As the Megalopolis Fake Critical Blurbs Scandal Prove, Artificial Intelligence Is Still Pretty Fucking Stupid
Francis Ford Coppola’s wildly divisive, self-financed, long-in-the-works one hundred and twenty million dollar labor of love Megalopolis recently experienced another scandal when negative quotes about previous Coppola triumphs in a provocative commercial turned out to be fake.
Megalopolis looks like a historic fiasco in the making. It’s gotten some of the worst buzz and reviews of its creator’s legendarily checkered career. Desperate marketed decided to make lemonade out of lemon by putting out ads that suggest that Coppola’s masterpieces have always inspired mixed reviews and vitriol regardless of their quality.
If famous critics bashed The Godfather, The Godfather Part 2, Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, then how can we trust them when they write that Megalopolis is an embarrassment?
Unfortunately for the clueless marketers, the legendary critics ostensibly bashing some of the most iconic, successful and influential American movies ever made never uttered the words of clueless condemnation attributed to them.
This disastrous, aborted advertising campaign relied disastrously on the black magic of AI.
It was the latest embarrassment for what is ironically known as Artificial Intelligence. An ad wizard clearly asked AI for scathing pans of Francis Ford Coppola’s best films and failed to notice when the mischievous digital scamp made up pans instead of taking them from real reviews.
It was an easily disproven ruse. The commercials didn’t make up fake critic, like “David Manning”, a non-existent critic Sony dreamed up to effusively praise their worst, most critically derided films. A quick glance at the historical record was all that it took for audiences to realize that they were sold a bill of goods.
If the marketer thought he was being slick in having AI do his work for him he was sorely mistaken. It’s not surprising that AI failed to understand the assignment. What’s surprising, and, frankly, horrifying, is that some human goober trusted AI to not fuck up majorly.
When I thought about AI in the abstract in decades past I thought of it as The Terminator’s Skynet: a devastingly effective force that, unless contained, had the power to destroy humanity.
For much of my life, AI has been an abstract concept. It was something that was going to happen in the future more than it was a current cultural force.
That changed very recently. AI has exploded. Seemingly overnight it became part of our everyday lives the same way the internet did decades ago.
In its current form, however, AI is most assuredly not like Skynet. It’s not intimidating in its inhuman power.
In its present form AI seems almost impressively stupid and goofy. It can write, for example, but its writing feels amateurish and embarrassing instead of imposing.
AI’s bad writing feels strangely human in its awkward messiness. It’s filled with flowery language and unnecessary words and phrases. It's supposed to mirror actual human writing but it consistently does a terrible job because it’s not advanced enough to do so.
It’s the writing equivalent of the uncanny valley: AI writing is just close enough to the real thing to seem creepy, wrong and disconcertingly un-human.
Artificial Intelligence is dumb. It’s clumsy. It’s a bad, derivative writer.
There’s something weirdly reassuring about Artificial Intelligence’s clumsiness and stupidity. It’s not just imperfect; it’s flagrantly incompetent much of the time.
AI’s ineptitude is oddly endearing. At the moment, at least, it’s not an unstoppable juggernaut that will put us all out of work; it’s the clumsy intern making foolish mistakes because it’s inexperienced and doesn’t know any better.
That won’t be the case forever, of course. AI has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years. It will continue to evolve, but it also continues to have weird glitches and fuck-ups, and that is both a cause for alarm and a strange source of comfort.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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