Repeat After Me: AI Doesn’t Know Anything

Yesterday, the Chicago Sun-Times (and then also the Philly Inquirer) published an issue of their newspaper that included an insert about fun summer things, and in that was a list of fifteen great summer reads, blah blah blah. Harmless enough, until of course you realize that ten of those fucking books don’t fucking exist because the writer (“writer”), Marco Buscaglia, used generative AI to generate the list of books. (He also seems to have used it in the rest of the insert, as well.) It literally includes books by real authors that do not exist. It also bungles descriptions of existing books. And then? This went unvetted into the world, unexamined, untouched, unworried, unbothered. Someone straight up closed their eyes, hummed a song, and slammed a happy finger down on the YES PUT THIS OUT INTO THE WORLD IMMEDIATELY button.

The problems with this are so myriad, I do not think my blog has the bandwidth to publish them. I could rage-shriek terabytes of just angry ululations about how generative AI is a rash that pops up in places you don’t want it, which is to say, literally everywhere. A rash is underselling it. It’s a cancer, bloating into full on metastasis as its tendrils push through our entire information system like the shoots, roots and runners of an invasive plant out to crush everything under a mat of bedstraw and bindweed.

I’ll focus on two things.

First, this just continues to absolutely damage (and ultimately destroy) the fidelity of our information systems. We are fast approaching the point where the boundaries of fiction and truth have dissolved utterly, plunging us into a river of garbage puked up by billionaire computers and their mindless lazy-fuck users. Anything is true. Everything is false. We’re cooked.

Second, the push for AI is by billionaires and tech-bro “break everything and disrupt the world back into the stone ages” villains but it is one seized upon and urged forth by carriers like the writer (“””writer”””) of that article, Marco Buscaglia. That guy was like, “Ennh, I don’t really want to do all this work,” and so he took his brain out of his head, shoved the machine into his empty skull, and gave it a hard poke, telling it to DO SOMETHING. Generative AI is the tool of the lazy and the unimaginative, the slugabed bullshit artist, the idea-fetishist, the disinterested and callous, the ignorant eyes-forced-shut soft-boy dimwits, the people who simply don’t care enough to make the journey and care only to teleport to the destination, the people for whom work and effort and knowledge is all just an impediment to result, result, result. People who want to build a building but don’t want to ever understand how architecture works. People who want to take their driving tests in a Waymo. People who want cheat codes for everything in life. People who are definitely going to try to marry a fuck-bot someday*.

Here’s the trick, though —

These people are, unsurprisingly, rubes.

Because they misunderstand the fundamental problem with generative AI, particularly when it comes to using it for informational services —

AI doesn’t know anything.

I’ll say that again, a bunch more times, because you need to get that:

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING.

AI isn’t smart. It does not have ideas. It is not sentient. It does not think. It is, almost literally, a super-fancy lorum ipsum generator. It is you giving it the parameters of a block of text, and saying, “Fill this space with the shape of the thing I’m asking about.” It will conjure not an answer, but an answer-shaped thing. That is all it does, all it can do, and all it will be able to do. Sometimes, the answer-shaped thing will contain fragments of Actual Answer. Sometimes it’ll even get it pretty close to right on. A lot of times? It’ll pollute the answer-shape with lots of made-up answer-shaped shit. Because it doesn’t know. It literally doesn’t vet the information. It cannot think its way through the information. It has no brain. It has no soul. It has no wit, no awareness, no wisdom, no knowledge. It has, at best, the cumulative wit and awareness and wisdom and knowledge of whatever it has eaten — which is to say, whatever was stolen for it by the billionaire tech-bro shitheads, stuff stolen and then crammed into its wood chipper mouth. Then it whirs and chews and chips it all into a meaty slurry, then horks up partially-digested chunks of that wit/awareness/wisdom/knowledge into the shape you want. But all the material has been smashburgered together. It is now just ground meat.

Uncooked ground meat.

It is bad at the job they are telling you it does. Further, this bad job it does comes at quite the high cost: it ruins, as noted, our information fidelity; it is based on material not offered to it but stolen for it from actual human beings who did not consent to having their life’s work ripped out of their hands and casually tossed into the wood chipper; it is destroying the environment, guzzling water, eating power.

Generative AI is a consumer. It eats and eats and eats. And all it can do with that is either throw it back up, or shit it out. And neither its shit nor its barf are nutritious.

Stop using it.

Not for art. Not for words. Not for information. Not for learning, for writing papers, for grading papers, for composing articles, for reading and parsing articles, for farming ideas, for executing ideas, for photos or drawing or videos or shitty stupid AI slop memes.

It lies because it doesn’t know not to.

It plagiarizes because that’s the only way it can do what it is tasked.

It kills the world because everybody is demanding we use it and they’re cramming it in every digital orifice across the internet and across our devices.

Just say no to generative AI.

And definitely, definitely don’t have it write a goddamn article for you, and definitely definitely DEFINITELY do not publish that fucking article.

WTF JFC FFS.

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* I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to judge you for marrying your fuck-bot, I feel like that’s kinkshaming, and neither you nor your fuck-bot deserve that. Unless of course your fuck-bot is built using generative AI, in which case, it goes in the volcano, sorry.

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Anyway, buy my book or I perish in the abyss. No AI was used in writing the book, because art and story is by people, for people, and I am people. Also I’m not a lazy fucking rube.