One of my favorite things to do, paraphrased:
Me (to "AI"): Recount the plot to [one of my books] and name five major characters and their roles.
AI: [Generates bad plot, correctly names only the protagonist, all other characters and their roles made up]
Me: That's wrong, you know.
AI: I know.
A lot of people don’t understand that Generative AIs will just make things up. They’re more like Mad Libs than what we used to think of when we said “AI.”
Back in the IRC days of NaNoWriMo, the guy who ran it had a chatbot program named Timmy
Timmy pulled random words or phrases from the chatters and would chat with us and also write his own 50k novels
Everything he said was utter random nonsense that would randomly make sense
TIMMY was a proto-AI
So when AI started becoming a thing, the IRC gang still remaining went to each other and conferred
"This is just Timmy, right?"
"Yeah, it's just Timmy but with more programming."
So none of us fell for the "AI is amazing!" nonsense because ALL OF US KNEW TIMMY
And Timmy was just a goofy program
AI is just a goofy program that too many people are taking seriously. It's ruining careers, it's ruining lives, it's DRAINING THE POWER GRID
Timmy eventually got shut down and "died"
We need to do the same with a lot of this AI stuff
I'm not going to claim it doesn't have its applications in science and medicine, but for creative?
It's just TIMMY
Annoying, bizarre, occasionally making a weird sense TIMMY
And Timmy did not make good art or books
They were unreadable
AI needs to stop being Timmy and go into science
