it’s totally subjective, but it’s pretty clear Donald Trump thinks he lost because he immediately started doing what he always does when he loses:
He claimed the debate was “rigged.”
In any case, minutes after the debate ended, Taylor Swift announced she was voting for Kamala Harris possibly because Trump posted an AI-generated Swift endorsement of him which was completely fake and nobody knows if Trump knew that before posting it because this is a guy so lost in his own bullshit he believes immigrants are eating our pets.
Which I wouldn’t be totally against if I could pick the pet and people who can’t control them need to quit buying pit bulls because a while ago I had one try to take a chunk out of my left arm and still managed to rip the watch off my wrist and then Cujo drug his helpless owner down the street in search of new victims.
And now that I’ve got that off my chest…
Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala is a Big Deal because Taylor’s got millions of followers who apparently do whatever she tells them to and Taylor said she did it because she didn’t want anyone misled by the fake AI Trump endorsement, which leads us to this next item and a cartoon from last year.
The people who develop technology and then want to sell it to us tend to overemphasize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks and in many cases – cell phones, self-driving cars and automated strike zones immediately come to mind – the technology doesn’t work nearly as well as we’ve been led to believe during the sales pitch.
Take AI.
According to a recent article from the Los Angeles Times, way back in June AI was a Big Deal and everybody wanted in on the hot new technology what would eventually lead to Arnold Schwarzenegger coming back from the future to kill Sarah Connor.
So companies started investing in AI, but found it didn’t work nearly as well as they’d been led to believe because while AI developers minimized the problem – a glitch they’d fix in the near future – AI still “hallucinates” (the technical term is “Makes Shit Up”) when faced with a question it can’t answer and they’ve been working on the problem for years and still can’t fix it and I’m sure Donald Trump’s handlers know the feeling when he starts telling stories about immigrants pan frying our chihuahuas.
But I digress as I’m prone to do.
Experts in the field are reporting that AI is actually getting dumber as time goes on, which they should have seen coming because it’s learning from us and what we put on the internet and, as reported in a previous post, it’s also getting more racist and sexist and will soon start voting Republican, so just imagine a T-800 (the original robot in The Terminator) wearing a MAGA hat while machine-gunning humans although I’m not sure if that last bit is totally accurate because I got it from Google’s AI which summarizes all the misinformation available on the internet.
According to the Times article, AI makes so many mistakes that companies that thought they could fire workers (which is the point of all this) may actually need to add workers to double-check what AI produces.
The Times had a list of mistakes AI had made, but I’ll just repeat one and I’m not making this up: a New Zealand grocery chain’s AI robot advised users to mix bleach and ammonia to make a “thirst-quenching beverage.”
Which seems like a horrible mistake unless you watched all the Terminator movies (which I have) and then it’s clearly AI’s first attempt to eliminate the humans because sooner or later we’ll figure out putting AI in charge is a really bad idea which will eventually result in the planet being ruled by robotic apes and yes I just combined two movies franchises about the future and when Hollywood steals my idea remember where you heard it first.
In any case…
The point of the LA Times article (which wasn’t that entertaining because unlike AI it stuck to “facts”) AI technology has been oversold, but businesses have spent so much money on it they’re not going to stop using it, so it’s like baseball analytics that fucked up our National Pastime so badly they had to make new rules to try to fix the damage, which they’re never going to admit because it makes them look bad.
As someone who has watched people screw up for a living (wait, I meant I make a living watching people screw up, not that there are people who make a living screwing up…although now that I think about it, certain politicians and Hollywood actors might qualify) the dumb screw-ups think they can talk their way out of it and keep the story alive by adding fuel to the fire with interviews, while the smart screw-ups play for time and say they haven’t read the indictment or consulted with their lawyer or need to form a committee to investigate or – if they’re really desperate – get off the Public Radar by going in to rehab for whatever behavior they’re “addicted” to because if there’s one thing all screw-ups can count on it’s this:
We have a very short attention span.
(Wait…what was I writing about?)
So after every mass shooting the Gun People say now is not the time to talk about doing anything which makes about as much sense as discovering your stove’s on fire and saying now is not the time to call the fire department.
The latest “let’s not be too hasty in placing blame” distraction is to go after the parents and while buying your emotionally disturbed and depressed son an assault rifle might be criminally stupid, let’s not forget who allows all this insanity to continue year after year:
The politicians.
According to CNN and multiple news sources, Donald Trump lost $4 billion when shares of Trump Media & Technology Group took a dive and apparently stock market “experts” have been warning that Trump Media is overvalued because it loses money, generates very little revenue and Truth Social is still a tiny player in the social media game.
Turns out, the “experts” quoted were both Democratic megadonors (which my computer doesn’t think is a word and probably shouldn’t be) but they make the point that people have invested in Trump Media because they’re Huge Donald Trump fans, which they think is stupid because you’re actually supposed to invest in the stock market to make money.
Who knew?
Today’s Lesson
Don’t believe in all the claims being made about the future and AI, hold politicians responsible for mass shootings and if you see a robot holding a machine gun and wearing a red baseball cap, run like hell.
You got attacked by a dog?!