2024 Scourge Of The Year: Generative AI
Boy did slop proliferate!
Man, was generative AI everywhere this year. It’s a billionaire’s dream! Cut out those greedy meatsacks wanting stuff like “paychecks big enough to live on” and “health insurance” and replace them with robots. Plus you can demand more from your office workers, because they’ve got AI to “help” them now!
It invaded Google searches, using 10 times as much power as a regular search to insist that Encanto 2 is real, because AI doesn’t know the difference between truth and fan fiction.
(None of the above is true, and there’s no Encanto 2 in the works.)
It took over health insurance: Medicare Advantage plans and UnitedHealthcare deployed an AI model, “nH Predict,” which executives knew had a 90 percent error rate, according to a lawsuit, using it to deny claims that doctors said were medically necessary. Also Cigna, which rejected more than 300,000 claims in two months using an artificial intelligence system. Rejection takes seconds, but an appeal could take years, years that dying people ain’t got! Insurance executives’ eyeballs cha-chinged with little dollar signs for pupils!
Also lovin’ it: perverts! AI is the perfect tool to make child sexual abuse material, or nonconsensual intimate imagery of members of Congress, or for teenagers to make deepfakes of their high school classmates.
AI slop is trying to take over the news, and making zombie papers rise from the dead. In Oregon, the Ashland Daily Tidings newspaper closed in 2023, but then a strange clone popped up in its place, with eight reporters who turned out to not exist, or whose identities had been stolen. Even the owner’s identity was stolen from a Christian music promoter in Texas. Who was behind it? Nobody knows!
Serbian businessman and DJ Nebojša Vujinović Vujo has become the “kingpin” of AI news, taking over about 2,000 web sites from defunct sources like The Hairpin and Minnesota’s Southwest Journal, and populating the sites with AI-generated clickbait pablum.
BuzzFeed wants in on the action! They sold the Hot Ones studio at a loss to invest in “AI-powered interactive experiences.”
Facebook is also investing in making AI users, so that one can go on there and have virtual friends, which is the saddest-sounding thing in the world.
AI has taken over the telephone, making interactive calls for political candidates. And of course it’s used by scammers to fake people’s voices and extort grandmas by claiming that little Timmy has been kidnapped, while his cloned voice begs for ransom in the background. It was used by Trump supporters to fake a bunch of Black women hanging around him. And it was used by Trump himself, who pathetically made an AI Taylor Swift endorsement for himself.
It’s taken over government functions: Nevada is spending $1 million to use Google AI to deny process unemployment claims, even though it’s only right 76 percent of the time at best. At that price, why not just add more employees? Don’t be silly!
The slop is dogging publishing, swamping acquisitions editors with AI manuscripts. Teaching, where students are using it to do research and write papers instead of book-learnin’. Schools are down to two r’s now: ropin’ robots!
Did you think online dating could not get any worse? The Match Group, owners of Match dot com, Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid and similar sites for the thirsty and lovelorn, has plans for a chatbot that can attempt to woo another’s chatbot on your behalf.
Is this efficiency? Is this progress? Only if you don’t give a shit about the quality of your product! A study from the online recruiter Upwork found that 77 percent of employees using AI say it’s actually added to their workload, hampered productivity and increased their feelings of burnout. Upwork blames this on workers not being trained or motivated enough. “Every worker should now think of themselves as a critical part of R&D, rethinking how to best do their work and accomplish their goals in light of AI advancements.” So is the boss going to be paying everybody R&D money, then, KELLY? LOL.
Maybe employees hate it because generative AI does not actually do a job for you, unless you’re a professional Internet troll. You still have to figure out what and how to ask it, and then you have to check its work, and figure out what inferences it got wrong, and so at the end of the day, how much does it actually help?
Anyway, I punched this article into ChatGPT and asked it to rewrite it in different styles, and all of them except Cormac McCarthy decided that this piece needed to conclude with some talk of the soul and spirit of human beings, even though I did not use the word “soul” once.
All of it was crap, and Rebecca took the whole section out.
You’re welcome.
[Forbes archive link/ STAT News / Gizmodo/ Wired archive link / Futurism/ NBC]
To be fair, Generative AI has made me $7,240 a month while saving me 81 hours per month otherwise wasted hand-crafting comments on Wonkette stories.
Damn that thunder rattled the windows! Quite a fireworks show Mother Nature is putting on in NYC tonight.