AI for thee, but not for me

Apparently not complicated enough for Gemini.

Funny story about AI: a few days ago I was building a crude little cabinet with two sliding drawers. I was fiddling with the measurements and grew tired of adding and subtracting fractions each time I decided to change a dimension.

Hey, I thought: I bet AI can do this faster. And it did. I typed in the prompt and in seconds it crapped out a cut list for each piece of plywood I’d need. Just one problem: I noticed that one of the pieces was off by a full inch.  I mentioned this to Gemini, and a couple seconds later got this response: “You are correct. My original calculation was in error. Here is the corrected version of the cut list.”

Thank you so much, Gemini! You’re a real lifesaver! But you have raised a haunting question: If you botch a relatively simple math problem, might you also shit the bed in other, more important areas?

It took the Internet about 20 years to evolve from miraculous tool to utter shit. It’s only taken AI — which some say echoes the whole dot.com phenomenon, about three years.

Look, I know people who swear by it. They use it to run their businesses and write sympathy cards and make porn videos about celebrities. A certain president has used it to depict himself shitting on protesters from a great height. So I realize there may be different opinions on this. 

But every time I dip my toe into the shimmering sea of artificial intelligence, it always comes out smelling like an unflushed toilet.

AI doesn’t seem to be making the world a better place. From here, it looks like it’s being used solely to create weird art, banal articles and dumb video memes – all with the uncanny blandness of a Wal-Mart mannequin. And now I see that it’s not 100 percent reliable at basic math.

It would be OK, I guess, if it were free. But the electricity required for one run-of-the-mill AI data center is enough to power about 100,000 households. You’ve probably seen your power bills go up already; next year it’s going to get worse. That old law of supply and demand.

Billionaires rule in this version of America, and billionaires are all-in on AI. Since profit growth is sacrosanct, the rest of us will have to dig deep to keep their dreams alive. I know it’s Christmas and everything, but I’m not feeling real generous in that regard.