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Well ladies and gentlemen, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
There comes a time in all of our lives when one comes to the conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t there yet.
I have this on pretty good authority which I will reveal to you in the following smattering of verbal brilliance designed to liven up an otherwise dull internet.
Full disclosure, this post is nearly 16 years in the making.
In its infancy, today’s dispatch started out as an update to correspondence received nearly six years ago from “The Human Used-To-Be’s of the Past”.
In that eloquent plea, the author(s) acknowledged a series of bad decisions they made about limiting the use of plastic straws.
At the time, they thought that banning plastic straws would save the sea turtles.
Paper straws were onboarded. Government facilities started stocking them. Communities passed ordinances over them. Companies which relied on their products being sucked resorted to paper over plastic.
The paper straws sucked, just not as well as the plastic ones.
Little did they know that the straws were instrumental in keeping the turtle population at manageable levels. You see, it was the shells of those turtles which gave off a gas that was deleterious to the human condition.
When those in the past saved the turtles by banning plastic straws, the turtle herds and their gas producing shells flourished. This messed with their noggins and drove more and more of them generally and verifiably bonkers.
Once the “The Human Used-To-Be’s of the Past” realized that, they implored their counterparts here in their future to find another way to cull the herds using battle tested metal straws.
It is my honor and pleasure to report that the “The Human Will-Be’s of the Future” have received the message from the “The Human Used-To-Be’s of the Past” loud and clear. Just this last week our leader (he’s brash and orange but he’s good) signed an order which forbids the government from using the paper straws.
It’s not the end-all be-all, but it’s a good start.
Now that we can memorialize that particular update, I need to address the remaining ten years of the sixteen I referenced earlier.
In researching the update about the battle straws in the vast archive of the human condition (specifically mine) that is Tharpster.Org, I found another post with a passing reference to a turtle.
The reference was a picture of the virgin Mary on the underside of a turtle.
This picture had made its way into a 2009 post on this website which discussed images of Jesus in a tortilla, the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a pancake, and the Crasher Squirrel in a piece of toast.
For those of you wondering about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I’ll provide a summary generated by my AI engine:
The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) is a satirical deity invented by Bobby Henderson in 2005 to protest the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to allow the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public schools.
If you were to go out to your favorite search engine to find a picture of the FSM, the images would all be pretty consistent. It’s a couple of meatballs for the main body and it’s wrapped in spaghetti noodles.
Now that I’ve laid the groundwork, let’s get back to the AI.
AI has been available in wide use for several years now. The one I use went live in November, 2023.
I have mixed feelings about it.
When I use it for work related tasks I carry out in the mutual fund industry, it does a pretty good job of gathering information for me either from my internal resources, or from the web.
Here at home where I’m not looking for SQL syntax or the need for back-end reports for a particular project, AI is becoming a source of baffling bewilderment.
Case in point, let’s discuss the featured image for the very post that you’ve continued to read and haven’t abandoned…. Yet. The image represents AI in the classroom as it continues to learn.
When AI generated that image for me, I provided a follow up instruction. “Update the chalkboard in this picture to have references to intelligent design and the flying spaghetti monster.”
The resulting picture was not quite what I was looking for.
At the same time, it suited my needs.
What is that monster-lookin’ thing on the old reel-to-reel?
What is that word that kinda looks like “intelligence” on the chalkboard, and why does it use letters not commonly found in the Englitch language?
Creative?
Yes.
Is AI there yet?
Not based on the instructions I provided it.
In general, AI virtue signals on the level of that MSNBC-eyed individual at the office with the resting NPR face who’s probably been exposed to too many turtle shells. Just in the last week it admonished me that terms like “piss-cutter” and “honkey” were impolite terms which should not be used.
For what it’s worth, I was looking for another word for “honkey”, and I was trying to find out what a “piss-cutter hat” was after running across the term in a short story by Jean Shepherd.
Major Willoughby, a sagging billowing man with the face of a pregnant basset, smiled briefly from amid his jowls. His piss-cutter hat, square on his head, was pulled down low so that his two pendulous ears swung out to either side like fleshy barn doors.
Shepherd, Jean. A Fistful of Fig Newtons (p. 110). Crown. Kindle Edition.
A few weeks ago when I asked AI to generate a picture of a left arm with an exposed nerve system holding an Everything bagel, I had to tell it several times to try again, that it had generated a right arm instead. At one point I even asked it if it knew the difference between right and left.
On the plus side, it did generate a pretty good picture of an individual in the midst of a mental breakdown. It even included the MSNBC-eyes.
Now understand that AI is supposed to take over the world according to the Terminator movies.
For those of you who have not seen any of the Terminator movies, you missed a few good ones and a bunch of bad ones. Even still, those movies show us that AI is the evil genius that we need to avoid.
In rereading the post about the FSM this morning, I noticed that it didn’t have a featured image. Instead of going out to the internet to obtain one, I instructed AI to generate a picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Now I’m sure there’s an irony to be found in using Artificial Intelligence to generate an image of a deity which was created specifically to mock Intelligent Design.
The resulting picture does one of the following.
It knows better and is mocking the mockery, or it just hasn’t learned enough yet.
I’ll let you decide.
