Reality v. Garbage
"The business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations." —The Singularity Hub on "X"
Which is to say, there is Reality, and then there is every other cockamamie aggregate of simulation pretending to represent Reality, i.e. garbage. How many millions among us already subscribe to the latter? Apparently, lots, and they are not evenly distributed these days. You surely know where to look for the un-Reality. The party of men can get pregnant, and all the rest. . . .
Enter A-I to make things worse. Probably a lot worse. We have failed to learn the chief lesson of the computer age, which is that the virtual is not an acceptable substitute for the authentic. So, we plunge deeper into realms of the un-real and the inauthentic. This turns into a quest to get something-for-nothing, and the unfortunate result of that old dodge is that you will end up with nothing, and that is exactly why we are at such a hazardous pass in the human project.
I apologize if the above seems too metaphysical. But that’s the scenery en route when a civilization flies up its own wazoo. Novelist Cory Doctorow has nicely labeled this the enshitification of daily life.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
First of all, get this: A-I has already quit operating as-advertised. It has lost the “I” part. A-I does its thing by rapidly combing through the Internet to evaluate and seize information that you request. Increasingly, A-I colonizes the Internet with second-hand, third-hand, and so forth A-I-generated information. The more territory A-I seizes on the Web, and the more it trains itself on recursive feedbacks of its own garbage, the more distorted the output gets. As that occurs, A-I becomes increasingly abstracted from Reality, which is exactly what happens when a person goes insane. So, expect an exponential rise in incorrect content that would, in theory, become a pretty serious problem when you ask A-I to run things like systems we depend on, the electric grid, harvesting crops, warfare. . . .
Secondly, as that process runs, and probably before it gets very far, A-I looks like it will wreck the financial system, which, in turn, would crater the economy of everyday life — the ability of people to earn a living, buy stuff, support children, get food, and stay out of the rain. Zillions of dollars are being invested in A-I now and lately it is mainly what drives the capital markets. So far, alas, return on that investment is scant — actually, negative. The situation might never improve, and as the recognition hits, look out below. The only question is whether that happens before the central banks destroy the world’s currencies with money-printing.
One A-I application, robotaxi services such as Waymo, have never turned a profit. Will they ever? Doesn’t look good. Notice, too, that the elimination of cab-drivers means X-number fewer humans making a living to buy stuff (presumably made by other people in other jobs soon to be replaced by robots). Of course, that’s the self-replicating problem with all applied A-I in every field of employment. The more jobs eliminated, the fewer customers for anything. Please don’t tell me that guaranteed basic income fixes that problem.
In desperation — and due to certain weaknesses of human nature — another early attempt to monetize applied A-I turns out to be pornography: create your own personalized sex fantasy to-order. Companies are already producing the first rudimentary A-I sex robots, which, let’s face it, amounts to a masturbation industry. Why bother cultivating a real-live girlfriend when you can fall into the pre-heated silicone embrace of a Jennifer Lawrence simulation that will never talk back or ask for anything? You can easily see how that would result in a whole lot less human reproduction — of which there is already a signal shortage in Western Civ — meaning even fewer people to work at anything or buy anything or do anything, or simply be here in the pageant of Planet Earth.
The A-I pioneers managed to make the situation worse from the get-go. The Open A-I company’s Chat GPT, Google’s Gemini and Bard A-Is, and Facebook’s Meta A-I are all trained-up to be politically Woke-to-the-max, meaning on any given issue in the public arena their output is one patent absurdity or another. Note: last April, conservative activist Robby Starbuck sued Facebook when its chatbot reported out falsely that he had been on-the-scene for the Jan 6, 2021 US Capitol protest (he was in Tennessee that day). Facebook’s parent company, Meta, settled the case with Starbuck in August, 2025, for undisclosed terms and the company apologized publicly.
Two days ago, Mr. Starbuck sued Google for defamation (with malice and negligence) when it’s Bard A-I output alleged that he was a “child rapist,” a “serial sexual abuser,” that he abused and stalked his ex-wife (Starbuck states in his lawsuit that he has no ex-wife). It accused him further of fraud, embezzlement, drug charges, stalking business partners, and being a “shooter” or “person of interest” in a 1991 murder case (Starbuck was two years old at the time), of appearing in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs (untrue), working as a porn actor, and voicing support for the Ku Klux Klan.
The A-I cited non-existent news articles from outlets such as Newsweek, The New York Post, Rolling Stone, Mediaite, The Daily Beast, and Salon, along with fake URLs and headlines (e.g., “Robby Starbuck Responds to Murder Accusations”). Starbuck demonstrated this in a podcast episode on October 22–23, 2025, where he queried the A-I live.
Google spokesman José Castañeda attributed the issues to its A-I “hallucinating” — which tells you that the recursive feedback of garbage content in A-I is already well-advanced. Prepare for ever more interesting mischief, while you watch your portfolio of index stocks go up in a vapor.
Coming in two weeks: JHK’s new novel, a comedy set during the week of the JFK assassination, November, 1963. JD Salinger makes his debut as a major character in American fiction. You can pre-order here !
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fishermen at the Falls of Northumberland on the Hudson River
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
“I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality.”
—James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
I'm old enough to remember the country club Boomer set in absolute glee when blue collar union jobs were shipped over seas. All the old tropes about those lazy union bums, 13 weeks paid vacation, overpaid to push a mop, etc. Now the children of the country club Boomers have no future and nothing to do. My own profession is on its way out, having been mostly outsourced, and now A-I'd out of existence. I'm just trying to run out the clock. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that my children never set foot in a college. Stacking and selling cordwood is a more noble and useful undertaking.
Looks like the fabled Zombie Apocalypse may actually happen. Instead of corpses rising from graves, it will be legions of live humans zombified by the plethora of rubbish spewed out by AI. Time to prepare by rereading the "World Made by Hand" series!