F**k AI

Seriously

Short one purely because I’d like to briefly tell AI to, as you may have gathered, fuck off. I’m not talking for the moment about AI companies ripping off everybody’s writing and art and music so slackers and corporate drones who haven’t put in a moment’s effort to learn how to do these things can now make terrible soulless slop while putting creatives out of work. I’m not talking about the fact we’re now facing a generation of students who can’t write an essay or string together a set of coherent thoughts by themselves.

I’m not talking about the fact AI is getting not smarter but fundamentally dumber, as it’s been recently shown that it hoovering up all the brainrot of the web — including stuff generated by AI itself, of course — is making it more moronic by the day (as it is with us humans). I’m not addressing either the horrific fact that AI chatbots appear to have enabled or even semi-encouraged more than one vulnerable young person to take their lives, as frankly I simply can’t look at that idea for too hard.

Right now I’m talking purely about the endless intrusion of “helpful” AI into not merely everyday life, but every freaking moment of it — those conducted via computers and phones, at least, which is increasingly almost all of them.

Yesterday my wife went to a clothing store to get a smaller size in a garment I’d bought for her (not my bad — “Sorry darling, thought you were huge” — it turns out to be an excessively roomy cut). While there she spotted something she liked a little more, and checked in with me via text to make sure I wouldn’t mind her switching. Of course I didn’t. But as I was about to reply to her, the AI now baked into my phone’s OS (and Apple is better and less intrusive with this stuff than most) perkily offered to write the message for me, either positively or negatively.

I mean… what the actual fuck? Are we really heading for a world in which husbands aren’t capable of or willing to answer that kind of enquiry themselves? And if not, how long — if ever — will it take for AI to get smart enough to realize when it should butt the hell out? And while it’s fucking off, perhaps it could also stop trying to write my emails, peck out my pointless Facebook posts (or else offer to explain why the people in them like cats, or list the most famous ten cats in history, or supply good recipes involving cats as an ingredient, or ARGGHHHHHH), or build me a to-do list based on best GTD practice or transcribe my zoom meetings in Welsh or wipe my arse sideways for me.

In the words of the wise man on Twitter in the header image for this post (okay, it was me…), seriously, fuck the fuck off.

(Annoyingly, it’s all too possible that piece of vitriol, spat out in thirty seconds in response to a Sandy Hook denier, may be the most influential thing I ever write. Please enjoy below a tiny sampling of the myriad ways my tweet is being monetized across the web by people who aren’t me. Note that AI isn’t the only thing making money off other people’s “creativity”, though in this case I’m happy to regard it as my gift to the universe. My mother would have been so proud.)

Anyway. For those moments when you really want to tell someone to go do one, here’s some musical assistance…

Gayle — ABCDEFU:

Upsahl — Douchebag:

Nessa Barrett — i hope ur miserable until ur dead

And finally the undisputed winner, a song that has run silently around my mind during more than one annoying encounter…

Lilly Allen — Fuck You

AI is my excuse, but you may find these songs — the Lilly Allen in particular — useful for dealing with the world in general or groups within it. Handy for certain politicians and billionaires, too.

I’ve realized the only tunes I know in this genre are sung by women, as it’s more culturally acceptable for girls to tell their partners to fuck off via the medium of song, but there must be more out there. Hit me up.