AI is always wrong. You have to find out why.

Picture of a supercomputer.
A very wrong AI image of a very wrong AI supercomputer. Always wrong.

If you are willing to accept its answers, then you are using it wrong.

How can something that gives me the wrong answer help with programming? Each answer is progress if you can determine how it is wrong.

If you are using it to write, then you are using it wrong because it has nothing interesting or important to say. That stuff has to come from you!

The AI is actually useful as a spelling and grammar checker. You can say, "Check the verb tense agreement of this paragraph" and then proceed to ignore what it says. That is how to use AI correctly!

For an example of AI generated writing, check out my fake movie reviews on this blog, or check out anyone else's entire blog. The movie reviews are supposed to be bad on purpose because they are an imitation of marketing drivel. This is a use case where the AI excels. I had to do so much editing, writing and steering that the final product contains human authorship sufficient to support a copyright claim (for real, see: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf), but dumb-ass phrasing like "Trapped in a web of deceit and facing powerful forces determined to silence them" is all AI and I confess that I couldn't have come up with something so idiotic. Well, I hope you enjoy the movie reviews. I had fun making them.

Some musings on AI ...

The first time I saw one of the new generation of AI images was in 2017. There was a series of images I had seen on a webforum, something wasn't right about them, I knew that they were fake and computer generated, but I didn't know how, but by 2019 stylegan was public and the site https://this-person-does-not-exist.com was up and there was no more mystery. Google had a series of images that were generated by the neural net program "DeepDream" earlier, in 2015, but those were psychedelic and were not fooling anyone. The images that I saw were much more realistic. The high-end consumer model GPUs of the time were capable of generating the images (Nvidia Titan X, GTX 1080 Ti). Who knows how long the stuff was secret.

I recently got an AI music generator running on my computer and I have realized that AI generated music has also been around for a similar amount of time. There is something distinctive about the noise and harmonics of AI music. It is a little bit like all of the sounds have been run through a vocoder or autotune while being chopped up into tiny slivers. It makes everything sound like a harmonica with strange timing glitches. I have suspected that a lot of the techno music that is available on YouTube is AI generated. There is so much of it and it gets made so quickly. We will have infinite dubstep soon!

There was a  (fake) computer science paper generator called SciGen. It wasn't AI, it was more like MadLibs. It was super funny to me at the time (2005). I asked ChatGPT to "write a computer science research paper in the style of SciGen." and it did! It made a fake paper about quantum computing (which is also fake). So funny.

So, uh, yeah, whatever.