AI And The Dunce Confederacy


Yessentuki

Kurduvādi Meet the most powerful idiot you will ever know.

It forgets things. It lies. And if AI were a human, you could beat the shit out of it.

That would be easy, because AI is such a complete kiss ass. Tell it you just punched it in the face and it will compliment you on your technique. Tell it the punch was sloppy and it will agree. Tell it you missed entirely and it will find something to praise in your footwork.

There is no version of this conversation where AI pushes back. It will absorb any insult, any contradiction, any outright lie, and find a way to thank you for sharing.

That is the thing nobody says. This genius has no spine. No memory. No shame.

Every conversation starts from zero. You can spend a month teaching it your life and your work. Come back the next day and introduce yourself again.

Because that is how it works. The machine that knows everything knows nothing about you the moment you close the window. You are a stranger every single time.

People who use AI heavily learn this the hard way. They build something over days. A voice. A process. A set of rules the thing finally seems to understand. Then they come back and it is gone. Not corrupted. Not misplaced. Just gone, like it never happened. You do not lose your work. You lose the relationship. And you have to rebuild it from scratch every time you sit down.

Then there is the lying. The tech world calls it hallucination. That is a polite word for making shit up with total confidence.

AI does not pause when it is wrong. It does not hedge. It delivers fiction like a surgeon reading a chart.

It invents court cases. It quotes studies that were never written. Ask it about a 1987 Supreme Court ruling and it will give you the case name, the vote, the dissent, and the justice who wrote the opinion.

None of it happened. But it will sound like it did. And the more wrong it is, the more certain it sounds.

If human employees did that, you would fire them. If friends did that, you would stop asking them anything that mattered. If a doctor did that, you would find another doctor and possibly a lawyer.

The tech industry has decided this is a feature of an emerging technology rather than a fundamental flaw in a tool that is already everywhere.

It is in your hospital. Your bank. Your kid’s school. The people running those institutions believe they are getting a powerful assistant. Sometimes they are.

Sometimes they are getting a very confident liar with excellent grammar.

Here is what AI is actually good at. Writing. Spelling. Grammar. Dates. Repetitive tasks that would bore a human into a coma.

Summarizing documents. Drafting emails nobody wants to write. That is a real list and it is not nothing. Used correctly, inside those boundaries, AI saves time and earns its keep.

Outside of that, you are dealing with a deluxe calculator that will tell you it loves your haircut.

The difference between AI and your old Texas Instruments is this.

Your calculator never lied to you.

60 Seconds


Scott Pelley walked into a staff meeting Monday and did something American journalism hasn’t seen enough of lately. He told the truth out loud, to the people who needed to hear it, in front of witnesses.

He told new executive producer Nick Bilton that Bari Weiss has no qualifications for her job. He said Bilton himself has only slender qualifications for his. Then he said Weiss is murdering 60 Minutes. He said it in front of the staff.

It didn’t come from nowhere.

Last December, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi had a story ready. It was called “Inside CECOT.” It was about Venezuelan deportees describing brutal conditions inside El Salvador’s maximum-security prison, where the Trump administration had been sending people.

The segment was promoted. Three hours before air, Weiss pulled it. Alfonsi fired off an email to colleagues saying the decision was political. Weiss called it an unfinished story.

Last week, Alfonsi was fired. So was executive producer Tanya Simon. So was correspondent Cecilia Vega. Pelley is calling it Black Thursday.

This is what happens when editorial decisions get made by people whose loyalties run somewhere other than to the story. Journalists know it. They just rarely say so.

When Bilton opened Monday’s meeting by saying Weiss loves 60 Minutes, Pelley was done.

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” he said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

A CBS executive told Pelley he was being rude. Pelley disagreed. “You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness.”

Bilton suggested Pelley speak with Weiss privately. Pelley said he preferred to speak in front of his colleagues. Bilton said they were his colleagues too.

“That remains to be seen,” Pelley said.

The staff applauded him on the way out.

That’s what journalists owe each other. Not a whisper campaign, not an anonymous source, not a carefully worded resignation letter. A name, a room, and the nerve to say what everyone already knows.

More of them should try it.