TL/DR: AI is bad and I’m not going to use it, so I’m not going to be posting with the frequency of a machine, but the words I do post come out of my head.
Leaving ’25 in the dust
Greetings and happy new year, internet. After a long break, I’m relieved to leave 2025 behind. This year has been exhausting. The news cycle fluctuates hourly leaving me with no time to process the newest violations of social norms, constitutional law, scientific theory, or human decency.
It’s been difficult to write for the past year. The world throws a new drama at us every hour. If I used AI to write, I could feed a few prompts into a machine learning program and spit out content daily. It would make my life easier; it would make content easier to churn out.
The point of this endeavor isn’t to push crap out into the interwebs. The mission statement of DLP is to inform and defend science. AI is only as correct as the algorithm determines it to be. I’m not perfect either, but I can try to make logical arguments.
Thought experiment
Here’s a theoretical question about AI. If the algorithms search the internet to learn and better hone the “humanity” of their interactions, and content on the internet is becoming more artificially generated, when will LLMs simply be learning from themselves? How long before every bit of information we see, hear, or read becomes an artificially generated loop? In other words. Artificial intelligence learning from artificial intelligence won’t make it any more human; it will just amplify misrepresentations of human thought.
The good and bad of AI
I am including images in this post to demonstrate the imperfection of AI. This is the only time you, the reader, will see fake images on a DLP post. Notice the problems. Yes, I got these off a free online image generator, and if I paid for a better one, the images would be better. Oh, you mean the content is only as good as I pay for? So, there is, dare I say, an economic element to the information available from AI? Interesting.
Now don’t get me wrong. There is good use for AI, but that isn’t what we are seeing, is it (I’m calling you out, Grok). These should be tools that we use like a pair of pliers. I don’t want my chainsaw to think for me! That’s what some people want, though. (Then again, there are some people who would benefit from the chainsaw doing the thinking).
If I allow AI to do my work for me, it is no longer my work. If the machine is thinking for me and working for me and even entertaining me, what is left for me to do?
Three months ago, we added a new member to the DLP crew, Penny. She’s 5 months old now and in her peak ornery mode. I am now trying to tame two hyper beagles. The internet and my vet tell me, “They need jobs; dogs have to have jobs.” We must manufacture jobs for domestic dogs to be happy, yet we willingly give over our own jobs to machine learning.
the take home
Big deal, so I’m writing my own content. It will be flawed; it may be inaccurate. I may sound like an uneducated slob, but the words will be mine, and the images will be mine. Hell, if nothing else, I’ll contribute to the improvement of AI when the bots scrub my content.
I hope a few real people read this!
