I’m not sure how long it’s going to last, but we’re still in the nascent era of artificial intelligence and it is showing itself to be rather stupid. Just as early computers were limited by the maxim of garbage in/garbage out, today we’re dealing with AI gathering huge amounts of nonsense and trying to make sense of it.
It’s like that bit that Steve Martin did back when he was a stand-up comedian. He said that a dirty trick you could play on a 3-year-old would be that whenever you were around the kid (with no other adults there), you should talk wrong. Then, when the kid gets to his first day of school, he would raise his hand and say, “May I mambo, dog-faced, to the Banana Patch?”
Unfortunately, AI is hearing a whole bunch of stupid stuff coming from Donald Trump and his spittle-licking minions. AI has no choice but to regurgitate the idiocy it has ingested.
Here are some examples:
What the Trump administration spokesperson said: Through the employment of persuasive and logical arguments, followed by prudent action, we are eliminating the damaging and divisive use of DEI programs in the United States.
What AI heard: Hot damn! We’re free to be openly racist again!
What Trump said: I will end the Ukraine-Russia war the first day I’m in office.
What AI heard: … the first day of my third term.
What wildly unqualified Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: By replacing news outlets like the New York Times and Associated Press for the White House briefings with the likes of Newsmax and Breitbart, we’re returning coverage of the news to the American people.
What AI heard: That’s like saying that when my mom was a teenager in the 1980s, her taste in movies ran the full gamut from “Sixteen Candles” to “Pretty in Pink.”
What Trump said: I don’t know why Ukraine even started that war. They didn’t have to do that. They could have negotiated their way out with a good solution. Instead, Zelensky is just a failed comedian who is now a dictator.
What AI heard: Ha-ha…Beavis, I said dic…”
What Trump said: Personally, I think that Elon Musk’s idea about having all federal employees send in an email every week listing five things they had done that week is a stroke of genius.
What AI heard: Who’s going to read three million emails every week? Hey, maybe Elon can do it and get out of my spotlight.
What Trump sucker-upper and Black GOP Congressman Byron Donalds said: I’m running for governor of Florida. Remember my name.
What AI heard: Or you can call me Clayton Grigsby.
What some poor schmo acting as a spokesperson for Tesla said: We’re not accepting Cybertrucks as trade-ins at this time.
What AI heard: Who are they kidding?! We couldn’t give these ugly-ass, overpriced Nazi wagons away and now they expect us to take them as trade-ins?!
When Donald Trump falsely claimed that tens of thousands of Americans had died building the Panama Canal and, therefore, the United States should reclaim it, all AI heard was, “Man, I wish I knew where Panama was. Is it near the Gulf of America? For that matter, where is the Gulf of America? Is it near Mexico?”
When vapid Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green said, “Federal workers don’t deserve their jobs. They don’t deserve to get paid” (apparently not realizing that she, too, is a federal employee), AI heard.”
What one of Musk’s young idiots said…right out loud…in public: I was racist before it was cool.
What AI heard: I’m racist.
It’s funny: Right after I finished writing this, I read that the transcription feature on iPhones was hearing the word “racist” and briefly transcribing it as “Trump” before changing it to the actual word. An Apple spokesperson hilariously tried to claim that it was due to “a phonetic overlap” between the two words. I mean, “racist” and “Trump” basically mean the same thing, but they don’t sound alike at all.
The two most likely causes of this would be either AI information gathering or an instantly classic prank. There is a slight possibility that while AI has gone about its voracious information gathering, there have been so many instances where “Trump” and “racist” come up at the same time that the AI considers the two words to be synonymous. But Apple’s AI is known, industrywide, to be awful.
I, personally, think that the other option is more likely. Somebody, obviously, snuck that into the code somewhere along the line in the process. That prankster had better lie low for a while. Ever since the election last November, Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken up permanent residence just to the right of Donald Trump’s left butt cheek. Cook and Bezos and Zuckerberg all came to the spontaneous realization that ethics and social justice are for suckers and that there are never enough billions of dollars to make them feel whole.
In Mike Judge’s brilliant dark sitcom “Silicon Valley,” the people at (fictional) potential start-up companies were skewered for always claiming that they weren’t in it for the money, but rather for the opportunity to make the world a better place. That all seems so quaint now as Apple and Microsoft argue over which of them was the first trillion-dollar company.
