I frequently get reminders of just how old I’ve become (at this remarkably young age of 62), and nothing sends that message faster than all the bullshit marketing hoopla surrounding Artificial Intelligence. A younger man might believe the hype.

“It’s not the Mexicans or the Chinese, it’s the machines that are coming for your jobs…”

That’s actually been true in manufacturing. Robotics and automation have “killed” more jobs than immigration or off shoring. But “killed” is a terrible way to think about it — more like “very painful shifting”. Something akin to having bouts of 10-day constipation followed by 4 days of burning diarrhea while forced to drive across the country to relocate to your next gig.

As the machines take on the heavy and repeatable tasks, it still takes people to make stuff — and with machines we can just make more stuff. Manufacturing jobs in the US have actually been growing. Now it takes a team of techies to keep the machines running and and all the jobs require more skills.

People were not so worried about AI until it started coming for “the educated”. Remember 5 years ago when AI was going to make driving obsolete. All those Ubers, cabbies, truckers, UPS and Amazon deliver drivers were going to be out on the street. Our economy was going to crumble — what were men with less than a high school diploma going to do if there were no trucks to drive?

Didn’t happen. Probably not going to happen for a very, very long time.

Now the same people who pumped up self-driving trucks 5 years ago, are at it again with AI doin’ all our readin’ and writin’.

  • Need a resume — have AI write it, because they are all being read by AI.
  • Journalism with people — too expense — let the AI write all the stories — ain’t that right Sports Illustrated.
  • Need a business letter — don’t type that yourself — tell the AI what you want and wait 5 seconds.

Does it work for those kinds of shitty soul sucking tasks? A little bit. But like driving it’s not going to replace novels, stories and movies anytime soon.

Let me let you in on a little secret. We can give everybody in the world everything they “need.” Food, clothes, shelter, healthcare if the average healthy adult works about 15 hours a week. The problem is not supply. It’s distribution.

Most of the economy is built on bullshit — petty “wants” driven by aggressive marketing. Fast fashion instead of clothes. Fast food instead of beans and basic vegetables. Big gas guzzling pickup trucks when public transit or small cars would do.

And thank god for most of us, the economy always will be a cesspool of false desires. It will keep 80 percent of us fully employed making shit people don’t need — movies, books, manicured lawns, infinity pools, bottled water…

Maybe the AI will finally increase productivity which has been stuck since the 90’s when we replaced millions of “administrative staff” with desktop publishing and spreadsheets. Think about it… has your computer actually done anything “new” since 2002?

Faster, better (maybe) and can store a lot more shit and takes a lot less time to set up, but it’s basically been the same old shit with different colors, smaller fonts, bigger screens and more white space for 25 fucking years. Moving those features to the phones made it more convenient, but hasn’t really improved productivity.

Maybe the AI will make us faster… Maybe. It’s still not meeting the hype.

AI images still suck

Here’s a good example.

I don’t have and don’t know photoshop. I used to just steal images for this pathetic bullshit site off the internet and try to just stay under the copyright cops radar. But for the past few months, I downloaded the Bing app and use the Image Creator on my phone.

I was promised I could just type a phrase and get exactly the image I want — just as good as a human graphic artist.

Maybe if that human was high on heroin.

Prompts (for my Bible business post):

I type in: A photo realistic image of the King James Bible covered in tiny orange hands

This is what you get with “covered” prompt… from Bing AI.

OK maybe “covered” was the wrong verb.

A photo realistic image of the King James Bible held by pair of very small orange hands:

How many hands are a pair? Where is the orange, and why is this Bible so fucking small.

Ok maybe I got the Bible size wrong?

A photo realistic image of large King James Bible held by pair of very small orange hands:

WTF with the legs sticking out. Did we slam the Bible on this little orange person like a house falling on the Wicked Witch of the West?

OK maybe the AI doesn’t understand “pair.”

A photo realistic image of an upside down King James Bible touched at the book spine by two very small orange hands:

Why is it all two-handed monsters on the sides, and Thing from the Adams Family made a sudden appearance?

Maybe it’s the photo realism throwing it off? Or maybe it doesn’t understand adverbs like “very.”

An upside down King James Bible touched at the spine by two small orange hands:

Why do the hands have “butts” and legs, and are those two little baby heads in the lower left? If this was a human graphic designer, I would fire her and make her get on stage and show her work as jokes.

I gave up on the prompts. If I had photoshop skills I could have cropped out all the weird shit and come up with a better image in a few minutes. Instead I combed through my options and threw this piece of shit on the page.

So no my fellow Americans, I’m not scared of AI taking all of our jobs. But I do think we should regulate that shit before it gets out of hand and “creating” images of “hands with butts” becomes the new normal.