A couple of days ago, I (foolishly) thought “y’know what, I want to cook some lasagna today. Let me google a quick recipe.” What a mistake! What an idiot I was (apparently)—you know what my over-engineered piece of garbage search engine served me up? At the very tippity top of the web page? A lasagna recipe from some hack-job Machine Learning Language that told me to GRILL the whole thing AFTER I assembled it! And it didn’t even call for noodles!!! In the moment, I was frankly too awestruck to even be mad; billions of dollars in software engineering from one of the largest tech companies on this god-forsaken planet had coalesced in such a magnificent way that I, an unsuspecting moron, can have my question regarding Italian cookery answered by a machine which thinks that noodles are optional when making lasagna, and that the pasta maestros down in Sicily are cooking their stuff on George Foremans.
What a crock. The only dang reason half this nonsense has wormed its way into my online life is because a bunch of Silicon Valley billionaires have determined that this is the newest snake oil they’ll cram down the throats of unsuspecting dorks. Now, billions in stock market value hinge on entirely trite, stupid apps with dumb names that generate blurry photos of cats with little top hats on. Of course, I ought not be surprised–this is the free market in action, baby. Ayn Rand would be clicking her devilish heels if she could see this. Barf.
And that’s just the superficially dumb stuff! This AI nonsense has, as I’m sure you know, wormed its way into academia, too. When I was in undergrad, it felt like there was an ever-escalating arms race between the professor’s capacity to detect AI, and the student’s hard-headed desire to keep using it for assignments. Now, I hear that some classes have students physically writing assignments on paper! BUT! Students will STILL type stuff into the AI essay generator, and just transcribe it to paper!!! Aaahh! Look, I’m playing up my outrage for the sake of a laugh, but this stuff really is pretty damning; it’s not as if America needed any help becoming *MORE* anti-intellectual than it already is. Now, we have mechanized assistants that, instead of helping us with the menial, bureaucratic bull that most of us engage with daily, rips away our capacity to reason through difficult texts, and make art. What should be fine-tuned tools for, like, DNA sequencing and filling out tax forms have now replaced our ability to write a 3-page essay. Three pages of independent thought is too much to bear?!? That’s just too much discomfort for us? It’s really less work to hand over our thinking to some hedge-fund ponzi nonsense that’ll pop worse than the 2008 housing bubble the second a cheaper technology is discovered? Great. Hey, maybe someday our silly little newspaper will all be A.I. After all, who gives a flip about independent thought when you can have some convenient easy-reading, eh? It sure would save us on pizza bills.
“They took the credit for your second symphony / Rewritten by machine on new technology / And now I understand the problems you can see.” –Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles.