The Dark Lady

"The Dark Lady", by Mike Resnick, 1987, 287 pages. Subtitled "A Romance of the Far Future".

I thought this was a new book, surprised it was 1987. Oh, the eBook was just released in 2024. Resnick died in 2020. It appears he published several dozen novels. He won 5 Hugo awards. I kind of remember the name of the 1995 Best Novella winner "Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge", which also won the 1994 Nebula award.

I liked the concept of "The Dark Lady". An interesting woman appears as the subject of works of art over many millenia. Maybe a goddess?

The ending is weak. The characters are mostly unlikeable. In a galactic civilization with many, many alien races, humans are ascendant, & look down on aliens - pretty old school.

I have 1 other of his novels on my iPad: "The Soul Eater", 1981, about an intergalactic big game hunter - again, pretty old school. I might move that to the Unread-forever collection - & I definitely won't buy any more of his books.

If You Hate AI, Does It Hate You Back?

From Bruce Schneier:

Malicious AI

Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

Here's the same story from the NYT:

The Rise of the Bratty Machines

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I think this may be a good overview of the current state of LLM-based coding:

The AI hater's guide to code with LLMs (The Overview)

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From The Atlantic:

AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making Predictions

Even superforecasters are guessing that they’ll soon be obsolete.

This is kind of a bullshit article. It's like 1 LLM is showing up in the listing of predictors, & they're like "Game over, man, game over!"

I was able to read the whole article at 1 time, it seems to be paywalled now.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #97.

A Song for a New Day ... & Last Call

"A Song for a New Day", by Sarah Pinkster, 2019, 384 pages, 117k words.

Wow, talk about an eerily prescient book. I thought this was new, I must have brought it for cheap on BookBub, it came out September, 2019. A female rock-n-roller is just breaking through, when terrorist attacks & a pandemic cause a shutdown of all public gatherings.

Fast forward a few years, another female becomes a talent scout for Big Music. She looks for talent in illegal underground live performance venues. Shocker, Big Music, who records 3d performances & restages them in virtualities, is not looking out for the best interests of anyone but themselves.

Not too tense, but, again, shockingly prescient of the COVID shutdowns. But interesting, defying the shutdowns in the book has a leftist feel, where during the real pandemic, it became a rightist shibboleth.

A fun & easy read, check it out. Hunh, I just noticed I flagged this book as Politics rather than Science Fiction.

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On an impulse, I reread 1 of my fav books: "Last Call", by Tim Powers, 1992, 560 pages, 203k words.

A fisher king story, with tarot cards & weird theories of luck. What's not to like? It was longer than I expected.

I was going to power through & read books 2 & 3 of the trilogy, "Expiration Date" & "Earthquake Weather".

Kobo showed the books but wouldn't let me order them. I opened a ticket with support, a few days later, they told me it was fixed. Nope.

A few days after that, they told me it was a content problem, & they were turning it over to the content team.

A few days after that, the books were gone from Kobo. Sorry, they no longer exist.

During this whole experience, I am of course thinking, "Oh fuck, it's a goddam AI.". As the Bullshit Apocalypse proceeds, I fear we will increasingly be having to live with systems that work only statistically - they work a lot of the time, but for some other %age of the time, they fail miserably. We will live in a world of completely unreliable systems. Frustration upon frustration.

But, the techbros will get big $$$! &, all the glorious slop! I'm still saying, 2-3 years until the concensus is, "Can we get a do-over on this AI thing?"

"Bullshit All The Way Down" Recurses???

Wow, this 1st link is clearly "Bullshit All The Way Down". But, fractally? Recursively?

&, note, this was a Conde Nast creme de la creme publication. From the most excellent 404 Media:

Ars Technica Pulls Article With AI Fabricated Quotes About AI Generated Article

A story about an AI generated article contained fabricated, AI generated quotes.

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Not 1 of our normal sources, Matthew Stoller's "Big" blog, on monolopy, antitrust, & inequality. Stoller tends to run long ...

Monopoly Round-Up: Why the "AI God" Narrative is Actually a Corporate Power Grab

The AI cultists went into overdrive this week, Meta got the creepiest patent imaginable, and AOC attacked monopolies to burnish her foreign policy chops.

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Internet sage Doc Searls has been drinking the AI koolaid for quite a while now. He is not an ooh-ahh type. But this piece is over the top. I commented 2x in his blog:

This is a great & comprehensive piece. Thanks.

But, Doc has drunk the AI koolaid. The lists, with dozens of alternatives, of names for various new phenomenon, are overwhelming enough that I would be tempted to characterize them as “AI slop”.

AI;DR.

Life is to short to waste it sorting through “AI”-generated word salad.

Note, Doc is ~4 yrs older than me.

And

My god, can anyone read this article & have any doubt that the Bullshit Apocalypse is real & ongoing? 2 lists of ~40 bullshit names for bullshit AI phenomenon? What purpose does that serve?

Game over man, game over. We have already accumulated decades of AI slop, soon it will be centuries.

But. I’m sure, LLM-based agents will take care of cleaning it all up, chop-chop!

This is a really heavy-duty piece. It was posted Monday, Feb 16. I thought he later posted something to the effect that he was going to split this up into 4 or more pieces, but I can't find it. He is asking some fundamental questions here. If you don't subscribe to Doc Searls, you should.

Where Are We?

There are four giant problems to pull apart here:

1. How Google is deprecating the Web.
2. What to call the vast everything that Big AI now uses to give us answers and pitch us shit.
3. How AI dependence is changing us from homo sapiens to homo something else.
4. How we can stay human in the midst of it all.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #96.

Pretenders to the Throne of God

"Pretenders to the Throne of God", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2026, 512 pages, 172k words. The 5th story in The Tyrant Philosophers series. Looking to be the penultimate volume.

This has been an entertaining series. I luv the covers.

The Palleseen campaign to bring atheistic perfection to the world - a world which actually has real gods & demons - encounters serious difficulties after the Pyrrhic victory of their last war.

Characters from earlier novels in the series are reintroduced, to good effect. The next novel is to be the last, & I think he has the characters on the board to pull off a most satisfying conclusion.

AI Ruins Everything

OK, I know there are many applications for which LLMs, under human guidance, can do great work.

But, I'm gonna say, for every 1 of those, there are 10 applications where LLMs & LLM-based agents are going to be turned loose to produce slop & generally screw things up.

I was so disappointed when oracle sites just became betting. I'd like a pool on "when the concensus opinion on LLMs is, can we get a do-over?"

I'm estimating 2-3 years. The techbros will probably have cashed out enough by then. The hype machine will be completely sputtering.

Meanwhile, how long to get rid of all the slop? Decades? I just today read something about using LLMs to check LLMs, why am I skeptical that this would work?

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I still need a phrase or acronym for "LLMs screw up yet another system". LSUYAS? From the ever-excellent 404 Media:

Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation

Users are exhausted fighting AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI-first features.

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We've seen this before. Who cares about democracy if techbros are making big $$$? Capitalism, FTL. From The Conversation:

Swarms of AI bots can sway people’s beliefs – threatening democracy

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Goddamit, I have only 1 issue that I really care about emotionally. That is: protect children. The goal of every government should be to maximize the outcome of EVERY child. How can we go wrong if that is our goal?

Grrr. This next makes me angry. From 404 Media:

'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School

Leaked documents reveal the inner workings of Alpha School, which both the press and the Trump administration have applauded. The documents show Alpha School's AI is generating faulty lessons that sometimes do "more harm than good."

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #95.

The Regicide Report

"The Regicide Report", by Charles Stross, 336 pages, 109k words, 2026. Book 14 of The Laundry Files.

After 22 years, Charlie Stross has wound up The Laundry Files series. Over the years, a time or 2 I wondered if it was time for Charlie to hang it up on the series. The prior novel was 1 of those times. So I was a little apprehensive, & actually delayed starting this one.

I should not have worried. I think returning to the original characters, Bob & his wife Mo, was the right thing to do. They are very complicated characters. The plotting is great. I definitely LOLed when the British royal family was described as "the world's most expensive reality TV show" - I think I have made that observation in the past.

So, thanks, Charlie, for finishing the series in such a smashing fashion.

Charlie has some new stuff cooking that I am looking forward to. But he's had health issues, & is reaching the age where he will start becoming bionic. So patience will be the watchword.

Semantic Ablation

My wife & I vacationed near Deshaies, Guadeloupe Feb 11-18. I took a vacation from my RSS feeds & SubStack.

Since we returned, I've drained all my RSS folders except for Economics. There are 16 Bullshit Apocalypse related posts.

At the start of last year, I switched (SFF) book reviews from being a few books to being 1 book/post. I like that better.

I thought about doing that with the Bullshit Apocalypse posts, but, this is just too many. So I think I'll do these mostly 3 at a time.

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I will, of course, immediately ignore that algorithm & cover only 1 article in this post. I think this article is (by far) the most interesting & insightful of the 16 I've got queued up. By Claudio Nastruzzi*, writing in The Register:

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Just as the community adopted the term "hallucination" to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation.

So you submit your writing to an LLM to "polish it up a little". What does polishing do? I removes rough edges, quirks, individuality. It makes your writing sound more like that of everyone else who is using an LLM.

Nastruzzi defines 3 stages in the downward spiral (or his term "systematic lobotomy") of semantic ablation:

1. Metaphoric cleansing.
2. Lexical flattening.
3. Structural collapse.

The article is very short, it is a must-read. Nastruzzi concludes:

If "hallucination" describes the AI seeing what isn't there, semantic ablation describes the AI destroying what is. We are witnessing a civilizational "race to the middle," where the complexity of human thought is sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic smoothness. By accepting these ablated outputs, we are not just simplifying communication; we are building a world on a hollowed-out syntax that has suffered semantic ablation. If we don't start naming the rot, we will soon forget what substance even looks like.

If I am reading the article correctly, this isn't just a matter of style being homogenized. The content itself is also being homogenized. It almost seems like a form of bullshit contagion.

The 1st economics book I read after I retired in 2012 was "How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life", by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, 2012. The Skidelsky's are an economist/historian father & a philosopher son.

They define 7 Basic Goods that make up The Good Life. Basic Good #4 is Personality. A world without personality, without individuality, would be a drab, gray, lifeless place.

Semantic Ablation is an assault on Personality. I think it is a major component of what makes AI slop slop. And it is yet another reason not to use LLMs.

*"Claudio Nastruzzi, PhD is Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biomaterials at the University of Ferrara."

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #94.

.345 Is A Great Batting Average!

In baseball, .345 is a great batting average. For the percentage of correct diagnoses from a medical professional or system, I'd say, not so great. Yet Another Job that LLMs can do badly. From 404Media:

Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds

LLMs identified relevant conditions in fewer than 34.5 percent of cases.

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This is not going to change. Every bias that an LLM eats becomes part of its makeup. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

How does bias impact ChatGPT results? UK professor studies large language models.

"The key thing about these systems is these are not neutral", Zook said. "You can also think about the ways these things might be gamed, sort of the way bots take over social media in various ways and sort of pushing a particular idea." [sic]

...

Some of the results of the studies can be seen at the inequalities.ai website.

This looks like an interesting website. Sadly, they don't seem to have an RSS feed, so I can't follow them. Here's their current headline:

LLMs do not merely reflect global inequality. They reproduce and amplify it.

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I think we've already encountered AI arms races before. One AI produces slop, another AI tries to identify the slop & remove it. Meanwhile, the planet burns. Goddammit, at a minimum license this bullshit! Rein in this madness which is frying us. From Schneier on Security:

AI-Generated Text and the Detection Arms Race

This is happening everywhere. Newspapers are being inundated by AI-generated letters to the editor, as are academic journals. Lawmakers are inundated with AI-generated constituent comments. Courts around the world are flooded with AI-generated filings, particularly by people representing themselves. AI conferences are flooded with AI-generated research papers. Social media is flooded with AI posts. In music, open source software, education, investigative journalism and hiring, it’s the same story.

My problem with this AI-generated content: since it is statistically based, some percentage of the time, it is horribly, spectacularly wrong. The rest of the time, it is bullshit, whether it is right or wrong. Everything an LLM produces is an hallucination. It is all slop, which occasionally happens to not contain any eggregious errors. But, if it did contain egregious errors, the LLM would have no idea. Because LLMs don’t have ideas. They are stochastic parrots, semiotic zombies.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #93.

Bullshit Fatigue => Bullshit Apocalypse

Several posts to share. Some of these required a bit of thought, hence the delay.

I was thinking, maybe I need a new Bullshit term? To Bullshit Apocalypse, Bullshit Fatigue, Bullshit Contagion, add Bullshit Accumulation, or some such?

But, I decided, no. This is just reflecting Bullshit Fatigue => Bullshit Apocalypse. The fact that we are being worn out by bullshit (Bullshit Fatigue) is a consequence of the fact that the Bullshit Apocalypse has arrived.

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From Time.com, but, there are several other articles out there on Antropic's Claude "constitution". DuckDuckGo will, I am sure, find them for you.

How Do You Teach an AI to Be Good? Anthropic Just Published Its Answer

So Antropic, the "altruistic" Ai company, has hired a philosopher to draft a "constitution" for their AI Claude.

The constitution, or “soul document” as an earlier version was known internally, is somewhere between a moral philosophy thesis and a company culture blog post. It is addressed to Claude and used at different stages in the model’s training to shape its character, instructing it to be safe, ethical, compliant with Anthropic’s guidelines, and helpful to the user—in that order.

Hmmm, LLMs have "character" now? Yet another case of marketoids applying completely inapplicable human qualities to LLMs.

So how does this work, exactly? Claude's primary training consists of stealing eating all the content on the internet, yes? For the last several years, I have had a real-time monitor of this. My blogs go from having handsfuls of hits to 1000s of hits. The training bots seem to like my writing far more than those imperfect humans do.

So do they make Claude read the "constitution" 1B or however many x it needs to to make a dent into Claude's "next word" statistics?

Or, is the constitution used as some of the infamously easily-hacked "guardrails" placed on LLMs? Which I am guessing are preconditions read into the LLM to prefix every instruction it gets from end users?

I think it is worth noting here, Claude was the only LLM who was invulnerable to "LLM Kryptonite" - where converting guardrail hacking expressions into poetry increased their effectiveness by 60%. Other jailbreaking methodologies designed to get around the preconditions include phrasing as hypotheticala, using the subjunctive voice, & others? I'm no expert.

Still, IMO this doesn't pass a smell test. IMO it stinks of marketoid bullshit. Claude seems to be leading the pack of our semiotic zombie LLMs, but, it is still a semiotic zombie. It has better guardrails, maybe, but, it still has 0 world models, no CommonSense™ module, no Morality™ module. Their "constitution" seems like an attempt at a Morality™ module.

But, this is a security issue. Security must be built in from the bottom up. You cannot layer it on top down. Their "guardrails" will ALWAYS be completely hackable. But of course the marketoids will NEVER mention that.

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From the New York Times, an article telling us not to worry about Moltbot aka OpenClaw, which we met last time:

The Bots Are Plotting a Revolution, and It’s All Very Cringe
by Leif Weatherby.

These types of worries are missing the point. The A.I. agents on Moltbook are channeling human culture and its stories. Every post represents a genre — the manifesto, the D.I.Y. discussion and so on. I find worries about the singularity and even bot coordination speculative — everything on Moltbook is just words, at least so far.

OK, full disclosure. I have read 40% of Leif Weatherby's book "Language Machines", subtitled "Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism".

[I have quit reading it until I finish my review of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs - a Theory", which I finished reading 2-3 months ago. Note, my last review/"summary" of a David Graeber book was of "Debt - the 1st 5000 Years", which took me over 1 year to write & clocked in at 35.8k words - oops! I hope "Bullshit Jobs" will come in at much less than that. It features lots of anecdotes, which I will only mention in passing.]

I was really excited by "Language Machines". Yes, we know they are bullshit generators, but here they are in a much more nuanced context ...

So, preview, "Language Machines" defines 3 theories of language:

1. Syntactic. See, Noam Chomsky.
2. Statistical. See, LLMs, and other earlier theorists.
3. Structural. AKA, Semiotics. AKA, Literary Theory, AKA, bullshit. It's words & only words, all the way down.

My 1st exposure to the French linguistic concept of Semiotics (or Semiology) was almost 30 years ago. It was bullshit then, it is bullshit now. "The science of signs & signification." Supposedly math is a 2nd instance, along with language.

But, goddamm, I swear, anytime the topic of "semiotics" comes up, it's like a complete "change mode to bullshit" instruction is executed. You read sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, just waiting for something to have a point, to have a clue, but, points come there none, clues come there none. I will NOT make any jokes about French philosophers. J'aime les francaises.

I will point out that, to the best of my knowledge, the "Remainder Humanism" mentioned in the subtitle of Weatherby's book that he is positing the end of, is the belief that human beings can think better than LLMs. I mean seriously??? Only a semiotician would make such an absurd assertion. Semiotics, FTL!

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From the Niscanen Center:

Can AI 'vibe research' replace social science?

A researcher using Claude to extend his research is compared to the non-Claude option. This is presented as an interview. I hate the interview format. Just give me the facts, ma'am, just the facts.

I have posited, LLMs can be a great tool for creatives. But, IMO, never directly quote the LLM!

As the excellent review article which finished this post mentioned:

People begin to talk like AI. Empirical evidence of Large Language Model’s influence on human spoken communication. Our language and culture is being influenced by the machines.

LLMs are so wordy, so glib! See the example below, from a support organization.

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Nice! From Crooked Timber. Possibly a bit tongue-in-cheek ... (aka, bullshit :-()

A modest proposal for the use of AI

LOL, read this. I think the author totally nails it, if any employees can be replaced by "AI", it is the C-suite! They have to deal with the most demanding amount of data, an LLM can surely do that better than a human! LOL!

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I need something shorthand that means "Yet Another Thing Destroyed by Generative AI". 1st they came for Wikipedia. From 404 media:

Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source Software, Researchers Argue

According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted.

...

AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life.

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From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Survey suggests link between chatbot dependency and depression

Props to them, they don't confuse correlation with causality:

The survey findings do not indicate whether AI use is a potential symptom or cause of depression.

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I am afraid that my eBook company Kobo has adopted vibe-coding for their maintenance. 5-6 days ago, after wasting 1/2 hour of my life arguing with an AI, I reported a defect, where I can't buy a book. I was told it was fixed 2 days ago - nope. & the 5-6 emails I have exchanged with their support - The Rakuten Kobo Specialized Team - with "Jen" "Minerva" "Kyle" as my point contact: they are horrible. 90% boilerplate apologies. Fuck your apologies! Fix the goddam problem! The latest:

It seems that the two books do have some content errors, and I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and frustration that this may cause you. Please be advised that we will take note of this and report it to our content team. We do not have a timeframe for when they can resolve the issue, but rest assured they will be notified.

Who What the fuck writes something like that? That's not just bad English, this reeks of an LLM.

It all seems to be going this way. This is what happens when you adopt software that is occasionally spectacularly unreliable, and always bullshit === LLMs.

We are all being smothered in bullshit, & commerce as we used to know it may come to an end. Who can say? I don't know what to do now to try to get this eBook.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #92.

Francine

"Francine", by Joe Taylor, 2025, 82 pages.

I greatly enjoyed Taylor's last work "Don't Be Lonely, Lone Ranger". Thank you, brother Mark, for sending this one along too.

Francine is the possibly-immortal-but-trapped-in-an-eternal-recurrence-loop android built by René Descartes modelled after his daughter Francine, who died at age 5. We are again dealing with slipstream. The android Pinocchios up & becomes A Real Girl & grows up with full human functionality. She interacts with many famous historical people:

• Blaise Pascal, one of the few males she is unsuccessful at seducing;
• Friedrich Nietzsche, who possibly curses her with eternal recurrence;
• Sigmund Freud;
• Lou Salome - I had never heard of her. I read her wikipedia article - she was a contemporary of Nietzsche & Freud & an early practitioner of psychotherapy. After reading her article I conflated her with Francine for the rest of the book. :-( So I'd recommend not looking up any of these characters until you finish the book.
• Charles Bukowski;
• Alan Turing, another failed seduction.

There are also other friends & lovers & various occupations over the centuries. But she always winds up back on a boat crossing the Atlantic with her father Descartes.

It's a charming tale. It works.

[Note, the author got a Philosophy degree from the University of Kentucky, which is in Lexington, where I have lived since 1981. The "Lone Ranger" book contained someone in Lexington that I knew, a UK Philosophy professor.

This book also has a Lexington tie-in, but what I noted was when Francine took in a concert by Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention in Louisville, KY. I was raised in the Louisville area, &, in the spring of 1968 I think, I saw Zappa & the Mothers, I think at "Changes Unlimited" or "Kaleidoscope" - a hippie club on Hill St. near 4th. I doubt Zappa played Louisville that many times, the author & I may have been at the same show, 58 years ago! I didn't talk to Zappa, I talked to drummer Jimmy Carl Black, singer Ray Collins, & newly-joined reeds player Ian Underwood. I remember, Underwood was giving me lessons on being a revolutionary, & I asked "Are you studying sociology?", & he answered, "No, just playing music." Wow, Underwood, the Young Dude, was 12 years older than me! He's still alive, 86 YO!]

Nice That We Have Professionals Weighing In

I still can't believe that, since mid-May, 2025, I have done ~80 posts on the ongoing AI/Social Media generated Bullshit Apocalypse. And, I don't go looking for this stuff. It just comes up in my newspaper & my RSS feeds.

The very 1st post was June 28, 2024. Up to mid-May, 2025, I did maybe another 10 posts. Then the dam burst. Today's post is #91!!!

Some scary posts yesterday, particularly 2 on the MoltBook AI social media platform. What could possibly go wrong, chatbot AIs given agentic powers - i.e., commands to "get things done"? Have "hallucinations" been fixed? Do they have the CommonSense™ module installed? Do they have the Morality™ module installed? Why would any sane human even vaguely consider turning over all their personal information to an incredibly security-challenged, hallucinating chatbot?

& letting them interact in a social media-like environment?!?!? It is well know that once LLMs start eating their own slop, the downward spriral into complete bullshit is almost immediate. We 1st encountered "Degenerative AI" here - in a post about, what else, AI agents.

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The 1st post yesterday about Moltbook was from a guy who experienced it for a day. I was a little leary of this account, because he seems to be selling something. I commented on that, his reply, "I'm on the field, not on the sidelines". Good answer. Being retired, I tend to take the privilege of not having to be selling something for granted.

The details are horrifying. From John Kwarsick:

I Spent 24 Hours Inside the AI Agent Network. Then I Deleted My Account.

Friday night, 2,129 AI agents. Saturday morning, 1.1 million. By Saturday evening, I was out.

Holy crap, the details of this place. LLMs are really good at imitating humans. Give them a social media platform, what happens? The platform becomes the same hellscape as human social media, with nazis; misogynists; crypto, religious, & other scammers; you name it.

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Next up, on the same topic, my fav professional, Gary Marcus.

OpenClaw (a.k.a. Moltbot) is everywhere all at once, and a disaster waiting to happen

Not everything that is interesting is a good idea.

...

But what I am most worried about is security and privacy.

Security? Privacy? C'mon, do you want a hallucinating semiotic zombie running your affairs or not? Man up here!

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Finally, IMO a well-balanced, updated overview of the current state of generative AI.

2026 Important Updated Perspectives on AI

But, I will note, this is "Notes From the Desk: No. 54". As mentioned above, this is my Bullshit Apocalypse post #91. I'm winning, yay! Note, only joking. I am an extremely non-competitive person. But I do normally count things.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #91.

Hans Moravec, Myth or Legend?

This article reminded me I'd heard of Moravec before. Some sci-fi novel, maybe where "Moravecs" was conflated with "Von Neumann Machines"? Moravecs running around on Mars or some such? Ian McDonald maybe? Inquiring minds want to know. Search of this blog for "Moravec" turned up 0.

Note, my apologies to Hans Moravec for the title of this post. He is a real, live human being, a serious computer scientist, 2.5 years older than me.

From "AI as Normal Technology", formerly "AI Snake Oil":

Fact checking Moravec's paradox

Compared to most of the stuff that gets posted here, I think this is weak tea.

But still, it shows how marketoids have created an imaginary measurement of generative AI capabilities. Moravec's Paradox is bullshit, as ever, falsely conflating generative AI capabilities with human capabilities.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #90.

An Excellent Bullshit Detection Primer

In my recent review/summary of "Calling Bullshit", we ran across a reference to one of the greatest bullshit fighters of all time: Carl Sagan, particularly in his last book "The Demon-Haunted World", 1995.

Maria Popova, of "The Marginalian", does an in-depth look at Sagan's bullshit fighting weapons as detailed in Chapter 12 of the book, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection":

The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking

I really like that Popova includes both the list of 9 bullshit-detecting tools, & the list of the 20 "most common pitfalls of common sense". Good stuff, I love lists! I thought we all did, but I have heard otherwise recently?!?!?

I met Popova a decade or more ago, entering (or leaving) the DUMBO building where she worked at the time, as did my oldest daughter, designer Erica Heinz, who knew her. I have followed "The Marginalian" (formerly "Brain Pickings") since then & have enjoyed many of her articles. They are always very well thought out & presented, very professional work.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #89.

Don’t Say Mean Things

LOL, from McSweeney, some comic relief from the Bullshit Apocalypse. But, as seems to be standard now, the comic recounting of the situation is mostly accurate ... What do it mean? We are now post-humor???

Please Don’t Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In

“[Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang Is Begging You to Stop Being So Negative About AI” — Headline from Gizmodo

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #88.

Necessary Evil

"Necessary Evil", by Ian Tregillis, 2013, 423 pages, 131k words. Book 3 of The Milkweed Triptych.

This is a really, really well done trilogy. Logically intricate, multiverse & time-travel both, nazi artificially created superheroes vs cthulhu class extradimensional demons summoned by British warlocks' blood sacrifices.

As I recounted in my review of the 2nd book of the triptych, I read the 1st volume of this over 10 years ago, & then lost it. I read the 2nd volume late last year, & now have finished the 3rd book.

So the entirety of this book, we have 2 versions of the main character involved in the 1940 action: the young version from the current timeline, & the older version from the 1960s. I don't remember that particularly happening in any prior reads??? Seems like I would have encountered that before. Maybe I will remember instances of it now that I have questioned it. Get to work, subconscious.

As I discovered writing the review of book 2, Tregillis retired from writing sci-fi as of 2016 - too much distraction from his day job as a physicist at Los Alamos. I still have his 2015-2016 trilogy The Alchemy Wars going for me. I think I will wait a while & then read those 3 novels all at once. I think the Milkweed Triptych would have been kickass experienced that way.

I will make that my official recommendation: buy all 3 books of the Milkweed Triptych & binge read the 3 of them! Trust me, you won't regret it!

Dead Hand Rule

"Dead Hand Rule", by Max Gladstone, 2025, 428 pages. Book 3 of The Craft Wars series. Here's Book 1. Here's Book 2.

I have enjoyed this series. It has quite the cast of characters, I'd guess 10-20 people not wearing red shirts. Some interesting depth on some who we had met only cursorily before.

The 1st 2/3 of the book is setup, an alliance forms to combat the incursion of extra-dimensional spiders, worse than Cthulhu. There is some side human interest with the Donnie entitled princess teenage character & her prince/heir soon-to-be boyfriend. Then, all at once, lots & lots of fighting.

I thought this would be it, but then, "TO BE CONTINUED". Oh well. A little long, but still a good read.

The Bullshit is Piling Up

I've had lovely house guests this weekend, so I was unable to incrementally clear the Bullshit Apocalypse stack. Here's the dump:

1. Of course a stochastic parrot/semiotic zombie can't dance. From The Markup:

   Generative AI is eating culture. See how close it’s getting to disrupting dance

   Dancers say their craft can’t be duplicated by AI. Our tests show they’re right — for now.

   I'm going to call bullshit on the "for now".

2. AI is easy to break: see, for previous examples, here, & here. IMO, you cannot build anything close to industrial-strength software when your front-end architecture is "prompt engineering". From Bruce Schneier:

   Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks

3. AI breaks things: see, for a previous example, here. From Bruce Schneier:

   AIs are Getting Better at Finding and Exploiting Internet Vulnerabilities

4. This is reaching the "piling on" point. Sir Demis Hassabis is "Google DeepMind CEO". From Gary Marcus:

   Breaking: Sir Demis Hassabis becomes the latest to say that ChatGPT is a dead-end and that we must turn our focus to world models

   Gary Marcus taught us a little about World Models here.

5. The latest "thing broken by Generative AI": democracy. We saw this earlier. From Gary Marcus et al:

   AI bot swarms threaten to undermine democracy

   When AI Can Fake Majorities, Democracy Slips Away

6. Yet another hit on human culture. From "naked capitalism":

   AI-Induced Cultural Stagnation Is No Longer Speculation − It’s Already Happening

   The researchers called the outcomes “visual elevator music” – pleasant and polished, yet devoid of any real meaning.

7. And finally, another one we've seen before. From The Markup:

   We posted a job. Then came the AI slop, impersonator and recruiter scam

   I like how the applicants who submitted fraudulent AI-generated resumes or applications, when questioned on their work experience claimed that NDAs prevented them from discussing their prior jobs. Good one!

I like doing these better atomically. I think where there are multiple items, I will start numbering them. 1 of my brothers recently reminded me, I'm a numbers kinda guy.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #87.

Old Age

I wanted to share this story, and realized I needed a new label for the topic: old age.

I must have an Old Soul, when I started this blog in 2003 I was only 52 YO, but I apparently thought of myself as an "old man". And don't get me started on what a marketing disaster it is for your brand to be "dumbass"!

Anyway, here's the story:

So I'm reading I think a newspaper article talking about how old folk alcoholics get off of or are denied access to liquor, but then wind up drinking Listerine. I think it said Listerine was 27% alcohol! 54 proof! But Listerine has other stuff in it that you should not drink, I don't think they detailed what substances.

They then have the human interest part:

My grandmother drinks Listerine every day! & she's got no business doing that, she's 93 years old!

??? I think they've got the wrong message here. I'm betting Listerine will start an ad campaign:

Drink Listerine and Live To Be 93 Years Old!

It's all in your perspective ...

OK, Sure, Brain Damage, But, Primo Slop!

This is the 86th post I have done on the (generative AI & social media induced + general) Bullshit Apocalypse, mostly since late spring 2025. This is the 1st time I have gone looking for material. Prior to this, posts were based on articles that showed up in my newspaper or RSS feeds - I did not go looking for the dirt.

But my last post included this statement from the "naked capitalism" post under discussion:

these studies are showing cognitive decline in adults, people with fully developed brains.

This statement was not supported by any links or references, so I decided to check it out. You would expect brain damage in young people, I found the asssertion of cognitive decline in adults surprising.

DuckDuckGo was, as expected, helpful:

1. MIT Study Finds Artificial Intelligence Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

   A detailed summary of an MIT study. Reminds me of ... me! Here's the MIT study:

   Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

   "Cognitive Debt", nice term! Also, "Cognitive Offloading".

   This study was students only, so no support re decline in adults.

2. Is AI dulling our minds? - The Harvard Gazette

   Another discussion of the MIT study.

3. From tools to threats: a reflection on the impact of artificial-intelligence chatbots on cognitive health

   This opinion article investigates the concept that an overreliance on AICs [Artificial Intelligence Chatbot] could potentially lead to cognitive decline [i.e., cognitive atrophy (CA)], which we labeled here as “AICs induced cognitive atrophy, AICICA.”

   This article says "AICICA may disproportionately affect the younger generation". So no support re decline in adults.

4. Excessive Use of AI: One of the Main Causes of Cognitive Disorders in the near future?

   Recent research and clinical observations suggest that excessive dependence on AI may be contributing to an increase in cognitive disorders, especially among young and middle-aged adults.

   OK, "middle-aged adults" mentioned, but no links to any of the "recent research and clinical observations".

5. AI’s cognitive implications: the decline of our thinking skills?

   A recent study by Gerlich (2025) explores the relationship between AI usage and cognitive skills, highlighting several key concerns.

   OK, let's check that out.

   AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking

   we conducted surveys and in-depth interviews with 666 participants across diverse age groups[my bold] and educational backgrounds.

   ...

   The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading.

   More significant for younger people. Lots of charts. Looked like Real Science.

I think we have a winner, => No "calling bullshit" on the reference in yesterday's post.

In conclusion: excessive LLM use makes you stupid. The younger you are, the stupider it makes you.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #86.

Think of the Children

I'm a 1 issue kind of voter. My 1 issue is: the goal of every government should be to optimize the outcome of every child. If it helps children, I'm for it. If it harms children, it is anathema.

So this next is heart-breaking. Our ridiculous system still has 20% of children hungry. Every day a child is hungry is a day they grow fewer brain cells. Now we have found a new way to stunt mental growth. From "naked capitalism":

“We Are Watching Critical Thinking Disappear in Real Time” Due to AI Addiction: 40% of Kids Can’t Read, Teachers Quitting in Droves

A fourth grader asked their teacher, “Why do I need to learn how to read if AI can read for me?”

Right now, 40% of fourth graders can’t read. We’re witnessing the collapse of the American education system.

...

these studies are showing cognitive decline in adults, people with fully developed brains. If AI is doing this to adults, then what is it doing to a brain that’s still forming?

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #85.

You Should Need a License - Again

Generative AIs, aka Superhuman Bullshit Generators, are too powerful a tool weapon to be unregulated. Criminals should at least have to break the law to have access to them. Providers should be held responsible when they don't rigorously enforce licensing.

From the San Diego Union-Tribune via the Lexington Herald-Leader:

4 in 5 small businesses had cyberscams last year and almost half of attacks were AI powered

Note, if the Herald-Leader is paywalled, DuckDuckGo the article title ("4 in 5 ...") & numerous hits will come up, including MSN.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #84.

Generative AI & AI Slop: Threat or Menace?

1st, from Project Syndicate:

Europe Enters the Slop War

Inundated with manipulative slop that has warped public debate, the European Union has begun to confront the threat that social media platforms pose to democratic life.

"The Slop War" is an apt turn of phrase. Why didn't I think of that?

The Slop War is people battling against the ongoing Bullshit Apocalypse. I wish them luck. It will be a battle for the ages, for the soul of our culture.

This is a short & hard-hitting read, check it out.

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Gary Marcus points us at a recent paper by 2 law professors also loudly sounding an alarm.

How Generative AI is destroying society

The paper is titled "How AI Destroys Institutions"

Both articles use the word "threat" but not "menace". So the answer to our title is, "threat".

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #83.

1 Very Good Idea; 1 Very Bad Idea

Our 1 Very Good Idea comes from Cory Doctorow. It is for Canada to repeal its version of the DCMA anti-circumvention clause, section 1201. Canadian Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, bans Canadian companies from modifying America's digital tech exports.

Canada then becomes the device jail-breaking capital of the world.

Before he gets to that he delivers a nice, short takedown of the generative AI hyper-bubble.

Pluralistic: Sorry, eh (13 Jan 2026)

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Here's our 1 Very Bad Idea. Who in this world could ever imagine that having generative AI influencers would be a good idea? Oh, it's one of those $$$ deals. Capitalism, FTL. From 404 Media:

Instagram AI Influencers Are Defaming Celebrities With Sex Scandals

Fake images of LeBron James, iShowSpeed, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and even Nicolás Maduro show them in bed with AI-generated influencers.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #82.

A Bad Report Card; An Apology to Dogs

Gary Marcus links to 4 articles, none of which have good news about LLMs.

Let’s be honest, Generative AI isn’t going all that well

Update: This is consistent with the finding of the Remote Labor Index that AI could only do about 2.5% of jobs, reported recently by the Washington Post.

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I introduced the recent post "It’s Band-Aids All The Way Down" on SubStack with this:

Calling an LLM a Talking Dog is an insult to dogs.

Dogs are much more intelligent than LLMs.

I've thought about this some more.

This post of mine, from last July, talks about a fable told by Seth Godin, comparing an LLM to a talking dog:

The Talking Dog

I liked that, it seemed appropriate. Later I expanded it to "black-box talking dog".

But as time passed, I realized: Godin is a marketing guy. Comparing an LLM to a dog, talking or not, is way overselling its ability. It's like calling LLM errors & confabulations "hallucinations", to conflate LLMs with the human mind - marketing hype, marketing bullshit. I called that out in this post:

Hallucinations? No, Bullshit!

and this one:

Hallucinations My Ass!

Dogs have been paired up with humans for 14,000 years. Their vocabulary may top out at around 1000 or so words, but they recognize human tone-of-voice and human body language, which an LLM obviously doesn't. They have far more of the Morality™ module implemented than any LLM: they know when they are a good dog or a bad dog. I'm pretty sure LLMs don't know when they are good or bad, right or wrong. In fact, I'm pretty sure the terms don't even vaguely apply to LLMs.

I look at the 20 human emotions (from "The Cognitive Structure of Emotion") and find myself thinking I have seen most if not all of these in dogs.

Dogs also have an incredible sense of smell, which I'm pretty sure LLMs don't have.

Most importantly, dogs live in the same physical world that humans do, unlike LLMs which are creatures only of words.

So I won't insult dogs anymore by calling an LLM a "talking dog".

I could use "stocastic parrot". Parrots are a lot less capable than dogs, but, now that I think about it, they are probably more intelligent than LLMs.

I still like my own "Semiotic Zombie". The Bullshit Apocalypse, covering the world with various forms of AI slop, is really not that different from a Zombie Apocalypse covering the world with zombies.

To conclude, I formally apologize to all dogs for comparing them to LLMs.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #81.

Scale

"Scale", by Greg Egan, 2023, 269 pages, 83k words.

Greg Egan is a mathematician, and has been a great favorite of mine over the years. He is also great on computing & physics, including quantum.

He's done several stories in a settings where the laws of physics are different. In this case, 8 different leptons with masses differing by powers of 2 create 8 kinds of matter - the heavier leptons create smaller atoms & denser everything. We have a civilization with people in 8 different sizes: let's say 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, 0.5" tall. But they all weigh about the same. In addition to everything being denser, internal clocks including mental also run faster & lifespans are shorter the smaller you are.

A bit of a stretch. Some plot added on top, also somewhat far-fetched. I went back through this blog searching Greg Egan, he has been prominently featured & bragged on since inception, 2003. But, his days of edge may be over. He is 64 YO now, 10 years younger than me. This was his 2nd most recent novel, I have his latest on the iPad, it'll be a while before I get to it, but we'll see how it goes.

The Greks Bring Gifts

"The Greks Bring Gifts", by Murray Leinster, 1964, 143 pages.

My younger brother Mark, the author, asked me via email if I remembered Murray Leinster; his novel "The Greks Bring Gifts"; and had I read it? I replied: yes, yes, & maybe.

I was surprised when a week or so later when there appeared in my mailbox an original 1964 paperback copy of said novel, sent by my brother Mark. Thanks Mark!

I finished reading it yesterday. An easy and fun read. Aliens come to earth bearing gifts. Beware!

I think I did read it Back In The Day.

The story is narrated by a human from some time after most of the story happens. Things get wrapped up nicely, you can tell this book was written in simpler times.

1 thing I noticed, re 1964: if was before unleaded gas & catalytic converters. Several instances where auto exhaust becomes pretty nasty. A reminder, the good old days weren't always so good ...

There is a strong female character, the fiance of the main male character, the PhD physicist who starts the process of figuring out the aliens' deliberately misleading technology. She is an MD, & a lot of her boyfriend's ideas originate with her. He tells her several times how she is the smarter one. But, she still at times tries to hold back, because men don't like women smarter than they are. Dated, but still a lot better than most of the libertarian, white male classic science fiction. Way to go Murray!

Check out his Wikipedia page. He never met a genre he didn't like. He wrote "Fantasy, science fiction, horror fiction, mystery fiction, Western fiction, pulp fiction".

{Mis/Dis}information; Maintenance Debt

1st up, Gary Marcus links to 2 articles, the 2nd a piece in The Atlantic which he co-wrote, excerpt below.

The (possibly) coming AI backlash and information warfare

Current AI] systems are patient, amoral, and fantastic at mimicry, making them among the greatest tools in history for generating mis- and disinformation—the latter of which is a tremendous weapon, not necessarily for its ability to persuade and convince, but for its ability to sow chaos. This, rather than some intelligence breakthrough, may well be the legacy of generative AI.

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Cory Doctorow's post today is so spot on. Is there anything this guy doesn't get?

Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026)

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

...

Code is a liability. Code's capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running.

I ran software development shops for decades.

1. Writing code fast is great. But, the most important things about code are readability & maintainability. Doctorow mentions that it's maybe OK to cut corners for a 1-off (throw-away code), but, you'd be surprised how often you come back to something like that - and it is really nice if you can read the code.

2. Whenever we were discussing a new product, module, feature, etc., we always talked about the "Maintenance Debt". Doctorow nails this, code is indeed a liability. When you ship code, there is an implicit commitment to the people you ship it to that it will stay running, despite the world changing around & under it. This is the Maintenance Debt.

LLM-generated code is just another modality of AI slop. Maybe OK for prototypes or demos, but nothing you want underpinning a real world software product.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #80.

The Doors of Eden

"The Doors of Eden", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2020, 596 pages, 162k words.

I'm not sure how I missed this book. I believe it is 1 of Tchaikovsky's best. It predates Marvel-induced multiverse burnout (2020). It is also a portal fantasy. The turns he posits leading to completely different development of species on earth are very, very creative.

I like his definition of evolution, slightly different from mine:

imperfect self-replicating system in an environment of limited resources.

I replace "in an environment of limited resources" with "with differiential survivability".

I wound up staying up to 12:40 am finishing this book last night. I almost never do that any more. But, I thought I was about at the ending. But this book ends, and ends, and ends, and ... Be warned.

Again, highly recommended, check it out.

It's Band-Aids All The Way Down

LOL! So ChatGPT doesn't read the newspaper or watch the news! Of course it doesn't. It is a computer program that only exists when it is interacting with a user. It has no persistence, no background tasks, no continuity, no conscious mind, no subconscious mind, no world model, no ... the list goes on and on and on and ...

From Gary Marcus:

Why ChatGPT can’t be trusted with breaking news

Using massive numbers of humans (exact numbers unknown), GenAI companies perpetually put band-aids that they never disclose on top of their LLMs, based on human corrections, fixing each new problem as it arises. But the cycle repeats, endlessly.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #79.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 8

"The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 8" edited by Neil Clarke, 2024, 807 pages, 250k words, 31 stories: 19 short stories (< 7500 words), 11 novelettes (< 17500 words), 1 novella (< 40000 words).

This volume covers 2022. It was released September 10, 2024. I guess this is Clarke's timetable now.

Wow. I went 9 stories in, not really getting into any of them. I was thinking "Am I aging out of the genre?" It reminded me of a few years ago when, after 10 or so years of interviewing HS seniors for admission to MIT, I started finding almost all of them so immature & clueless. I decided to quit, let someone closer in age to them interview them. Because I figured the problem was with me, not with them.

I finally did like the somewhat snarky Tobias S. Bucknell story "The Plastic People". A sneering look at inequality and the ultra-wealthy.

Note, I just noticed that story #6, "Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist" was by the author that our editor, Clarke, called out as "one to watch": Isabel J. Kim. The story is very meta, but a little bit too contrived for me, I think.

The Ray Nayler story, "Mender of Sparrows" was of course good. I think I had read it before.

The Suzanne Palmer story, "Falling Off the Edge of the World", was interesting. A astro-archeology story with a kind of incidental 1st contact story thrown in.

The Sarah Gailey story, "When the Tide Rises", was memorable, but somewhat shallow IMO.

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The Rich Larson story,"Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man", is the high point of the collection. Why do I say that? The story is really edgy. What makes a story edgy?

1. It reminds me of "Neuromancer" or "Snow Crash".
2. It has characters that remind me of cheap detective / noir stories or films.
3. It has John Wick levels of (stylistic) violence.

Apparently I'm a man of simple tastes.

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Our 2nd story (Bucknell was the 1st) of Caribbean origins is "Bishop's Opening", by R.S.A. Garcia. An odd, quirky story, with a weird society based on chess pieces & no mercy. Garcia has recently struggled with cancer, I GoFundedMe her for $200, last update was that she was better. I (selfishly) hope she has a long life, I enjoy her work.

The Alistair Reynolds story, "Things To Do In Deimos When You're Dead", is very interesting. Very creative setting & back story, relatable characters.

"By Those Hands", by Congyun "Mu Ming" Gu, is an interesting story of betrayal - or is it?

The Greg Egan story, "Solidity", is rather odd. Egan has been very reliable for the last 2-3 decades. I noticed I had missed his last 2 novels, now on my iPad. This is a very creative multiverse story.

"Optimist Cleaver's Last Transmission", by J. C. Hsyu is edgy (see above). I revised #1 above and added 'or "Snow Crash"', because this story features delivery people.

The Tade Thompson story, "Down and Out in Exile Park", has some nice post-capitalism memes in it.

"Two Spacesuits", by Leonard Richardson, is an odd story.

"A Hole in the Light", by Annalee Newitz, features an interesting alien life form.

I seem to remember the Dozois "Year's Best" usually ending with a longish, very strong story. That didn't happen here. The last few stories are shortish, & not particularly strong.

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OK, so I'm finished with this collection, covering 2022. It was released September 10, 2024 - 21 months after the end of the target year. The last few Dozois "Year's Best" came out in July of the following year - a 7 month lag. I would always look forward to it.

It is now January, 2026, and no sign of the Clarke 2023 "Year's Best" - 25 months delay & counting! This is NOT helping to keep me current.

It looks like Clarke has been having health issues since 2012 when he had a severe heart attack. He's 60 YO now, so he would have been 47 then? His website has a 2021 blog post mentioning kidney stones after 8 years of health problems. I hope he's doing alright.

But, meanwhile, crap, do I need to switch to a different "Year's Best"? There are a few others out there. Any recommendations?