Pyrrhic Comedy

as science writer Corinne Purtill states in regard to the hurdles encountered by AI engineers, “To understand a person’s humor is to know what they like, how they think and how they see the world.” An artificial intelligence with humor would have to know us better, in a sense, than we know ourselves.

If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what’s the incentive to put new content on the web? What’s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the w... See more

If what you want is a content-marketing blog post that serves more to incrementally improve Google search results than to be read by an actual human, AI might help. If you want to think deeply through a subject and synthesize knowledge, then communicate that knowledge to others, it’s going to be better if you just struggle through the painful proce... See more

The calling for this new internet has never been more dire. As you're reading this, machine learning algorithms are being trained on the billions of gallons of bullshit we spew online each day.

AI-powered document editors, then, among other tools, use all that training data to make it even easier to write outcome-oriented garbage that moves us furt... See more

Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy i... See more