Mike Brown: Artificial Intelligence!

Craft Lake City has a rich history of supporting the crafts of science and technology over the years. It’s not like they were 3D printing Julia Reagan billboards, but educating the public on the roles that science can play into the world of crafting. And these days, technology is advancing faster than a jackrabbit can hump. 

Aside from the crazy AI-generated TikTok memes going around, which I must admit can be as intoxicating as an absinthe cocktail full of Xanax, another popular AI is ChatGPT. I won’t lie, I haven’t fucked around with this technology too much, but it can manipulate images and words and it has society freaking out right now thinking that we are all getting replaced.  

I kind of like the idea of robots taking over so I can stay at home and and play more video games and eat more popcorn and such. And I’m a big fan of cheating the system so when stories started coming out about college kids just having ChatGPT write essays for them, I kind of liked that. Although this will make humanity stupider than we already are, in my opinion, maybe it’s a sort of reverse evolution that is inevitable.  

It’s not uncommon for young people to drop off a resume to me at my job. That’s a good way to get a job, since the robots haven’t taken away all them yet (just a bunch of the shitty ones). But yeah, the ChatGPT resumes are pretty obvious — they are too good! As someone who has been fired several times and has had to write several resumes because of said firings, I know what a resume is supposed to look like. And during my COVID unemployment spree, I was purposely sending out shitty resumes full of typos and whatnot so I could stay on unemployment, and it kinda worked.  

But since I do like to write, and I like writing my SLUG articles, I can’t lie: The thought of the SLUG editorial team replacing me with ChatGPT has crossed my mind. I should probably start being nice to them.  

My opinion on technology taking society over, though, is basically this: The robots will basically be able to do every single fucking job, so everyone has to worry. This kind of evens the playing field and makes me think it’s not gonna happen any time soon without a major restructuring of our capitalist society.  

And although Terminator 2 and RoboCop are two of my favorite movies ever, the nightmare of having to fight off robots does kind of scare me, and it seems more and more plausible the more technology advances. I also worry about the propaganda campaigns that our government could generate with AI against the general public, although we all know our government is completely honest and would never lie to us about anything, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about that one too much.  

But there’s all sorts of shitty jobs that this new industrial revolution could replace that people probably wouldn’t mind so much, like shitty jobs that people really don’t like doing and wouldn’t mind if a robot took it over. I’m thinking of things like robot DoorDashers. Given the amount of times my DoorDash orders have been fucked up, I’m convinced those guys really hate that job, and I don’t blame them.

Well, just for poops and giggles, I’m going to submit this article into a ChatGPT mod and see how it restructures it. Then I’m going to turn in both versions to my editors and not tell them which one I actually wrote, and see which one they print. This should be a fun little experiment! Also, go to the Craft Lake City DIY Festival this month!

Read more from SLUG columnist Mike Brown here:
Mike Brown: Shooting The Tube!
Mike Brown: The Local Leader of Local Drunks: Sunyin Marci