Posted on July 20, 2023
Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Exist, Actually
Although you wouldn’t know it from the cacophony of nonsense spewing forth from the slack-jawed maws of jellyheaded techbros, insufferable influencers, wannabe experts, and fake-it-till-you-make-it con artists entrepreneurs all shouting the contrary – AI doesn’t exist, actually.
Machine learning exists.
Large Language Models exist.
Algorithms exist.
But AI? Not so much.
AI won’t take your job, either. Well it will, but not because it’s remotely capable of doing your job – it isn’t (because AI doesn’t exist, actually) – but it will take your job because some bozo with an MBA and a weekend habit thinks it can. A whole lot of people are going to get sacked simply because toddler princes are running the kingdom with Dunning-Kruger confidence and Artificial Intelligence PhDs they printed off the back of a cereal box in the copy room last Thursday when Donna wasn’t looking.
The good news is that it doesn’t mean you won’t eventually get your job back. It’ll just be a different job that pays less and demands more because you’ll be the one cleaning up all the garbage some generative AI produces for the intellectually destitute “prompt engineer” your boss hired to command the robots at a rate five times higher than what he was paying all the people he fired so AI could take their jobs.
Just look at what’s happening with the writer’s strike. Studios want to be able to use generative tools to “write” screenplays and then pay actual writers even less than they do now to edit the silly little chatbot’s silly little output and create something of quality from the questionable mishmash the bot spits out since it has no way of knowing if a joke is funny or if a tear-jerker will jerk any tears. It doesn’t understand how to elicit any emotion because it doesn’t even know what emotions are.
Because AI doesn’t exist, actually.
Of course, for computer and data scientists, the catch-all term of “artificial intelligence” does exist and is used interchangeably with other aspects of the field, but no true expert (or anyone who understands anything) believes any of the systems people are currently hocking as “AI” are in any way intelligent. Because they’re not – but you wouldn’t know that from all the NotScientists™ promising revolutions.
“But,” I hear you shouting, “Elon Mush and Sam Walkman believe it! Microsoft and Google, too! Not to mention my buddy Earl down at the Gas-N-Sip or that hopped-up dropout I knew in college who’s inventing the next big AI tool! How could they all be wrong? They’re changing the world!”
Well, sure. They’re changing the world, all right – one Greater Fool at a time. Invest early, kids. Get in on the ground floor of the latest reskinned GPT-3 or 4 or 5 or 6-7-8… (or any other float in the parade of constant loathing made up of all the other LLMs doing the exact same thing).
Ever notice how there are never any actual scientists on the stage whenever any of AI’s industry leaders are talking? Sure, there are plenty of CEOs and C-Suite sycophants in hoodies and business casual cargo shorts their wives keep begging them to throw away – but where are all the computer scientists? The data scientists? The really real linguists? You know, the actual experts and not just a bunch of salespeople and sometimes an engineer. Why are they always absent?
It’s because all of these “amazing” new AI tools do the same thing, and none of them are remotely intelligent. (And the scientists know that. Because AI doesn’t exist, actually.)
All these chatbots do is break your prompt down into a statistical model they then compare against the datasets they were trained on to look for patterns and statistically predict the next word (or pixel) with varying levels of accuracy. It’s playing Guess Who with numbers, not thinking. That’s it. That’s the tweet.
LLMs don’t understand their prompts. They don’t understand any of the words in their prompts. They can’t interpret symbolism and metaphors embarrass them at parties. They are incapable of assigning meaning to anything, and they’re not actually having a conversation with you. They’re not sentient, they never will be sentient, and they will never, ever be capable of any sort of intelligence, artificial or otherwise.
We do not now, nor have we ever, had an artificially intelligent system of any kind. At all. Because AI doesn’t exist, actually.
I get why so many business people are so excited about generative AI, though. You know the type – the Big Brain Idea Guys who believe that having ideas is some magical thing that only they can do, and are completely oblivious to the fact that everyone has great ideas. There’s never been a shortage of ideas – it’s having the talent (or access to investment capital) to realize them that’s in short supply, and generative AI provides a quick pathway to creating something while having exactly none of the skills needed to do much of anything. (Which is where “prompt engineering” comes into play, otherwise known in polite society as simply being able to effectively communicate.)
AI may exist eventually, but it won’t be virginally birthed from an LLM’s sacred loins, no matter how much “it’ll get better” time goes by or how big their datasets get. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. The technology that may eventually lead to Artificial General Intelligence (or Artificial Super Intelligence if we’re talking about an Effective Altruism / Longtermist’s eugenics-powered fever dream) is fundamentally different from the way Large Language Models work.
Comparing LLMs to AGI isn’t even apples and oranges. One will not and cannot lead to the other. It’s more like Fruit-by-the-Foot and your grandma’s ’67 Coupe deVille that’s been rusting in her driveway since Gerald Ford was president – it’s a wholly nonsensical comparison. Believing that one has anything at all to do with the other only shows just how much your average True Believer doesn’t understand anything.
That’s not to say that ML/DL/LLMs/etc tools can’t be phenomenally useful – we’ve been using them for decades – it’s only after AI became a hip new marketing buzzword that we started calling anything with an algorithm and a dataset Artificial Intelligence, though.
A whole bunch of actual science is done with the help of machine learning. Oodles of physics and medicine and an endless list of other applications are aided by deep learning and sophisticated algorithms. Practically every industry is using – and has been using – some form of what we’re suddenly calling “AI” for decades now. If you’re reading this on or from a social media app or a search result you clicked in Google – you’re using AI right now.
People call it “the algorithm” a lot – the YouTube algorithm, the TikTok algorithm, the Facebook algorithm – they’re all using machine learning and have been all along. It’s likely they’ll all soon be rebranded as whatever “AI-powered” is supposed to mean, but nothing will have fundamentally changed. And the androids will continue to not dream of electric sheep.
Artificial Intelligence as “understood” by the general public and easily duped is simply science fiction masquerading as science fact. Generative AI can’t think or understand or analyze or reason, even if it’s really good at pretending it can. It can’t analyze what it can’t understand because it’s not intelligent and lacks any sort of cognitive ability whatsoever. It’s just finding statistical averages and guessing without ever actually knowing what it’s saying. It’s not Data from Star Trek or C-3PO from Star Wars or even the Sixth Sense kid when he was in that Spielberg movie about Robot Pinnochio.
Because AI doesn’t exist, actually.
During one of tech’s previous Next Big Thing hype cycles, I remember being able to come to only two possible conclusions for anyone who believed NFTs were ever going to amount to anything:
- People who didn’t understand the technology
- People who did understand the technology and were just in on the grift
It’s pretty much the same with AI. If you actually understand how the technology works, you either hop on the hype train and ride it as far as you can or you start writing excessively long rants about how it’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors because you just can’t take it anymore.
(I guess a third option would just be not understanding any of it but pretending you do, which probably accounts for the lion’s share of early adopters and LinkedIn pundits now that I think about it.)
It’s a money grab right now, which is why every company is rushing some “revolutionary” new AI product to market that isn’t all that new, isn’t revolutionary, and is either just doing the same thing it’s always done but now Siri is called, I dunno, some stupid AI marketing name – or it’s just another LLM doing the same thing every other LLM is doing.
Remember the iEverything craze back in the late ’90s and early 2000s after the translucent iMac (followed by the iPod) came out, when it seemed like every company on the planet started launching iSomething products even if they had nothing at all to do with the internet?
Like that, but today with AI.
You don’t even have to think back that far. Remember ten minutes ago when every company was rushing some “revolutionary” new blockchain product to market? How are those working out today? Or how about five minutes ago when the metaverse was going to change everything? Or a half hour ago, when everyone from respected financial institutions to major video game publishers were going to do something “game changing” with NFTs? Or every day since your brother-in-law went down the crypto rabbit hole and lost his life savings but still won’t stop shouting HODL TO THE MOON every time your wife invites him over for dinner?
Another day, another hustle.
Just because a bunch of companies start shilling nonsense, it doesn’t suddenly stop being nonsense. There’s just a lot of money to be made in tech when they’re marketing something that looks cool, seems inevitable, and is generally misunderstood by nearly everyone involved. There are always plenty of Greater Fools out there, and mining the rich FOMO fields of techbro, Steve Jobs wannabes is lucrative…while it lasts.
When the dust settles and people finally come to their senses, they’ll see generative AI for what it truly is – a collection of semi-useful tools/toys for niche applications that lie a lot and are rarely very helpful outside of being a handy crutch for the creatively and ethically bankrupt. (Also, let’s not forget how incredibly useful generative AI is to scammers and fraudsters and people who want to disrupt the foundational core of democracy. And also some pervs with image generators. Probably a lot of pervs, actually. So many pervs.)
Some form of “AI” will eventually be added to every app and program and service under the sun, even if it’s something that’s always been there and especially if it’s a worse version of something we already have. (Fun fact: “Making worse versions of things we already have” is the unofficial slogan of tech billionaires everywhere.)
Generative functionality will quickly become as ubiquitous as the search box or spellcheck (although nowhere near as useful while also being biased and discriminatory and perpetuating stereotypes while promoting statistical mediocrity all at the same time). People will eventually stop caring, and a lot of folks are going to lose whatever money they had left to invest in Random AI Startup #5,437 after they fell for web3 and blockchain and crypto and NFTs and the metaverse and…
Look, just be wary of anyone selling the latest digital snake oil, whatever it is. Silicon Valley trots out some “revolutionary” new bit of tech every few years so con-artists entrepreneurs can run the startup hustle of faking it while hoping to make it just far enough to be able to pay their daddy’s investment capital back and cash out with a profit before people realize that nearly every tech startup is running the same Theranos scam and Elizabeth Holmes only got caught because she bought her own hype and stayed in the game too long.
Then again, Musk has built an empire out of scamming people and they still believe every lie he sells them, so what do I know? He’s even got his own AI now, which alone should tell you everything you need to know about the scamminess of the whole scammy scam, but invest in whatever you want, I guess. I’m not the boss of you.
But AI still doesn’t exist.
Actually.
Posted on April 17, 2022
Peter Pocking Tail
The internet might think Taylor Swift invented this Easter “egg tapping” tradition, but whatever. I was paqueing Easter eggs before I even knew what paqueing was. (Or pocking. Or pokking. Or packing. No one can seem to agree how to pronounce it, much less spell it. This will likely only be resolved by future historians.)
Anyway, I cheated.
Well, cheating is a pretty strong word. Basically, I just refused to be bound by the arbitrary rules imposed upon me by an uncaring universe. Or by a gaggle of Cajun cousins I’d never met before. Whichever.
Growing up, we didn’t do many family reunions, probably on account of how they were usually held in places that took too much gas to drive to. We didn’t have a lot of money.
But we did manage to make exactly two reunions on my Dad’s side. They were both over Easter, somewhere not in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but close enough to drive to from Beaumont, Texas without breaking our 1980-something gas budget. It was called The Ole Place, near Sugar Town. (Not to be confused with Sugar Land in Texas, which is just another word for the endless urban sprawl that is Houston.)
The first one we went to was fun, if a little awkward. I didn’t know anyone there, and any cousins my age had about as much use for the scrawny, nerdy comic book kid as the scrawny, nerdy comic book kid had for a bunch of cousins who could probably punch him into the next parish using only their pinkie fingers and a determined glare.
We had a big Easter egg hunt, followed by a round of smacking our eggs together to see whose egg cracked first. This, I would later come to find out about five minutes ago when I looked it up, was called paqueing (or one of the entries on the aforementioned list of alternate terminology). It was probably the only game they actually played with me as an equal, so I had fun. But I lost a lot.
The next year, I went prepared.
For some weird reason known only to herself, my mother had a collection of alabaster eggs she’d put out as a decoration every Easter. I snatched a few off the shelf, then boiled some of those goofy shrink-wrap bands onto them that were probably new and revolutionary in the ‘80s, but just seem cheap and kind of stupid now. (This pretty much describes a lot of the ’80s, now that I think about it.) Still, once wrapped, the alabaster eggs looked more or less like regular Easter eggs, so I figured we were good.
I was ready. When it came time for the annual smacking of the eggs, I strode onto the field of battle with a level of confidence my scrawny nerd body had never known before. Then, I found my first victim.
tap…tap
tap…tap
*smack*
*crack*
I WIN!
I mowed through rows of cousins, each one falling to the might of my mysterious, impervious eggs. I did have the good sense to bring a few spares, though. I’d switch them out every now and again to avoid too much suspicion, just so the other kids might think I’d lost once or twice.
I never did.
The field of battle was littered that day with the shells of those crushed beneath my righteous fury. My egg was fortified with years of oppressed nerd rage, and I was unstoppable!
Right up until one of the cousins stopped me.
He snatched my egg from my gloating fist when I wasn’t paying attention and shouted, “HEY! HE’S GOTS ROCK EGGS!”
The other cousins ran up and gathered around, sensing my fear like a hundred hungry vultures circling a tiny woodland creature with a promising limp.
“GET HIM!”
I ran.
They caught me.
As punishment for my crimes, I was held down and basically waterboarded with off-brand Kool-Aid. You know, that weird red punch that comes in plastic milk jugs and tastes faintly of vomit that was ubiquitous at every kid’s birthday party back in the day? Yeah. That’s the one.
Ah, memories…
Looking back, I probably bit off more than I could chew. Or maybe I just got too cocky with each new win. If I’d just quit while I was ahead, then I might have walked away un-punched and the totally rad neon shirt I was wearing that day wouldn’t have been ruined.
Then again, I also wouldn’t have yet another humiliating story from my youth that I could capitalize on later as a grown-up trying to sell you this book. (Assuming you’re reading this in a bookstore or in an online preview or sample post or whatever passes for marketing these days, anyway.)
Life is all about balance, y’all.
(If you enjoyed this excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, why not buy the book and impress all your friends with how fun you are at parties? All the cool kids are buying it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Posted on March 8, 2022
Everything You Think You Know About Writing Is Wrong — Here’s Why
Good writing — valuable writing — isn’t about craft and talent and technique. It’s not about your unique voice, your special insights, or your original thoughts. It’s not about you at all. You aren’t interesting. Your thoughts don’t matter. Mine don’t, either. Nobody cares.
That may sound harsh, but it’s the hardest truth writers need to acknowledge and understand before they’ll ever be able to write anything of value. Because writing isn’t about the writer — it’s about the reader.
It doesn’t matter what you’re writing. Write a novel all about how your life got flipped, turned upside down and people might take a minute to just sit right there but they’re not going to listen while you ramble on for days about how you became the Prince of Bel-Air if every word you write is only about yourself. Your experiences, your reflections — how things in your life have affected you only matter to you. For your writing to have any value to a reader, it has to be about how your experiences may affect them.
If you’re writing an essay, a business article, a tech primer — it doesn’t matter. The only value your writing has lies in whether or not your readers are willing to give it the time and consideration every writer so desperately wants. The problem is too many writers don’t write for readers. They write in their own self-interests, to prove themselves to the world — then they’re surprised when no one reads their work.
It’s not their fault, though. This is how we’re taught to write. Writing is as fundamental as ABCs and 123s in school, and it’s taught that way — as a means to convey mastery of a subject rather than affect readers, which is why everything you think you know about writing is wrong.
Think about it. How were you taught to write? What was the purpose behind every paper you wrote in school? Was it to add value to a concept your teacher wanted to improve her understanding of or was it to prove that you’d mastered the material? Were your research papers designed to challenge the status quo, to solve a reader’s problem, or change their minds? Or were they to show that yes, you’d read the assignments, you’d passed the tests, and here’s the proof.
Readers don’t care if you understand a subject. If you’re writing about something, they will assume you already do. No one is reading your work to be convinced of your brilliance, your wit, or your expertise — so stop trying to prove it to them.
Consider any recent article you’ve likely read. How was it structured? How did it start? What was the body like? What’d you think of its conclusion? Chances are, it was the standard five-paragraph essay you’ve been writing (and reading) since high school, even if it had a lot more paragraphs, a bunch of subheadings, and looked a little different. It was still structured in the shape of an hourglass.
It probably started with a broad generalization, maybe including some explanation with a definition or two thrown in. After that, its focus likely narrowed a bit onto a few key points where the writer put a lot of effort into proving just how much they understood the assignment before wrapping everything up with another broad generalization summarizing everything you just read, assuming you even made it to the end.
Did the article provide any real value? Can you even really remember it at all?
The probability is high that you either never finished it or forgot all about the thing as soon as you’d clicked away and moved on to whatever you read next…which was likely another five-paragraph essay in disguise.
This is because people write how they were taught to write — to prove understanding — rather than how to write anything of value to readers. It’s why your writing is bad, why a whole lot of my past writing is just gawd awful, and why most of what you read on the internet is as forgettable as whatever the last thing you read was that you can’t remember right now unless you really think about it. And even then…
So how do you fix it? As with most things, the solution is very simple. Execution, on the other hand, gets a little tricky.
Write something of value to readers. That’s it. That’s the secret.
To know what your readers will find value in, you first need to understand who you’re trying to reach. Identify your audience and write for those specific people in a way that creates something they want to read. If you’re appealing to other subject matter experts or influential professionals in a specific field, you don’t need to explain generalities or define terms. They already know what the words mean. They already know what the problems are. They’re looking to you to provide solutions or at least enhance their understanding of a problem. They don’t care about your credentials, they’re not interested in your personal observations, and they certainly have no desire to listen to you try and prove yourself in a thousand words or less.
Writing is about the reader, not the writer — and your work has to offer something of value to readers that they can’t get anywhere else but your article, your essay, your novel. Whatever it is you’re writing, if you’re just trying to communicate your ideas, you’ve already failed. Instead, identify your readers’ ideas, then write something that will either add to their understanding or change how they think altogether. Don’t be timid and don’t waste time trying to prove you understand the material — punch hard, punch up, and punch fast. Nobody has time to read oceans of text about what matters to someone else. Readers want to read about what matters to them. Not you.
State the problem, show the reader why it’s costing them something (time, money, resources — everything has a price), and provide a solution that will either minimize that cost or provide a benefit that outweighs the expense. That’s it. That’s all your writing has to do to be valuable to a reader.
Of course, getting there is harder than it looks. For a reader to even consider your writing, it must be crafted well, with proper technique backed by a talented pen. The mechanics of writing are the things worth learning in school, even if we get them mixed up with purpose by the time we graduate. But when you get it right — when you’re writing at the highest level with the understanding that your work isn’t about you, and you’re instead hyperfocused on providing something of tangible value to the reader, they’ll remember your name. They’ll look you up, search for other things you’ve written, and come to rely on your voice as a leading expert in your field.
A valuable essay challenges readers with conflict and tension, for which it also supplies relief. Make your reader feel uneasy, force them to worry about a problem they might not have considered before, and show them the cost of not solving it. Give them a reason to be concerned, then calm them down by providing a solution. Write an article that saves your readers time, money, whatever the resource is — and you’ll have written something of value.
(Yes, I know. The mechanics of fiction work a little bit differently so don’t come for me. Still, the goal is the same no matter what you’re writing — write for your readers, not yourself. Stick to that basic idea, and the rest will come naturally.)
Don’t pull your punches, don’t self-aggrandize, and take yourself out of the equation. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares about me. The only things readers care about are the words on the page and whether or not they add any value to their lives. The sooner you understand this one simple concept, the faster your writing will improve. Your articles will get more clicks, more shares, and more of that sweet, sweet recognition every writer craves — but you won’t get there by following the rules you learned in school. Those rules taught you how to write for teachers. You need to start writing for readers.
Write hard.
Write fast.
No mercy.
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