The latest way to waste modern technology is to create AI-generated cat videos and slideshows that tell stories about cats, with theme music from popular songs where all the words have been replaced with meows. This is why I subscribe to the Washington Post.
As a child, my favorite story was The Ugly Duckling. Now I want to know what an AI bot called The Ugly Kitten could do. Spoiler alert for anyone who doesn’t know how The Ugly Duckling works: What will the Ugly Kitten be at the end? Will it really be beautiful when it takes off its glasses and lets down its hair?
I’m impressed by how stupid bots can be.
As many of you long-time readers know, I have foolishly claimed to be an expert on stupidity. I call myself a first-rate stupidity researcher. This started when I was bored in graduate school and realized that people were almost without exception intellectually incapable of dealing with a pair of identical-looking doors, one of which was a pull door and the other a push door.
If a subject happened to pull the push door, they would inevitably switch doors, but at the same time switch from pulling to pushing, which never worked. And then they would give up because they didn’t see a solution. I observed this repeatedly for about two hours during a lunch break outside the main campus cafeteria. The doors were made of glass. My subjects could see that people were inside, but they still asked, “Why is the cafeteria closed?”
One of the problems I had as a stupidologist was that when I tried to illustrate the principles of the topic, I had to use people as examples, and they took offense. I can get around this a little by not mentioning names, but even so, third parties feel sorry for the unnamed subjects and think I’m mean. This isn’t as much of a problem now because AI is so similar to human intelligence that it mimics human stupidities. I can use them to illustrate.
This is why I became so addicted to the website Quora, where people can ask questions and self-proclaimed experts in various fields can answer them. Recently, Quora thought it could get more users active by letting a bot ask questions. The bot is called QPG, the Quora Prompt Generator, and the questions QPG asks experts are called prompts.
So QPG is not human and therefore I cannot hurt his feelings by identifying his stupidities. And there are many of them.
I used to say that there are no stupid questions. Given QPG’s questions, I can no longer believe that.
Current examples: “How can there be so many more people living in China than in the USA when the USA and China are the same size?” “What is the smallest positive whole number that is both even and odd?” “How fast do I have to flap my arms to be able to fly?”
This hints at a possible reveal at the end of “The Ugly Kitten.” She grows up, finds a beautiful griffin or griffin-like creature, and flies off into the sunset.
In related news: The people bringing us AI are struggling to make things so they can realistically represent humans. The recent launch of a new bot got high marks for its realistic, anatomically correct human hands. It reminds me of how anthropomorphized animals like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had to make do with fewer fingers than we do because the full-fingered hand was too cluttered to draw. Maybe now we have the technology to recreate Mickey and Donald with proper hands.
There were also problems with the proportions of the whole body. The most popular illustration was to compare the proportions of Superman and Batman with those of Prince Valiant. Or El Greco’s “Christ on the Cross”. What idea of appropriate proportions should AI machines choose? I think Prince Valiant should be the default, but the machine should have other options available as well.
Speaking of stupidity, Trump thinks we’re all buying into the idea that Kamala Harris suddenly turned black. There is a form of stupidity. Thinking that other people are as stupid as they can be. That’s a concept that goes beyond its natural application.
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