Do you ever feel like John Connor or is it just me?

It feels like lately any time there’s something that I do that involves an algorithm making a decision, the algorithm goes against me. Whether that’s posting a video (separate rant entirely!), or posting a comment, or placing an advertisement, or writing an article, the bots always seem to come up with something.

It’s never because there’s a reason. The excuse produced by the algorithm is always invalid and not applicable. But I probably used the wrong keyword, or had the wrong IP address, or exhibited “bot-like behavior” because I type so ridiculously fast (40 years of typing experience), or because my vocabulary is too large, or any of a thousand things that makes me not appear to 100% adhere to the “average, standard Human” that algorithms expect.

I am not good at bullshitting. I’m annoyingly honest, because making stuff up is EXHAUSTING and I just don’t have the patience for it. My style is to tell you what’s up, give a (hopefully concise) explanation, and get on with my day or whatever I was creating. So, the idea that a bot would flag me for “deceptive statements” or “misleading links” is doubly offensive. First, your bot is stupid. Second, that’s not something I’d even try to do.

Google/YouTube, Facebook, and every other platform: Fix your half-assed algorithms. You’re making the world a worse place with them. Stop being evil.

I expect that this problem will only get worse as the internet becomes mostly just robots lying about things. Before “AI”, this was already tough. Now it’s probably going to become impossible. It’s hard enough to get a tech support Human now. As companies hand over more and more of their business to algorithms, Human support is pretty much going to disappear.

The thought that I might be the one to defeat the AI apocalypse gives me a lot of hope for the future.

I’ve touched on this before, but it bears elaboration.

With the rise of AI, which most people call “Artificial Intelligence” but I call “Artificial Ignorance”, you are absolutely going to have problems if you are not normal, or are in the minority in any particular situation.

This is because AI systems use large databases to generate “rules” or guidelines about the world. Because they’re based on math and averages, there will always be a margin of error.

Let’s go with some fake statistics that I made up for the sake of this post.

• 88% of people in Michigan like vanilla ice cream.
• 91% of people in Michigan follow professional hockey.
• 78% of people in Michigan own a pair of skis.

Well, if you don’t like vanilla ice cream, don’t follow hockey, and don’t own skis, it might be pretty safe to assume you’re not from Michigan. After all, only 0.2% of people in Michigan fail to meet one of these criteria, so it’s safe to assume everyone else is a faker.

When these 80/20-rule-type things start making decisions about your life, you are absolutely going to run into problems. Why?

• Nobody is completely, entirely, 100% normal. Everyone is unique in their own little way. You will inevitably be in a situation where you don’t match the math that the computer has decided is correct.
• As Google has shown, companies can get away with having almost exactly zero support for their products, so there will probably not be a Human you can talk to to solve your problem.
• If there ARE Humans available for support, they probably won’t have the power to fix your problem, or will be overwhelmed with the 20,000 other people (0.2% of the population of Michigan) who have been miscategorized and need to have their issues fixed.

The AI apocalypse will not be robots shooting Humans. It will be dumb computers denying us food and housing because we don’t match their badly-calculated templates.

With the growth of artificial intelligence, you’re going to have to get a lot weirder.

AI systems like GPT-3, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and others are trained on gigantic collections of data. They analyze this data and find things that are in common, and use them to synthesize “new” things based on the rules and styles they’ve learned.

Essentially, AI art, writing, and music manages to plagiarize thousands of works simultaneously.

What this means, is that generally things produced by AI are more “average” and a lot closer to the middle ground. “Interesting” and “weird” will gradually be eroded and replaced with things that are more and more average over time. Nuance will be replaced by uniformity and commonality.

Your only hope is to always be weirder, more interesting, and more original than the robots.