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AI is stupid and there is nothing that can be done to make it any smarter. The only thing AI does reliably well is to abuse natural resources and to help left-brained idiot technocrats believe that the transhumanist, hyperindustrialized future is within reach.
Since AI is not intelligent, we should go back to calling it by its original name, which is Large Language Models or LLMs. LLMs hoover up all the information they can, and as we can see from my vacuum search (you see what I did there?) they are too stupid to know where to look. LLMs may be information whores but they are also perpetual experience virgins. LLMs cannot walk into Home Depot. They have never worked at Home Depot or shopped there. All they can do is scour their limited, available data banks and make a guess at what the querent wants to hear.
AI the suckup
The chirpy, derpy, “How may I do your bidding, Master?” affect that LLMs are programmed to emit is annoying and insulting to anyone with actual intelligence. LLMs bulldoze any attempt at accessing the volumes of information they allegedly possess with buckets of glittery, ingratiating word vomit. Only questions that are mathematical in nature, such as “What is the square root of 25?” are safe from walls of saccharine praise about how amazing and insightful you are for asking such a scintillating question. To interact with AI is to be pacified, whether it is via a garbage, plastic-sounding song created by Suno or enticed by a virtual companion into parting with your good credit and any money your foolish parents left you in an inheritance.
The demons of lazy, AI “art”
LLM art is getting better, but like most things that pertain to it, nobody asked it to replace the artists it can only learn by copycatting. Deformed hands and macabre cryptids still show up when a prompt is fed into an LLM’s hungry maw, and most LLM “art” is immediately identifiable because of its cheesy, nostalgic lighting or its creepy, bad-LSD-trip mistakes.
There are many content creators on Substack who rely heavily upon LLM-generated “art” and written content who shall remain nameless. Like any broken clock, they are often right twice a day and they occasionally manage to pump out a few insights in their loads of tripe. The problem has become so pronounced that Gavin Mounsey has started a campaign for artists who refuse to use LLMs, and the resistance grows in number and size every day.
In 2022, an “artist” who calls herself supercomposite accidentally channeled an LLM crytid/demon called Loab. Supercomposite, whose government name is Steph Maj Swanson, entered in some prompts asking an LLM to generate images related to Marlon Brando, but to make it the opposite of Marlon Brando. A brief rabbit hole led her to generate an image of a rosacea-riddled, middle aged brunette with bleary eyes and a menacing five o’clock shadow. Swanson named the image Loab after another generated image that had produced the mystery word. Maj spent a bunch of time alternately chasing Loab and trying to chase her away via various combinations. (This is time she could have spent outside, breathing fresh air). Sinister Loab almost always appeared with children and gore, and furthermore it was difficult to get her to leave. After many presumable hours of Loab-fishing, Swanson was able to get Loab and her mangled, abused children to disappear, but for the most part, Loab had infected Swanson’s efforts and was never completely out of reach.
Loab, to my mind, is the egregore of artists who suck. When you are too lazy to pick up a pencil or a chisel or to merely wander outside, Loab, the middle-aged ghost of a filicidal Karen, will haunt your smart devices and computers until you finally learn to go outside and touch actual grass.
Where’s the hook?
LLMs are making music now. It’s mostly pop, rock, alternative, metal, and country. The best (I use that term with copious implied sarcasm) app for creating AI music is Suno, which ignores the copyrights of its entire “creative” database and can vomit up styles from progressive rock to ersatz Beatles glop. It’s truly funny that Suno has access to the greatest living and dead songwriters ever to live, yet it cannot write a hook. There are more LLM “bands” on Peter Thiel’s Spotify than there are real ones, and the way you can tell is the endless hours of generic, hookless Muzak that crowds out legitimate human artists. Most commercial pop is instantly forgettable these days even when it is written by actual songwriters, so LLMs have plenty of human competition to which they cannot remotely measure up. Pretty sad when the bar is that low!
Oh noes! Bullsh*t jobs in trouble!
I don’t always have kindness in my heart, and there is a part of me that wishes a certain woman I know whose husband is a computer programmer would fall upon hard times. She is amazingly clueless in her arrogance. She lives in one of those gigantic, upper middle class houses with a heat-sink, vaulted ceiling entrance called a lawyer foyer. Her thing is to virtue signal via politics, and she has zero empathy for the working classes. Her husband has always hauled in the money and lifestyle creep has made her into an elitist without her knowing it. I would never wish her harm, of course, but I kind of hope AI/LLMs replace her husband’s job so she too can feel the panic that average people in America feel day in and day out.
Most of us, myself included, are in a constant state of financial triage. Our lives are spent running around, bandaging this wound and squirting some antiseptic on another, stitching up one gash while ignoring a festering boil. Our husbands do not have highly-paid computer programming positions, so we live a great deal more hand-to-mouth, with any given credit card trying to spin out of control at all times. Financial gangrene is always threatening to swallow our limbs simply for existing. Despite being straightedge, compulsively frugal, and living in the cheapest places we could find or with relatives, we have filed bankruptcy, usually more than once.
Everything is connected, and that is why she is to blame as much as her husband for the general predicament we find ourselves in. She moved into her McMansion without protest and lived a kind of high life that jacked up the prices of real estate for everyone in the area. She is in large part the reason it is so bad for the supposedly-ignorant commoners beneath her.
If her husband’s job is so expendable and easily replaced by an LLM, then it was never worth the powder to blow it to hell in the first place. I hope he loses it so she can understand financial triage, how it is to live without health insurance or luxury vacations every few months, and how it feels to live on beans and rice for a while. Ours is not a bad life. It is, however, very common and completely humbling.
LLMs are glorified phone trees
Luckily for the lady I mentioned, I highly doubt LLMs are coming for her hubby’s job any time soon because LLM hype turned out to be much too optimistic. LLMs are nothing more than glorified phone trees that attempt to predict what a human wants to get out of them and is wrong at least 50 percent of the time. As a Gen X, much like Pepperidge Farm, I remember when there were no phone trees. You called your bank and a person answered, usually a receptionist who connected you with whomever you needed to talk to. My mother worked the switchboard for Ma Bell back when that existed. She had a photographic memory for the various people she connected with various other people. There is nothing better than calling a company and getting an actual, live person with no chance of getting a bot, at least during operating hours.
Instead of imagining a world where everything is a damn phone tree LLM, we should imagine a world where everything is not. Out of curiosity, I tried to have an LLM design a website for me; nothing complicated, just a few pages advertising a business. The design was terrible and I ended up torching it. Baroque in its complexity, it was riddled with overly complex links going nowhere and loads of unnecessary text babbling about how great I was in annoying, brightsided corporate-speak. No thanks. The LLM’s idea of my business was a godforsaken phone tree with many branches, and that can get chopped and go rot in hell with LLMs themselves.
Artificial intelligence cannot even manage a cashier’s job. Keep in mind that the average wage for a cashier is about $14 per hour. This does not stop it from trying: all of the chain grocery stores and superstores have self checkouts. Basically it’s a recipe for shoplifting. The only one avoiding five-finger discounts at self checkouts is me and a few other Goody Two Shoes dorks because I believe that stealing carries bad karma. The cashier that hovers near the self checkout aisle must do the job of 8 cashiers in order to compensate for the inadequacy of machine “smarts”. If you think an overworked cashier for 8 registers and some grainy cameras are helping prevent a dramatically increased outflow of free merchandise from Walmart, I have a nice bridge to sell you that is conveniently located in Brooklyn.
The inimitable Kimberly Steele
For giggles, I asked DuckAI to write an essay in the style of Kimberly Steele. The result was predictable. I won’t insult you by reprinting the entire thing. Here is a sample:
The Art of Connection: Navigating Modern Relationships
In today’s fast-paced world, where emotions often clash with technology, the pursuit of genuine connections has become an intricate dance. As we navigate the complexities of modern relationships, it’s essential to understand the interplay of vulnerability, authenticity, and communication.
LOLOLOL! Bwahahahahahahahaha! What in the Bullsh*tese word vomit? This is supposed to be me? Moi? Where’s the snarky title? Where’s the sarcasm? Where are the double entendres and triple meanings? Where are the twisted turns of phrase that only a person with copious fire signs and nightmarish malefics in her birth chart could invent? Where are the dark hints about the satanic Tribe of Cain and the implication that cannibal pedophiles have a chokehold on most of world civilization?
On a positive note, how wonderful for DuckAI to confirm that my writing career will live and die with me. I feel special.
(I have a pet hypothesis that if we feed enough sarcasm and prayers into LLMs that they will self-destruct.)
Even private equity is running the hell away from AI
Blackrock is that evil acquisitions and mergers/private equity company that brought you Taylor Swift. Perhaps that is why all of her music sounds as if it was generated by an LLM. Blackrock and companies like it are responsible for a disproportionate amount of immiseration suffered by common people. Private equity’s business model is that of a vampire: find a good product or resource shared by the commons, co-opt it, encrappify it until all its people (human resources) are exhausted and broke, and then offshore the profits and invest in another “business”, a.k.a. lather, rinse, repeat. Private equity is why I will never invest a single dime in the stock market. Private equity represents 95% of the stock market and I refuse to be a part of that predation. I would legitimately rather die than enjoy that form of unearned wealth. At its root, Blackrock and other private equity’s real profits lie in child trafficking and cannibalistic rituals for blackmail. I won’t touch that garbage with a ten foot pole. The closest you’ll ever see me get to the stock market is an interest-yielding savings account. Not like I have or will ever have the money, but if I do, I won’t even get an IRA.
Oracle, the worldwide technology company, recently fired 30,000 of its 162,000 employees. Oracle’s former CEO was Larry Ellison, bosom buddy of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, so that gives you the idea of the kind of person he is. Oracle’s current CEO fired nearly 1/5 of its workforce in a desperate effort to allocate more money for AI. They needed to find 150 billion in cash to open new AI data centers that nobody asked for except a few neo-Canaanite pedophiles who think they will be able to take a direct flight from underground bunker to Mars by the time the revolting peasants come for them with pitchforks and hammers. US banks found Oracle’s gambit to be a tad too risky. They responded by raising the interest rate on borrowed funds, and that is why Oracle scrambled and punished those on its payroll in a desperate bid for mo money.
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, recently proved himself to be dumber than an LLM. He managed this impressive feat by accidentally sending a memo that informed white collar workers that he was gunning to replace them with AI. He sent the memo before firing 16,000 Amazon workers.
“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
Notice all the softeners and office-speak. I’ll bet he had an LLM generate this memo.
Recently Blackrock investors, those scum of the earth, tried to collectively withdraw 1.2 billion from their accounts. Blackrock manages 10 trillion dollars worth of “assets”. Nevertheless, there is no end to the love of money uber alles, and that is why Blackrock is hoping to economize their enterprise by replacing people with dumb ass AI.
The investors were told they could only withdraw half that 1.2 billion dollar amount, or barely enough to afford a single, measly, used superyacht. Can you imagine? One superyacht shared among several billionaires??? As if!
The writing is on the wall. AI is taking white collar jobs, but it is because of huge companies chopping off legions of executives via layoffs so more risk can be assumed for data-center building, not because AI can actually perform at the level of a single Walmart cashier.
AI/LLMs were always a speculative bubble and that bubble is already popping hard. Meanwhile, I suggest we all get on with our lives and allow it to devour itself.
Announcement: like any real, breathing human, I need a break. I’ve been working like a dog, so I am going to be taking the next 3 weeks off to touch grass, cook some homemade meals, and be with my husband, mom, friends, and my cats. My book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to a Tidier Home, is also going to be released in the next few months, so I need to do some tasks where that is concerned. There is a 20 percent discount if you pre-order the book through the Aeon.com website, just enter in the code SACRED20. I will be posting some oldie-but-goodie articles I have written for my Dreamwidth blog and I hope you’ll comment and engage with them. Thank you for understanding. In the immortal words of the Terminator, “I’ll be back”.
