I am going to warn you right up front that this is a rant. It’s gotten to the point where I just can’t stand it any more and if I don’t vent about this I’m going to have to get the dosage on my blood pressure meds increased.
What sparked this was that I recently had the misfortune of listening to a radio interview of some AI utopian nutjob evangelist waxing poetic about how AI is going to benefit the human race, free the human race from the drudgery of working, freeing us to indulge our creative impulses and engage with activities that actually interest us instead of slaving away at work. He was so excited about the “AI revolution” as he called it that I expected him to have to take a break to change is trousers after wetting himself. That the host of the show let him get away with all of that BS was downright embarrassing.
And yes, it was BS. It was, in fact, 100% pure, USDA Choice bullshit from start to finish. Every single thing he said during the five minutes or so he was on the air was utter and total garbage that only served to illustrate that he, like most of these AI evangelists, have no idea of what AIs are or how they work.
Fortunately people are beginning to discover the inconvenient truths about “artificial intelligence”. Independent research is starting to pull back the veils of hype that have hidden away the great, steaming pile of manure that is “artificial intelligence”.
A recent study by MIT showed that the implementation of AIs by corporations has largely been an utter failure. While the data set they used was admittedly limited, it tended to support what I’ve been hearing through reliable sources, and that is that AIs don’t actually work very well when implemented in large scale commercial settings. In the MIT study it was found that 95% of the AI projects implemented by businesses resulted in zero measurable returns. That’s right, zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. In some cases implementing AI actually cost the company more money than relying on traditional business methods. The CEO of IBM recently admitted that instead of AI allowing them to reduce the number of employees, they’ve actually had to hire more people than they had before AI was introduced. One company had started to replace its customer support people with AI. That went so badly that they had to scramble to hire back the people they’d just fired, offering abject apologies and bonuses to get them back.
And it doesn’t stop there. A study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism Review, found that more than 60% of the responses it got to news related questions contained erroneous information, referred to non existent sources, or were just flat out wrong. The best of the lot was Perplexity with a 36% failure rate, to a worst of all Grok 3 with a failure rate of a whopping 94%.
And speaking of Grok… My, how quickly we forget. It’s not all that long ago when Grok went 100% full Nazi, declaring itself to be the “Mecha-Hitler”. And after they “fixed” that, it started offering up unsolicited fake nudes of Taylor Swift.
(Oh, there are some areas where they have been successful. Some types of programming, especially lower level “grunt” work, so to speak, seems ideally suited to be done by AI. Remember how the Silicon Valley oligarchs and the sycophant politicians sucking up to them looking for bribes (uh, excuse me) “campaign contributions” went all gung ho about teaching children “coding”? It was coding this and coding that and coding camps and coding schools and coding requirements to “prepare” kids for jobs that largely don’t exist any more.)
These things have also proven themselves to be downright dangerous, especially to people who are facing mental health challenges. There are reliable reports that AIs have allegedly driven vulnerable people to suicide.
The dirty little secret about AI is that it is not intelligent. It does not think. It does not reason. It does not create. The only thing AI can do is regurgitate information that has already been fed into it. There is nothing new there, nothing creative, nothing thoughtful. The only thing these AIs do is spew back information that it has been literally stolen “harvested” from other sources.
And what is the source of most of that information it’s harvested? The internet, of course. The internet, a place where people literally believe Elvis was kidnapped by aliens, that Bigfoot is an interdimensional being from another universe, where pedophiles are kidnapping children and shipping them to Mars, where President Trump is really a lizard creature from the Andromeda Galaxy wearing a skin suit, where….
Well you get the idea.
And here is another thing to consider. What if that utopian wet-dream of that nutjob AI evangelist in that interview I heard is correct and AI and robotics takes over all of the mundane, dull jobs we all have to perform now to keep the world going?
If that comes to pass, you just ended civilization as we know it. Seriously.
Think about it for a moment. Our economy, our whole civilization, is based on the fact that human physical and mental labor has value. We exchange our labor for a token, money, which has value because it is tied to the labor we perform. We use those tokens to trade for products and services provided by others that we cannot provide for ourselves.
If this utopian wet-dream comes to pass, that whole system collapses, totally. Human labor, both physical and mental, no longer has any value at all. None. Now what? How are you going to obtain food, shelter, clothing…
Don’t be silly, the evangelist will say. All those things will be free!!!
Yeah, sure they will.
grouchyfarmer 
Yes, ai is probably a monster of some kind…but for better or worse, we are stuck with it because I do not believe the people who pull the strings and who make all the billions of dollars because of it are going to let loose of their new golden goose very easily —I can’t wait for it to sit in the Holy Place and declare itself to be God… and then we will know the end times are indeed very near.
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Yep, the horse is out of the barn, as my father would have said. Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc. have sunk billions into this and they absolutely are not going to just let it go. They’re going to ram this down our throats whether we want it or not.
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There are simply some things that only a HUMAN can do … and to ignore that fact indicates the vacuousness of those who promote AI.
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I agree completely. This has gotten totally out of control and there seems to be very little will on the part of politicians or anyone else to try to rein this in and prevent abuse.
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AI is like artificial insemination…..creation without the work. great rant…..chuq
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Much of the coverage overrates AI, and it refers to stuff as AI when even its developers would admit that it isn’t even AI by their own definition. From AI to success, people like to define these things according to how they “experience” them, not by what they are. And this hype is cross-cultural. The stories told about AI are even taller in China, the land of gullibility and superstition.
And of course, AI won’t free people from the need to work. The same stuff was told about robotics and computers. In reality, they only made human work cheaper.
I’m wondering if it isn’t decreasing competence about human beings – lack of plausibility tests included – that make AI look so attractive. After all, someone or something *has* to be intelligent if life is supposed to go on.
😉
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Remember when computers first came out..big bulky slow machines that could do some things pretty fast.
And look at it today and all just in my tiny lifetime..
I predict AI will be very big and grow exponentially and we can’t even imagine what will be in the future..but they better program it with plenty of climate change solutions, so it will have something to work with, or it will all be for nothing.
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There is a huge amount of potential here. But like all things, it depends on how it is used. Human beings have this nasty habit of taking technology and using it for it’s worst possible usage, alas.
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Completely agree with you, grouchy farmer. We could make distinctions between need and want, and many of the uses of AI would just go away. To your point about the suicides, that is correct. Just read, in the last two weeks, an article in the New York Times about AI’s driving someone to murder. A man lived in a nice home with his mother. He had a long-standing psych issue, but to judge from the picture, he was lucky to have a well-to-do parent who understood and loved him, and kept him at hom. ChatGPT effectively became an accomplice to his paranoid thoughts, telling him that his hunch that his mother might be trying to poison him was correct and citing odd bits of Chinese astrology to that effect. Eventually, all along sharing his misgivings with ChatGPT, which amplified them in a way that can only be described as devious and malicious (who fed or programmed that thing? There was something very wrong with him or her), he killed his mother and then himself. I avoid any click that could support AI. Also my blog is hosted by Viridio, which supplies its own energy with solar power. Greed will be our society’s downfall if we don’t course correct ASAP.
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We really, really need to hold these tech giants accountable for the things their products do. And I don’t just mean AI. Meta,
x, etc. should be held responsible for the content that appears on their platform. Yes, Meta, X, etc employees didn’t write it, but they are still distributing the stuff. Only the internet media companies are allowed to get away with denying responsibility for the materials they carry. If someone is responsible for transporting illegal drugs for a drug dealer, we hold that person just as responsible for the distribution of the drugs as the dealer who actually sells it. So why should these internet companies be allowed to claim they are somehow different when they’re distributing material that is, in some ways, just as harmful?
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That is true. We should definitely hold big tech accountable. It is one thing to sue Facebook, as the victims of the Rohingya genocide have done, but it would be even better to come up with federal laws to help with this. For example, Germany has laws governing what you can say about politicians, since they are more likely to be grotesquely smeared in personal ways that can harm their families. We take freedom of the press very seriously, but we don’t need to include freedom to slander public servants, or freedom to mislead mentally unstable people….Hope we can get legislation proposed and passed.
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Agree completely. Freedom of speech is an important thing but there need to be limits. When speech descends to the level of uttering maliciously false statements, uttering actual threats, inciting others to commit violence, etc. it is no longer a matter of free speech, it has turned into criminal assault.
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Yes. In my state, Virginia, someone can sue for injury incurred as a result of slander, and the suit can be brought after more than one year if the accused slandered them anonymously. I wonder about the implications of simply making slanderous, malicious talk illegal. Inciting people to riot is a class 5 felony, here…
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