The Clankers Are Telling Stories Now

I saw something on LinkedIn that really saddened me. Someone had posted about how he'd used Gemini AI to create a storybook, so now he didn't have to think about the stories his children read, or buy books and read to them. His followers thought this was a great idea. Now they can tell their children to leave them alone, go sit on their computers, and write their own stuff with the help of some clanker.

'Clanker' by the way is modern slang for AI bots that are about as useful and reliable in your moment of need as a chocolate fireguard, and I intend to use the term every time I come across these bloody clankers. They're like a virus. You call up a helpline and the clanker can't solve your problem and won't put you through to a human who can. Argh!!!

It is sad that so many people don't work in tech, so they don't understand that today's AI is as intelligent as a brick. Actually, a better analogy is that today's AI is as intelligent as a turd slowly dissolving in the rain. It has zero ingenuity, zero creativity, zero insight, zero empathy, zero honesty. All these programs do is take human works (without permission or acknowledgement, or it would be obvious the works were stolen), shove them in a giant archive, and reproduce them. It is literally like someone stole your watch and is running round selling you the time.

I wanted to scream in the face of this LinkedIn clown that the AI didn't write a storybook; it STOLE A STORYBOOK! It found a children's story in its vast dataset, repurposed it around different characters and imagery, and vomited it up on a screen. With no nod to the original author, it was effectively claiming that this storybook was an original work by Google. Wtf?

What happens when humans stop creating content for some AI company to steal because it's no longer worthwhile for us to do so. The biggest website for software developers to collaborate is about 77% down on queries, so they're also massively down on the answers that only humans have the intelligence to derive. AI coding assistants aren't getting smarter, they're just getting faster at offering up average-to-awful code.

What the AI companies are doing with their easy regurgitation will eventually kill the imagination that goes into making children's stories. We fear the consequences of AI but we are complicit in the murder of human creativity when we allow AI to steal whatever it likes. The theft is only tolerated because we feel there's an uncontrollable intermediary; the AI is alive and can do what it wants. This myth is deliberately fuelled by lies that the AI is able to defend itself, it can't be switched off, it has become sentient. NONE OF THAT NONSENSE IS TRUE. It is nothing but a set of programmable algorithms. Pull the f***ing plug or delete the code and it's stone dead! The owners of the AI software ARE THIEVES and they are master manipulators. They are lying to us and bribing politicians so they can steal whatever they like from us without paying for it.

Please, whatever you do, despise anyone who uses an AI to 'create' a storybook for a child and thinks that's somehow a good thing for children. It's not, they'll just grow up in a world where all the stories there could ever be are told to all the children (except the children of the rich and powerful no doubt) by Nanny Clanker.