Mr Roboto

Artificial Intelligence.

It’s just about everywhere we look and a few places we don’t. The world is fascinated with AI and the things they can create with it and the things it can do for them. It’s everywhere you look anymore and the trend started quite a while ago. It’s been slowly creeping in ever since. So slow, in fact, that even us old fucks who saw the original Terminator in the theaters aren’t even noticing it.

We ought to be scared shitless is what we ought to be.

A lot of you will remember the days when we had to sit with our finger poised over the record button on our tape deck to be able to capture our favorite song when it came on the radio, or worse yet, just had to go to the store and buy the album. Nope, those days are long gone. Now we just scroll to the song we want to hear on our phones, bluetooth that shit to our home entertainment system and POOF! Better yet, we just stand there, no phone necessary and say to no one, “Alexa, play Mad World by Tears for Fears” and after a brief Alexa introduction, there it is. We’re listening to our favorite song in glorious, high definition sound that can rattle the windows. I like that last part. No, it’s not because I am getting old and can’t hear anymore. I hear just fine, I just still like it loud and I’m old enough not to give a shit what it’s going to do to my hearing in the future. My future is limited.

“But Eric, that’s not really AI, that’s just easier access to music”, you may ask.

Bullshit.

What happens after the song is over? Alexa throws Abracadabra by the Steve Miller Band in your face without even asking and then, unless you intervene, you’re getting the Greatest Hits of 1982 for the foreseeable future. There’s AI all over that. An algorithm is taking your musical choices and feeding them into a program that then starts making assumptions as to what you want to listen to, and over time it learns more and more until it finally reaches a point (at least for me) that it honestly has no fucking idea what I want to listen to because I’ve listened to everything from King of the Road by Roger Miller to Taylor Swift’s new album and it’s got 6 decades of decision making to do.

Side note: I listened to Taylor’s new album mostly to see what all the fuss is about and frankly, some of it is not bad although it’s still not really my preferred genre, there’s still nothing wrong with it. She became a billionaire making that music and in turn has done some pretty awesome stuff with that money, including giving a giant middle finger to Ticketmaster. In short, tell the satanic ritual conspiracy dipshits to shut up and leave her the fuck alone. Find another red hat wearing shitshow to attack.

Yeah, you heard me.

Anyway, back to AI.

The most frustrating problem with it, at least for me and my current situation, is that it’s being used to hire employees for just about everything. Have ya’ll tried to apply for a job lately? There ain’t no filling out an application with your trusty pen and handing it over to the store manager anymore.

That shit is goooooooooooone.

Nope. Now we sit at home and do it all online. We fill out application after application and when we’re done, we attach our resume that we had to specifically tailor to each individual application because we’re all just guessing what the algorithm that reads it is going to be looking for, because that’s is what is reading it. There’s no human being looking at that application, at least not yet. There are a couple of gatekeepers that application has to go through before any human ever sees it and even if it passes all the gates, a human may still not even look at it. Those gatekeepers are AI and they’ve been taught what to look for. If you’re lucky enough to get past the gates, they’ll just call you in for an interview and ask a list of predetermined questions to see if you meet the minimums to pay you the least amount possible.

Come by and watch me apply for jobs one day and you’ll get it. I spend a half hour filling out the application with my resume open in a word processor, changing a word here or a sentence there to try to match what I think the job will require, then I click the old submit button and get the standard “Thank you for your application. You should get a response from us in about 2 days.”

Seconds later, make sure you heard me, SECONDS later, the tab with my gmail open, lights up to let me know that they are “sorry, but you did not meet the minimum requirements for employment with our company”.

Really. A high school graduate level, customer service job for which I have over 30 years experience as well as being an honorably discharged Marine Corps veteran, and I didn’t meet the minimum requirements?

That’s not even the biggest insult. The biggest insult is that in order to submit my application . . . wait for it, this is good . . .

I have to prove I’m NOT A FUCKING ROBOT!

What in the actual fuck are they looking for?! What keywords did I fail to include, or what “bad” ones did I include that they didn’t like. My favorites are the little personality tests that ask a bunch of ridiculous questions about how I feel about or what would I do in certain situations and then give me three options to choose from, none of which include how I feel or what I would do and I’m left to guess which one they think is the right one even though all of their options are shitty ones and all of them would make me look like an asshole.

I mean, I’m an asshole, but not when I’m filling out the application if I can help it.

They’ll find out the fun part after I’m hired.

It all boils down to who you need to impress now and unfortunately, it’s not a human. Remember when people used to say shit like, “you know, one of these days they’re gonna make a robot to do your job and then whaddya gonna do?”

Apparently, apply for shitty jobs so I can be judged worthy to do it . . . by a robot, that’s what I’m gonna do.

My shitty attitude is the other fun part they’ll find out after I’m hired. Only fair since the robots are largely responsible for my current attitude. It’s an ugly circle.

Job applications aren’t the only thing AI is taking over, it’s just the one that is the most greatly effecting me at the moment. AI is popping up everywhere. Anyone who has ever screamed “REPRESENTATIVE!” into the phone is already fully aware of it.

I miss the days when you could slam down the phone. You still can, it’ll just cost you $1200 if you don’t have AppleCare.

The truly scary part is that AI is being used in lieu of creativity. I won’t go too much into how it’s used in writing as I think my friend Chris did a more than fine job of that in his post The Growing Contempt for Human Creativity. I’ll just say, when they figure out how to AI my writing style, that’s when I’ll give up. There’s a lot of profanity and regional slang required for that and probably no interest in it, so I think I’m safe for now.

Two old friends were playing golf.

One said to the other, “I’ve never felt better in my life. I have a great job, a wonderful wife, and my golf game has never been better.”

The other man said, “That’s great to know. How’s your hearing?”

The first man replied, “Oh, it’s perfect. I can hear everything.”

The second man said, “That’s funny, because you just hit the ball the wrong way.”

–Joke written by ChatGPT

Chris is absolutely correct, AI is cheapening just about every single creative thing there is. AI is writing speeches, news articles, plays and movie scripts. AI is creating paintings and inventing photographs that only a trained eye can tell apart from a real photograph. AI is creating poetry, writing and performing music and writing entire books.

Even deeper than the cheapening of creativity, it is further increasing the amount of LAZY in creativity and pretty much everything else. Why paint a picture when you can just say what you want in a sentence and then, seconds later, have it appear before you? How long before doctoral thesis’ are legally created by AI and we become a world overcome with computer generated PhD’s? Prove it hasn’t happened already, now that ought to fuckin’ scare ya! We see, hear, understand and make decisions based on the information given to us and more and more and more of that information is artificially generated. Ironically enough, that artificial information is based on the information that we feed into it and it is learning and it learns at a much faster, more efficient pace than we do. That really only has one outcome and it ain’t good.

I hate to sound alarmist, but I’m alarmed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sporting a tin foil hat and babbling to myself on a street corner about how the machines are coming to eat me. I’d go into a terrifying panic if I were to lose my phone just like anybody else and I can still tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t, for the most part, although the AI photography is getting pretty fuckin’ good. Let’s be real, though. George Orwell wasn’t just blowing smoke up our ass when he wrote “1984”, he just realized some shit well before anyone else did.

What he didn’t know is that he’d barely scratched the surface.

Big Brother is here and he’s got several billion eyes and not a single one of them is attached to a brain cell. They all go to a computer somewhere, watching everything, recording everything. Ya’ll know what I mean. Find me somewhere outside of your own home that you’re not on camera pretty much all the time. How are most crimes solved nowadays? Cameras, that’s how. I realize cameras aren’t necessarily AI, but they do speak to what Orwell was talking about. Everything sees everything, you will watch what is given to you, you will read what you are allowed to read and you will speak in the most recently accepted language or go unheard.

2+2=5, a theory nearly proven correct with the “New Math” movement and its “close enough” theory of calculation. Thankfully, that movement didn’t last very long due the sheer number of parents whose brain cells were exploding at the concept and common sense eventually won over. This time.

AI will be all our teachers eventually anyway, where it hasn’t already happened. Yet another job to be taken over by robots.

We are AI’ing ourselves into our own obsolescence.

We’re not completely gone yet. I still write, Chris still writes, my brother paints and plays the guitar, my friend/landlord is still a photographer . . . us creative types are still out here creating and we will be until we are physically unable to do so anymore. More than anything, the point of this whole post was to bring attention back to the real creators that are still out there doing it.

Resist the manufactured and celebrate the original. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to recognize those who have put a lot of effort into their craft, so buy that artwork, buy that book, buy that album and visit those craft booths at the fair.

Until next time.

I love all ya’ll. I’m still figuring out my algorithm.

^{(The answer is both of them were created by AI. Neither of them are real.)}

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