AI and the Coming Bullshit Tsunami

The quadrennially recurring political spasm that attends every presidential election in the United States is now well underway. It's going to be a little bit different this year, though, as many far left newspapers, magazines and TV programs whose stock-in-trade is production of low quality, continuous partisan misinformation, have laid off their staffs. This may seem like an odd freestanding thing to do in this season, but there's a new kid in town. Well, he's not really a kid, he's AI.

For several years, people have noticed the awful quality of articles produced by these very same publications, wondering why these reeking word piles are presented as reading material. They characteristically wander about, belatedly, if ever, getting to the subjects that were touted in their headlines. If you read them on your handheld device, many times you are treated to repetitious and disgusting photographs of skin conditions, tempting you, if you are of a certain perverse nature, to click for more useless information.

?You may also have noticed that these failing publications have, in recent years, scored very high marks for DEI, a set of traits that has nothing to do with business success. But meanwhile, software tools such as Grammarly provide indolent semi-literates with a slightly better sentence structure and composition quality. If the ability of my phone to accurately transcribe my dictation was even reasonable, I might say that AI has a huge place in the production of the written word for legitimate purposes. It does take some of the tedium out of typing. On the other hand, to have your sentence written by Grammarly or other similar softwares, seems the same as plagiarism, only it’s uncredited.

?Nevertheless, the route has been run for this wan type of semi-human literature, and many ungifted staffs have been discharged, mostly to find themselves in a jobs marketplace that does not have a need for their lack of skills. AI can now produce crap, faster and without any conscience, and likely without any accountability.

?Currently, we are witness to the political pers- and prosecution of Donald Trump in a doomed, desperate attempt to keep him from returning to the White House. For me, this is the third election cycle in a row where I must point out that he is the only reasonable choice for president. You can see what you got from Joe Biden, and he can't even fake it, nor can his "historic" Vice President, the Giggler-in-Chief, Kamala Harris. And the people persecuting him on the front lines are laughably criminal perjurers in their own highly conflicted positions.? Imagine the effectiveness of a lawyer who claims the inability to remember a single relevant occurrence during his (or her) past five years.

In this particular cycle, even people on the Republican side have made cause against Former President Trump, and openly. Still, the Trump Train rolls on, gathering momentum with each dirty trick in the media and the courtrooms. Irrespective of support in Washington DC, polls show Trump is poised to defeat any and all comers, including the somewhat remarkable Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has the misfortune of going up strongly against big pharma. This keeps the entire Democrat Party treating him like he has leprosy. As Democrats go, he's not too bad, inasmuch as he calls for a closed border and cessation of support for the wars of others in Ukraine and Israel, but he definitely favors slavery reparations which would be a country-busting program, and he also favors the green agenda, which will be a national treasury busting program. Accordingly, despite his Kennedy charm, that dog won't hunt.

?The announcement of Mitch McConnell's retirement, dated yesterday, represents a similar event to the collapse of many popular media outlets. The center cannot be held: you must pick a side. In fairness, Mitch McConnell has not been simply a Democrat operative in a badly-fitting suit, but he has done a lot of what is characteristic in Washington DC, and that is enrich himself at the expense of the national treasury. Another quisling republican, the unctuous Mitt Romney, will also be retiring.

?There seems like a certain kind of battening down the hatches that is occurring in the nation's capital. It is now possible to produce propaganda solely using AI, and I expect that anti-Trump rhetoric will proliferate to an extent never before seen, because miscreants don't have to wait around for the slow machinations of writers who still have a vestigial notion that a premise must be presented and then defended. AI has no such scruples, indeed not even a need for facts. You will be unable to find AI red-faced in an interview by somebody who takes issue with what has been published. I reckon the phenomenon will be agreeably known as The Bullshit Tsunami of '24. Expect to be inundated by a continuous flood of incorrect, misleading, manufactured, and deliberately false information, overwhelming your information sources continuously through Election Day. Most of us already deeply discount the information that we get through the various media, opting for open venues such as YouTube, "X" and Rumble, but you can already see the proliferation of fake channels on these sites offering the video equivalent of the rambling online articles that never get to the point. The point is they waste your time and take away time from legitimate information and pursuits.

?Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt has given the world a wonderful little book called On Bullshit (2005), in which he thoughtfully teases out the real meaning of the word, and for my purposes, the very thing AI is super-qualified to produce in the world of politics. The quintessential passage of his book is towards its end, thus:

?"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out,or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

?What could be more true of AI than its indifference to the truth? Already this week we have seen countless Google Gemini AI- generated pictures of multiracial Nazi soldiers from World War II, a black George Washington, and every other abomination one could imagine

I submit that AI is not only creating misinformation, but mass produced bullshit, to the extent that it will crowd out all other information. A few areas of obviously recognizable AI bullshit are in, as mentioned above, politics, but also political efforts such as electric vehicles, green energy via windmills and solar farms, our unwarranted taking of sides in foreign wars, and the imminent danger of climate change. And the unquestioning acquiescence to such things are what we must be on our guard against. In a gentler time, people would signify their unwillingness to hear bullshit by rolling their pant-legs up to mid-calf as if to avoid the eponymous substance's soiling of their garments.? Before long, it's all going to pile up around our eyes and ears, and we must keep these from being soiled, lest our minds succumb.

In this scene from Slumdog Millionaire, the determined younger brother dropped himself into a raw sewage pit to escape from being locked in a privy, in order to get the autograph of his Bollywood hero who was touring nearby.

?