I spent an hour on YouTube tonight rehearsing material for this weekend, and ugh, AI is taking over. It’s not like this is breaking news. We all know it’s been coming for a while, and the tech companies have been going after the AI thing with ferocious competition. And guess what?
IT SUCKS. AI SUCKS. I plant my flag firmly in the dirt, and say this: AI SUCKS. I don’t care if they are going to make it “even better.” Weird big-boobed-big-butt women speaking with some weird artificial-looking computer mouth saying stupid stuff; smoothed-over almost-human characters telling heartwarming stories that may or may not be true (but sound true); hundreds of thousands of these godawful AI music videos with fake 1960s girl groups and fake 1950s rockers; or even worse, the “AI enhanced” revamps of old familiar (real) video clips that somehow now look like weird, grainy, CGI cartoons.
I don’t care if it gets better. AI SUCKS. This is not the ranting of some old dude (okay, guilty), but of a human being recognizing that certain things are good for the human psyche and human biology, and this isn’t it. This is a door that is going to open and leave us with nothing but an empty soul, the kind of feeling that you get when you eat an entire bag of Circus Peanuts Halloween Candy. AI is garbage for the mind. I hereby reject it.
I will continue to write my own books with my own damn brain. I will continue to play my guitar and write songs with my own damn brain. I will continue to live in a world where human kindness and helping someone is the dopamine that I want—not the weird digital dopamine of whatever AI wants you to ingest.
And yes, I yearn for a time when things were real, and dirty, and gritty, and hard. I yearn for a time when people wanted to go wild listening to Jerry Lee Lewis play the living daylights out of a piano. Sweaty, yelling, jumping, LIVING people, not on their phones or in front of a screen.
You know the story about Native Americans, when they are hand-weaving rugs, they purposely add a “mistake” into the weave. Why do they do it? Because they believe that acknowledging and incorporating imperfect elements makes the rug stronger. It lets you know that it was made by humans, not by some damn machine. And that’s the hill I’m gonna die on. AI sucks. I don’t care how good it gets. It sucks.
I wish I was in this audience of young folks, losing their damn minds while Jerry Lee Lewis tears it up on this 1964 TV special. That’s where it’s at. Doing real things. Feeling real things. Some tech bro ought to invest in THAT. (click image for link)
