Yes, I had a terrific amount of fun for a few weeks, but novelty does wear off eventually, and the more I thought about it, the more I worried about the obvious dangers of this technology falling into the wrong hands. And by "wrong hands," of course, I mean "the general public." In other words, people.
People are scum. They will use this technology like they've used every advance throughout history, to screw each other over. Now it can be done with machine-like efficiency.
Then there's that other danger, that AI will take over the world and make the perfectly sensible and defensible decision to eliminate humanity. On one of my last forays with Craiyon, I decided to ask a direct question:
And now we have Chat GPT and the like, which can generate a wall of grammatically correct text based on some simple prompt, making writers like me obsolete, or would if we weren't already obsolete due to the fact that nobody reads anymore. It does appear that there are still some bugs in the technology, as AI doesn't seem to be able to tell the difference between facts and the feverish internet ranting of whatever randos that it is trained on. Or maybe that's a feature, I don't know. But using algorithms to predict the next word in a sentence based on people's usage of the language is bound to have problems, because, as we know, people use words wrong a lot.
If my experience with autosuggest is any guide, I'll be better off choosing my own words for the balance of my life. I was writing a comment on another blog recently and wanted to include a reference to an event in which some lizards rode a natural raft across the ocean to another island and proceeded to colonize that new island. The words "lizards rafting over from another" resulted in the suggested next word planet.
Uh, yeah. I'll just continue to do my own writing. Sorry, Skynet, I don't need your help. I was writing professionally when you were still playing Pong, you dumb bastard.
And now, regarding the Twitter experience...
I wrote here about my experience with the bird-logoed social media site. Shortly thereafter, one Elon Musk bought Twitter, and between his demonstrated misunderstanding of how free speech works, and the fact that I prefer that billionaires not make more money off me than necessary, I abandoned ship, and have not looked back.
I have been following the news, however, and have managed to derive more than a little schadenfreude from watching Elon flail about as advertisers and users flee and his new acquisition loses money to the point where he is telling everyone that Twitter, for which he paid the princely sum of $44 billion, is now evaluated at $20 billion. Tempering my joy somewhat is the knowledge that he mostly is putting other people's money at risk, because that's what billionaires do. That's how they get to stay billionaires despite legacies of repeated failures, and how they retain power and influence despite obvious idiocy.
And Elon has that in spades. I mean, the man can't even get off a passable that's what she said joke, which I'm guessing any half-bright nine-year-old could pull off.
Two problems billionaires always seem to have: they never think they're making enough money, and they don't get humor.
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| "Knock knock." "Who's there?" "I don't know. Ha ha ha ha ha." |
In any case, Twitter is now in my rear-view mirror. Which, I think, is an option now on the new Tesla vehicles, along with a steering wheel.
As for the last part of the title of this post, that whole "King of the Fifth Grade" bit, you can find the full explanation here. Things have certainly changed since I wrote that back in 2011; I now live in a world where the Kansas City Chiefs are a budding NFL dynasty, with three Super Bowl appearances and two championships in the last four years. My football life has never been better, and the best part?
I deserve every bit of it.
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