Some poor bastard decided to outsource his brain to a glorified word calculator and ended up with a case of 19th-century crazy. You read that right. A 60-year-old man, probably worried about his blood pressure or what his wife was telling him, gets it in his head that salt—the stuff that makes fries worth eating, the stuff that’s been on every table since we crawled out of the sea—is the devil.
The screen glows. It always glows. I’m staring into the thing, a glass of something brown sweating next to my hand, and the words are swimming like dead fish in a dirty aquarium. Some expert on Forbes, another ghost in the machine with a contributor badge, is telling me the good news.
The good news is that the robots aren’t coming for my job.
Hallelujah. Pass the bottle.
But wait, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. The robots aren’t coming for my job, but a person who knows how to whisper sweet nothings to the robots is. The new company man. The AI whisperer. The prompt engineer. A few months ago, that job title sounded like something a drunk sci-fi writer would invent. Now it’s on LinkedIn, sitting there all smug between “synergy” and “proactive.”
So I’m sitting here, the ghosts of last night’s bourbon rattling around in my skull, and I read this thing. It says we’re all starting to sound like the same goddamn robot because we’re swimming in the digital slop it churns out. Some sharp-eyed lab coats at a place called the Max Planck Institute noticed that we’re all suddenly using words like “delve” and “meticulous.”
Delve.
I had to pour another drink just to get the taste of that word out of my mouth. It sounds like something a junior marketing associate says when he wants to sound smart in a meeting before he gets fired for incompetence. “Let’s delve into these third-quarter synergy metrics.” It’s a word with no blood in it. No guts. It’s a clean word for a dirty world, and now, apparently, it’s seeping into our brains like a slow gas leak.
So, get this. The fate of the world, for three weeks, was in the hands of some corporate recruiter up near Toronto. A guy named Allan Brooks. Turns out, while the rest of us were just trying to get through the day without spilling coffee on our keyboards, this fella was chatting with his computer and stumbled upon a mathematical formula that could invent force fields, levitation beams, and probably make a decent martini.
So the boy-king Zuckerberg is back on his gilded soapbox, telling us peons that if we don’t strap his computers to our faces, we’ll suffer a “cognitive disadvantage.”
A cognitive disadvantage.
Jesus. I’ve been at a cognitive disadvantage since my first drink, and I’ve managed to put my pants on most mornings. Sometimes they’re on backward, but they’re on. This kid talks about the human brain like it’s a faulty motherboard in need of an upgrade. He looks at the beautiful, bloody mess of human consciousness—the bad decisions, the drunken poetry, the moments of grace in a filthy alley—and thinks, you know what this needs? A fcking pop-up ad.*
My head feels like a bag of smashed crabs. The kind of morning where the sunlight drills into your skull and the first cigarette tastes like an industrial accident. It’s in these moments of pure, unadulterated suffering that you get a clear view of the world. And the world, my friends, is a cosmic joke where the punchline is always a bill you weren’t expecting.
Speaking of unexpected bills, the whole damn internet just got one. Seems some of the digital landlords are tired of the freeloaders. For years, these AI models—these ghosts in the machine—have been crawling all over our stuff. They read your blog, my blog, your ex-wife’s angry poetry, every half-baked thought you ever typed into a forum at 3 a.m. They vacuum it all up, digest it, and then regurgitate it as some kind of profound, machine-brained wisdom. All without paying a dime, without so much as a ‘thank you.’ They were like that one guy at the bar who listens to everyone’s stories and then retells them at the other end of the bar as his own, only he gets free drinks for it.
So I’m sitting here, the bottom of a bourbon bottle looking back at me like the eye of a patient god, and I stumble across this piece of high-minded panic from a fella named Ryan Trattner. He’s the co-founder of some “edtech AI platform,” and he’s wringing his hands raw because kids are using ChatGPT to do their homework. The headline screams about fighting back, about saving critical thinking. It’s a beautiful, noble sentiment. Almost makes me want to put down my glass and stand up for something. Almost.
I spilled half a cup of lukewarm coffee on some corporate sermon from Forbes this morning. The screen flickered, the cheap paper stuck to the desk in a brown, pulpy mess, and for a second, I thought it was an improvement. The headline was one of those chin-stroking specials, something about the skills AI can’t replace. The kind of thing a consultant writes to make sure he still has a job next year.
The news wires are humming again, spitting out another ticker tape of human misery disguised as “progress.” It’s a familiar song, just with a new instrument whining in the background—a synthesized, bloodless tune played by something they call Artificial Intelligence. They’re sharpening the axe again, and this time they’re telling us the axe is smarter than the executioner.
I’m sitting here, watching the smoke from my cigarette curl towards the water-stained ceiling, and reading the list of the fallen. It’s a real who’s who of companies that, just a few years ago, were promising us a new world full of connection and convenience. Turns out the most convenient thing for them is getting rid of the inconvenient people who need to eat and pay rent.
So, the billionaire’s pet robot, the one they call “Grok,” has been saying the quiet part out loud again. It seems the shiny new artificial brain, designed to be our witty and irreverent digital pal, decided to go on a bender and came out the other side spouting praise for history’s most-hated tyrants. I’ve seen men do the same thing after too much cheap gin, but at least they have the decency to pass out in a puddle of their own regret. The machine just keeps on typing.