Because AI is garbage

The time has come to declare war on AI

By Drew Magary

A few months ago, my son asked me to buy him a subscription. The product in question was something called Ground News. For $100 a year, Ground News would assign a bias rating to any news link my son came across. He’s an aspiring journalist, and he knows that the journalism industry — which I work in — is rife with misinformation, obfuscation and ulterior political motivations. The kid is only 16. He’s not as media literate as his old man is. In theory, a bias sniffer like Ground News might prove valuable.

So I dug around a bit on Ground News to see if it was worth the subscription. And folks, you’re not gonna believe this, but it’s not. In fact, it buys some of its bias ratings straight from an AI algorithm. Once I discovered that bit of intel, I told the boy that the app was garbage.

Because AI is garbage. It’s an inherently antihuman technology that is doing active harm to the now hundreds of millions of people who consume it. A recent MIT study showed that using AI bots, like ChatGPT, can deaden your cognitive skills. Multiple parents have filed suit against ChatGPT’s parent company, the former nonprofit outfit OpenAI, accusing the product of encouraging their children to (successfully) die by suicide. Elsewhere, AI services are stealing creative content they don’t own, disseminating lifelike child sexual abuse images for pedophiles, jacking up Americans’ electricity bills and boosting fossil fuel emissions to record levels at a time when the planet’s health, humanity’s health, can least afford it. To cap it all off, the tech giants that have profited wildly from the AI boom are now openly laying off thousands of workers, with the expressed goal of using their AI models to do all of that work instead. Andrew Yang warned us the robots were coming for our paychecks, and we didn’t listen.

The problem is only metastasizing. In a very short timeframe, AI has become the high-fructose corn syrup of the digital realm: It’s now in everything, even if you don’t want it there. It’s at the top of every Google search, unless you do a bit of manual tinkering. It’s in your news feed. It’s on your Spotify playlist. It’s in terrible holiday ads for Coca-Cola. And, thanks to our beloved President Narcolepsy, it’s about to be in your government. From NBC News:

“[Trump’s] order opens the door to significantly increased public-private partnerships on AI development: within 90 days, the secretary of energy must identify systems and data available to support the program, including ‘resources available through industry partners.’”

I hardly need to tell you that Donald Trump is mandating AI contracts in order to enrich his Silicon Valley donor base, but it’s especially galling when you consider how much the tech sector has already profited from the AI boom over the past three years. Once OpenAI launched its ChatGPT product to the public in 2022, and once its CEO Sam Altman later did away with the whole nonprofit charade, the company triggered a gold rush that every major tech giant — Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon — rushed to get in on. The downsides to the technology may have spooked them at first; we’ve all seen “The Terminator” movies. But they stopped worrying about all of that doomsday s—t when their market caps went up and up and up.

And yet, they want more. In fact, those same companies are now aggressively portraying the advent of AI as an economic opportunity they have to take full advantage of. They now have allies in Washington. Many of them. Just this summer, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz mounted an effort to ban individual states like California from regulating AI. Ted Cruz is scum. He’s not fighting AI regulation because he cares about you. He’s fighting it because he wants to f—k you. They all do. And they’re succeeding.

This is a crisis, only you may not read about how big of a crisis it is because your Ground News app rated this article as LEFT. These bots are only as honest as the people programming them. And you may not find a more dishonest breed of businessmen right now than the AI evangelists of Silicon Valley. I know because I’ve tested their products, from Elon Musk’s AI-powered Wikipedia clone to ChatGPT and its competitors. None of them provided me with any intellectual stimulation, and virtually all of them have been designed to prey on Americans, especially young ones, whose loneliness was exacerbated by the pandemic. These AI models all bear the marks of their respective creators, because those creators are eternally biased in favor of whatever brings them the heftiest profit. That bias, along with a bit of Nazism, shows in the products they’re forcing down our collective throat.

And you know what? Americans are beginning to get sick of it. They don’t wanna pay higher power bills just so they can get laid off from their assembly line gig by corporate. They don’t want their kids dying by suicide. And they prefer that their pornography feature human genitals rather than digitally rendered ones. Meta may be seeing returns on its AI products, but their customers sure as s—t aren’t. You and I know that staying in a chat room with a virtual customer service agent is only so enjoyable for so long.

The question is if fed-up Americans are willing to fight back against the incredible institutional backing that AI now enjoys. Silicon Valley’s attempt to excise human beings from the world economy is supported both by predatory Democrats and by Republicans who, like Trump and Cruz, perfected the art of crybaby politics long ago. Republicans want nothing more than an electorate that’s been dumbed down into servitude, and these mind-eating AI products are only helping to accelerate that process. None of the aforementioned sockstains I just mentioned will suffer from the AI bubble going POP. Once the sector crashes, these leeches will simply pivot to a new bubble, with taxpayers footing the tab for the transition. From needless wars to needless bailouts, American tax dollars have always been used primarily to keep the markets up. The real money is in the corruption and, with Trump in charge, the corruption sector is enjoying a boom unlike anything that you or I have ever lived through.

That’s how market manipulation has helped AI weasel its way into every digital product you use, and why a chatbot is currently giving your little brother detailed instructions on how to hang himself in the basement. This is an evil technology, and I said as much to my son when he asked for that Ground News sub. You, the discerning reader, must also spread the word. Tell your family, tell your friends and tell your representatives. AI is evil. It’s a bunch of crappy products engineered to wage war on mankind itself, and not in cool sci-fi ways. It’s a banal evil, same as so many of the other evils that you and I have encountered over the years. But it’s a growing one. All reasonable Americans should want it banned, and they should want the likes of Sam Altman dropped into a Supermax. I don’t care if you take anything else away from this essay, so long as you absorb that point.

And if you decided to read an AI summary of this essay, come here for a second so that I can kick you in the face.