Over on Tumblr, the “very functional webbed site” which is perpetually on the verge of falling completely apart, I don’t usually do more than reblog the occasional post, sometimes with a tag or so added, occasionally with actual commentary.

One of the tags I use a lot lately? “#fuck genAI”

I recently added commentary to a post (one about the John Cena chatbot kerfuffle, if you’re curious) and thought, “You know what? I should store this on my own dingdanged website for posterity.” And so, somewhat reworked, here’s my official position on genAI garbage like ChatGPT and its ilk.

If you take literally nothing else away from this post, please understand that these chat bots cannot think. They have no actual personality, soul, or anything else. They’re a mathematical program that’s guessing what the next word to say to you should possibly be, one word at a time. It does so very, very fast, but it’s just that: Guessing the next word to say. These guesses are based on words that have been placed after the previous word in a bunch of other data (such as published novels, chat logs, fanfiction, science papers, blog posts, and so forth). It cannot reflect on what it’s said. It does not know what facts are, let alone which ones are correct. (Has every bit of fanfiction you’ve read been factually accurate? Has a blogger never written anything blatantly false?) It has no memory the way you or I think of what memory means. It has no morality. None. Zero. Nada.

This is not the Sci-Fi future promised you by books, movies, and television. This is not “AI as in computers that can think.” At all. Not one iota. It’s “AI as in Algorithmic Inanity.”

The only reason that snippets of software code are often (mostly) usable when presented in Google searches, by the way? Because workable code examples all tend to look the same, everywhere they show up. The next-word-guessing-machine has an easy time with that! It still doesn’t know that the answer is right. It cannot.

I know that we humans will pack-bond with literally any inanimate object, but please for the love of all that’s holy, do not pack-bond with the guess-the-next-word-to-say math program.