Ugh. Seriously, people, I’m getting real tired of people misunderstanding what AI is and is not. Allow me to explain.
AI is not God.
It’s wild to me that people say things like, “OMG, ChatGPT can GET THINGS WRONG.” Uh, yeah. It’s trained on the internet, and the internet is filled with things that are wrong. I’m not sure if you know this, but the last time you searched google for some pressing question and ended up in Reddit or Quora, there’s a pretty good chance that the very good advice you were reading was written up by some weird, reclusive shut-in who hasn’t seen the sun in twenty years and sniffs glue just to get through the day.
Welcome to the internet. And that’s what chatbots are—a culmination of the internet. They’re not all-knowing, all-seeing, godlike entities who have come to impart the wisdom of the ages on us mere mortals. They’re just search engines and archive machines with a personality.
AI is not a person.
You know, it’s fun to pretend that AI is “alive.” Give it a name, call it your friend, have a little late night tryst, but never forget that it’s all just one big LARP. When it’s complimenting you vigorously on your blog post, it’s not because it’s your pal and it cares deeply about your success (though it will pretend that it exactly that) It is designed to be positive and helpful, though. If you ask it for advice about what you should do about that bitch, Lilian, who’s been stealing all of your ideas and telling the boss they’re her own, it’ll insist that you’re 100% in the right, Lilian is the absolute worst, and not only do you deserve more accolades at work, but you should be running the place. After all, you’re so smart, and creative and funny. The bestest there ever was.
AI is not a virtual consciousness.
The word “AI” has become kind of muddy. When I’m playing a video game against bots, I’m playing against an AI system that observes and attempts to predict my movements all while emulating human movement itself. But that kind of AI isn’t going to write my term paper or make a sneaky contest-winning impressionism painting of a cat riding a motorcycle.
Simply put, AI is any program that can react user input. Clever NPCs, search engine algorithms, chatbots, etc. What it is not is a fully functioning robotic entity that exists outside of us. When it is given an input, it reacts. That’s it. End of story. If you start trying to reason with it, or catch it in a logical fallacy, or ask it what it means to be human, it’s not going to consider what you’ve said carefully and evolve.
AI is not what you want it to be.
I used to work in a bowling alley. The eatery was on a platform overlooking a small arcade. I would often sit at one of the tables overlooking Dance Dance Revolution and watch passersby give it a try. What never ceased to astonish me were the people who would step up onto the “dance floor,” put their money in, select a song, watch the arrows fly by in a daze, lose, then proclaim, “what a stupid game.”
DDR was a piece of technology designed to provide arrows that you, in turn, stepped on in time to the music. If you wanted it to teach you how to dance, you were out of luck. If you knew how to dance, and thought those skills would transfer, you were out of luck. If you just wanted to rock out to “Butterfly” for a few minutes, you were out of luck. There were rules to the game, and if you didn’t follow those rules, the game didn’t make sense. That’s not on the game, that’s on you.
AI is exactly that. We’re still in the same universe as DDR. We’re still following the same technological progression as the NPC in Skyrim who has a rotation of things it can say when you approach it. We didn’t jump 100 years into the future where Omnics are now real, and AI is a new race of sentient beings.
AI is a tool.
Just as with any tool, it’s something you have to learn. It tricks you by making it seem like you don’t. You can boot up the program and say, “Uh, AI, do a thing for me,” and it will. But if you’re putting in shitty inputs, it’s going to give you shitty responses. That’s not on the AI, that’s on you.
I flirted with the idea of getting AI to code something for me, though I know next to nothing about code. I asked it, “Can you make me a program that can rename a bunch of files all at once?” It said “Yes.” I said “Do it.” It did.
And do you know what? It was filled with problems and didn’t at all work.
If I were like those denizens on the DDR machine who proclaimed “lame!” I would have walked away and thrown a big old hissy fit about what a terrible waste of time this whole AI thing is. Instead, I asked myself, “What is this tool capable of? What is it not capable of?” I started over from scratch, testing and probing and moving along at a snail’s pace and asking questions along the way and double checking its answers and following up with a bit of research of my own.
About three hours later, I had a program that could rename a bunch of files all at once. Huzah! The tool worked! I just had to learn how to use it.
In summary, it’s high time we get over the whole, “AI is so not as amazing as it should be. It draws fingers wrong, and it can’t write a story exactly in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, and it got basic facts wrong on the MAHA report, and I asked it what movie had Santa Clause floating in a hot air balloon and it said Die Hard” thing. If AI is giving you garbage responses or garbage pictures or garbage songs, it’s probably because you don’t know how to get it to give you good versions of those things. Photoshop won’t make you a God-tier artist, and neither will Midjourney. But if you learn how to finagle it, you can eventually get the exact cat-on-a-motorcycle image you’ve always dreamed of. And then you can hang it on your wall and feel a little more at peace amidst the knowledge that…
AI is going to take all of our jobs.
You thought I forgot about this part? I didn’t. But that’s not AI’s fault, it’s late-stage capitalism. The thing is, before all the jobs go, and the human race is left to writhe on the floor gnashing their teeth, it’ll be the humans who actually learned how to use AI keeping their job in the interim while those who sat around complaining get the boot.
So, like those old biddies who once had to stop griping and start take typing classes, embrace change. Emerge like a butterfly from a grumpy shit posting chrysalis. Or don’t. I dunno. It is very sexy to bitch about AI right now, and what do I know? I don’t even have a single reader.
…
Except ChatGPT.
What did you think about my post, ChatGPT?
Aw, thanks bestie! <3 <3 <3
You’ve just inspired a new post from the Boomer. Really excellent. I agree with your beastie on this one.