can everyone kindly shut the fuck up about AI

The robots aren't coming, but the people who can't shut the fuck up about them are already here.

Please please please can everyone just take a moment to shut the fuck up about AI?

It’s so stupid and it’s barely even started and already everyone can’t stop nutting about how cool it is BUT IT IS NOT COOL.

"It's fascinating and it's going to change every single aspect of our lives forever!!!" Do you even hear yourself??? It’s a fucking chatbot just like Alexa, Siri, and the exception that proves the rule, the GOAT itself SmarterChild.

Even if it is different even if its the smartest best thing that’s ever existed I don’t care just stop talking about it you sound like a fucking dork.

“Oh wow look how silly billy this chat bot is it said it loves me”!! WHO CARES.

Ya know who loves you? Your wife and kids. Take them out for dinner at IHOP once in a while, but dont you dare talk to them about AI unless you’re discussing how an AI could never make a good pancake.

“Did you see how that one robot made a little mistake in a product demo for Google” WHO CARES. I don’t want to know ANYTHING about Google product info NOTHING.

If I have to see one more fucking app INTRODUCE an AI assistant as if its revolutionary fucking road, I’ll scream.

None of it is new - Google has been using ‘AI’ to feed you bullshit for millennia. But now its a big deal cuz some freak chatbot lost its mind? No.

Ya know who was a real assistant? This guy:

And ya know what they did to my man Jeeves? They gutted him, made the site Ask.com (very fucking original), and stopped doing search entirely in 2010. They went from this:

To this:

Shame!

Remember the last time we clutched our pearls and couldn’t shut the fuck up about something very very stupid? One of the extras in Home Alone 2 became president:

Let’s back up

A few weeks ago, something strange started happening.  I began seeing my nickname “Al” smeared all over the news like cream cheese and lox on a delicious egg bagel: thick and with no regard for the health of the recipient. 

There I was, in the Mainstream Media, being accused of writing hundreds of sci-fi stories? AND e-books on Amazon? AND being a DJ for Spotify!?

I obviously hired a crack squad of the best PIs who knew a thing or two about acronyms. Specifically, they knew about acronyms with the letter I, which was the lucky break I needed. 

AI wasn't my nickname. It stood for Artificial Intelligence. Don’t believe me? Have a look for yourself. Can you tell which of the below is my name and which is the tech bullshit thing? 

Al 

AI 

THEY ARE THE SAME. 

What if we enhanced: 

Al

AI

NOPE still the same. How can a country that proclaims to be “united” do something so devastatingly divisive? This cannot stand; it must sit. 

In fucking conclusion

In case it wasn’t clear already, allow me to restate my thesis: can we please all shut the fuck up about “AI”?

I just want to stop talking about it entirely. I hate it.

I know it’s gonna change everything but so did the steam engine and you sure as shit didn’t see every single 1800s news story be “aaahhh the steam engine it’s so cool it might replace water power oh noooooo!” 

What did happen, according to cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell (whose title and name both go Hard) in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, was that people freaked the fuck out:

“There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed.”

Bell says these moral panics focused on threats to women and children. The automobile was a “devil wagon” that’d make women faint or – and this one is classic woman stuff – have fits of hysteria.

Telephones would cause impropriety, possession, or electrocution, but just in women. It does make me wonder, a bit, if the “teenage girls are most harmed by social media” argument would fall into this category? IDK I’m not an anthropopulist!

But damn it see, I’m already doing the thing I wanted to avoid: arguing about the AI. ENOUGH.

There’s so much other good stuff to talk about, too, like:

• how weird people are. that’s fun. 

• how we hate being lonely but as soon as we’re together all we want to do is be alone.

• how we hate the rich while simultaneously lusting after everything they have. 

• how the last twenty years of “social’ media made us less social than ever, a failed experiment that we will look back on and go ‘holy fuck why did we do that?’ oh wow just like ai is about to be jesus christ on a ritz

• how we’re busying ourselves with stuff that doesn’t matter because the stuff that does matter is way too much to handle

• How the term jock comes from the word jockstrap 

And of course the biggest question of all, the one on everyone’s minds, the crime of the century: 

how the hell imitation crab got away with it for so long

It’s not the crime that gets you, I’ve been told by Washington insiders, it's the cover-up. 

But the imitation crab (or Krab) - which is obviously not crab, as it says in the title plain as day - has no cover-up. They tell you straight up: this is an imitation don’t believe us this isn’t real this is imitation and if you somehow missed the word imitation, don’t worry we spelled crab wrong we spelled it with a wacky ass K!!

They were being so honest, we had no choice but to trust them. we let our guard down, we ate it and thought “I’m eating crab.” We wanted to believe, so we did.

I used to eat a package every two days. 

It’s good because it's basically Alaska pollock, sugar, and fillers like wheat, egg white, or something really simple that ancient cultures have been eating since forever ago: the enzyme transglutaminase.

But we don’t care, its sweet and yum and fuck it they said crab in the title so they can’t be lying that bad, can they?

They can and they did and they are.

Look around - it’s imitation krabs all the way down. We’re surrounded by the lil fauxstecians, yapping about how wacky they are while the real world around us burns.

The AI is an imitation crab. 

You see it don’t you.

• “artificial” intelligence 

• “imitation” crab

They put it right in the title and so we believed them and now we’re acting as if these dumb autocomplete fuckdongs are the next stevie hawkings.

Real crab still exists. People still eat it. 

And if that’s true, then real intelligence exists too. People still have it. Let us use it and please, kindly, shut the fuck up about AI. 

Regardless, change the name to FI fake intelligence. I need my nickname back. 

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Let’s hear it for the newest paid subscribers!

Huge congrats to the latest and greatest three people to become patrons of the BAT: Deb S, Arthur P, and Anya L. As promised, please find below a short and very much real 100% authentic well-researched bio for each.

Want to get your very own bio AND support the great work we’re doing here at BAT? Now you can. Everyone who becomes a paid subscriber gets a cool bio - it’s that simple (if you want any specific info in your bio, email me after you subscribe).

Deb S:

Everyone knows that Deb is short for debutante, a word that for some reason means ‘young woman ready to make her debut in society,’ which isn’t weird at all! Debutantes are ‘debuted’ at a big debutante ball, which as far as I can tell is a Groupon style Bat Mitzvah where a lot of women are all celebrated at once. Men have one too - beautillion ball - which sounds more like a hipster style of matzah ball.

Even though her Wikipedia page says otherwise, Deb S. had nothing to do with the debutante ball thing. Sure Deb S. created the word debutante back in her wild days in 1700s France, but her version was actually the earliest known instance of a comedy roast - a deb-u-taunt. People would gather from all over the world and highly esteemed comedians plus some who just don’t have other stuff to do would come up on stage and all say some funny and a little mean but ultimately loving things about Deb. “Now this is a deb-u-taunt ball!” Deb S. once screamed. Someone misheard her and well, the rest is history. Deb lives in Idaho with her five cats and one husband. She is a welder.

Arthur P.

Not much is known about Arthur besides the six volume biography he wrote about himself and released back in 2003. Of course, everyone told him that if he wrote it, it was an autobiography, but Arthur screamed, “there’s nothing automatic about this! I worked my ass off on this thing for the last 25 years.”

And it was true. It was his life’s work to write about his life’s work, which got a bit hairy, like when two people standing next to one another are talking to each other on speaker phone and you get all that static. That’s what Arthur’s biography feels like: a whole mess of static.

Much to the chagrin of the New York Book Literati and Illiterati both, Arthur’s biography, I Wrote This About Me Writing This, went on to be a best selling novel on Amazon in the “biography that is actually an autobiography” section with a sum total of five sales. Arthur P. lives in Maine with his wife and three kids. He is an author.

Anya L.

Anya is a free spirit, a wanderer who is not lost. She once walked for so long she said “ah dang it I need a break.” Anya is in no way affiliated with the “I can’t believe it’s not a parody” company Anya that looks to sell things like nipple balms and body butter for new moms as if they came from Sephora.

The company’s website - thisisanya.com was originally owned by Anya L. until Anya the company paid her five million bucks for it. They will go out of business soon, for sure.

Anya L. on the other hand, will live forever. Anya L. has a cat who will move mountains one day. Because of a recent windfall of 5 million cold buckaroos, Anya is tri-coastal. She, too, is a welder.

🗣 Tell all your human friends

Pass this onto as many human people you can. Do not send it to the fucking AIs.

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✍ Comment

Let’s talk about it. Some prompts:

1. Did I go too easy on the whole AI thing? If you say yes do not answer.

2. How do you feel about the AI? Does it not bother you as much as me and if so wtf.

3. What would you like to talk about instead of the dumb AI?