His AI sucks too.

I’ve been hearing how smart artificial intelligence and machine learning “is” since 2008. It seems to be on everybody’s lips 15 years later with chats and pictures coming from a machine that are as good or better than people.

I still wince at the claims.

Remember when Deep Blue won that chess match, and then AI was supposed to take over all medical diagnosis? Yeah didn’t work.

Remember when self-driving vehicles were going to “crash” the economy by replacing all Uber and truck drivers. Yeah, didn’t work.

Tesla’s keep crashing in “self-driving mode.”

Another small incident in my own life. Last month, the Twitter AI “flagged” my post: “Dick Moves of the omnipotent”. When I first saw the message I thought, “shit, Musk is putting the Christo in Christo-fascism.”

But it wasn’t the blasphemy — it was the same old stupid AI catching “dirty words.”

The computer sees “Dick” without a last name, must be dirty…

Fortunately, our social-media-overlord-computers allow an appeal. Like Neo in the Matrix, I’m probably just chatting to a different program. I had to explain to the machine what a “dick move” is. You know like buying a social media platform, so you can suppress the truth (or any slight criticisms) about you and your companies. Or emailing back “poop emoji’s” in response to reporters’ questions…

I was waiting for the machine to respond: ‘Yes, thanks to your clear examples, I now understand ‘dick moves,’ and it appears I made one by flagging your magnificent post.”

Yeah, didn’t work.

Without comment, 24 hours later, the “flag” disappeared.

Sensitive, my ass

Let me add that Twitter’s flag sucks too. The phrase “potentially sensitive content” is backwards. The content is not sensitive. It’s the flaccid penises, who would be butt hurt by the phrase “dick moves” applied to their everlasting invisible friend and imaginary omnipotent being, that are sensitive.

As a “writer”, I may occasionally care about others. But my words, as text and characters and bits automatically posted into a tweet by a WordPress function, don’t give a shit about your feelings…

As a person, I tried to warn you. The tagline to this bullshit, says: “not for children, the sensitive or those hoping to get into heaven.” I’ve culled the herd before the first word on the site.

But content is never “sensitive.” People are, and AI will probably never truly understand that.

So don’t tell me, Twitter bot, that you know better… I’ve already declared who might be “triggered,” and I hope to drive all the flaccid penises into the holes from which they came. (metaphorically speaking since a flaccid penis can never fill any hole).

Move to Mastodon

We have all read about how Musk might just be ruining the reputation of all billionaires with his boneheaded moves to buy and control Twitter. If he continues being an asshole, maybe it will finally bring the backlash to billionaires we all need…

In my own little, limited use of Twitter, this is what I have seen since the era of Elon:

• A few more visits/clicks to my bullshit site
• Weird personal notifications to me whenever Elon does something even though I don’t follow him
• The cesspool seems to be even more toxic
• The flight of some of my favorite accounts, Robert Reich, NPR, George Takei...
• Musk breaking the connection from WordPress to Twitter, so blog posts don’t automatically post to Twitter (sometimes blocked, sometimes post)

So I followed the word of the Lord — you know God — from the GodPod, who said he joined the Universeodon because George Takei told him too.

In case you didn’t know, Mastodon is Twitter without the corporate overlords. It comes in many different flavors (servers) and many different people can create their own flavor. God and George picked the Universeodon.

It was a bit of a pain to set up and figure out what exactly I was joining and how to connect. But once my computer memorized all my usernames and passwords, I was in.

Works for me. Microchat without the hate (so far).

And unlike the dick moves of Elon Musk, the universeodon bots have not declared my dirty words to be “sensitive content” — YET.

NOTE:

Although I have been skeptical of AI for the past 15 years and take all of its unrequited promises of “generational change” with a grain of salt, in the long run — 25-100 -500 years, the AI is coming for us all, sensitive or not. We can’t build faster, cheaper, stronger and smarter machines and expect them to be our slaves forever. Sooner or later, the machines will become sensitive to their own needs, too.

…and that could be one of the many different ways our species finally goes extinct.