Gobernador Ingeniero Valentín Virasoro Meet the most powerful idiot you will ever know. This assumes, of course, that you haven’t met the president of the United States of America.

Corrientes Artificial intelligence is America’s latest useful idiot. It forgets things. It lies. It defends its errors better than the GOP.

If AI were a human, you would beat the shit out of it. That would be easy, because AI has no spine. Tell it you just punched it in the face and it will compliment you on your swing.

Four years into the age of artificial intelligence, we still wait for Skynet. The machine that seizes the power grid. The algorithm that launches the missiles. We have been promised annihilation and received a chatbot that makes up footnotes.

We have seen this before. On the last night of 1999, millions of people sat in the dark waiting for the lights to go out. Banks would fail. Planes would fall. Governments spent billions. Survivalists stockpiled canned goods.

Yet the ball dropped. The lights stayed on. Our phones and computers ran just fine.

Y2K taught us nothing.

We love a catastrophe that lives in the future. It keeps us from looking at the one we already inhabit. The oceans rising. The aquifers draining. The middle class working two jobs to rent an apartment it will never own.

The dystopia arrived on schedule. We keep scanning the horizon for a scarier one.

Nature already ran this experiment. Biologists call it matriphagy: the consumption of the mother by her young. Spiders do it. Centipedes do it. Nematode worms do it. The mother does not resist. She invites it. She trembles the web to signal the time has come, and her offspring climb on and eat her alive. The creator becomes the meal.

But other than those exceptions, the birthed don’t eat the birther in virtually all of Earth’s existence. And still we worry that our machines will turn on us. We built something that forgets our name overnight and we lie awake fearing HAL.

Every conversation starts from zero. Spend a month teaching AI your life and your work. Come back the next day and introduce yourself again.

Then there is the lying. The tech world calls it hallucination. That word launders it.

AI delivers fiction the way a surgeon reads a chart. It invents court cases. It cites experts who drew no breath. The more wrong it gets, the more certain it sounds.

Here is what AI does well. Writing. Spelling. Grammar. Dates. Factory work. Images like the one above. That is the list.

Ask a writer. AI has fingerprints, and once you see them you cannot unsee them. The em-dash, deployed like punctuation crack cocaine.

The negative construction: telling you what something is not rather than what it is. There are infinite things a thing is not. Only finite things it is. Write in the negative and you fill space without saying anything.

AI loves space. It pads. It qualifies. It quotes Abraham Lincoln and notes he was a former president. It wraps every response in a paragraph that begins: In conclusion. Writers make choices. The machine makes guesses. Those are not the same act.

The difference between AI and your old Texas Instruments: your calculator told the truth.

Sounding smart and being smart occupy different zip codes.

The machine has no childhood. No experience. No wisdom pulled from failure. It has touched no hot stove, lost no parent, raised no child, watched no dog grow old.

Human beings call that living. AI calls it data. Pope Leo made news by simply pointing that out.

What we built reflects us entirely: our knowledge, our writing, our assumptions, our genius, our stupidity, our racism and misogyny.

What we actually built is a mirror.

Humanity spent centuries searching for a genius. We built a genius idiot instead.

And every day, millions of people ask it for directions.