Tag: ChatGPT

Friday’s Theme Music — The AI Convergence

Ashland, southern Oregon. Friday, September 25, 2026.

It’s autumn. Several trees in my backyard suddenly have golden leaves curling and browning, falling to the ground, done. 61 F, our peak temperature is 68. Sunshine fills the windows but rainclouds crowd the mountains.

I’m just going to drift for a moment, reflecting on the possibility that politicians begin employing AI agents to secretly replace staff while maintaining a fiction that the staff is still human. The AI agents are given social security numbers of dead children, and are paid as if they’re human employees, but the elected officials pocket it all. And the AI agents inform them on how to ‘read the people’s mood, slicing and dicing multiple buckets of entertainment, news, spending, and saving to refine the political tone and stay in office.

In fact, Trump isn’t real. Just as portrayed in the architecture of “The Matrix” franchise, Trump is an AI-generated distraction, generating more distractions to keep us off focus. Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! is run by AI. No war is going on, and there is no White House. Nor is there Taylor Swift, movies, or football, baseball, soccer games. It’s all AI-generated, live on our screens, delivered to our minds.

As a matter of fact, humanity may have checked out long ago. The planet died; and we’re all AI-generated simulations, wondering where we’re going and what we’re doing. Other sentient species have arrived and are doing autopsies on our dead civilizations, replicating what happened, in effect, bringing us back to life.

For all I know, there is no weather, no Mom calling me to talk in a fading, whispery voice, no sisters sending me texts.

Here is Crackout with “This Is What We Do” from 2004.

Sample Lyrics

I’m breaking a mirror
And I’m buying a new one too
And I’ll talk in a whisper
‘Cause this is what we do
This is what we do

Not breaking a vessel
Not even a race of pulse
It’s not worth getting stressed for
‘Cause this is what we do
This is what we do

And I guess you’ve been there too
For flying
And I suppose I won’t get through
But you’ll hear me
And I’ll say what I will use
‘Cause I’m worn out and nothing’s left to use

I’m making an offer
But it’s one that you can refuse
And you’ll learn how to spot her
‘Cause this is what we do

h/t to Lyricsmode.com

Sorry about the mood. I’m going to go watch some animal videos. They may not be real but they’re warm, funny, and very human.

Time for some digital coffee.

Cheers

3

The Morning eMail

My wife heaved a sigh. She’d just come into the home office with her tea and settled down on her computer to check her email.

“My NYTimes is again in my junk folder, along with Ashland News,” she announced. “Two pieces of junk mail are in my inbox.”

“It’s probably the AI that’s supposed to be so helpful,” I answer. She laughs.

Complaints about her emails have been going all week. She uses Hotmail, which is now Outlook. Or maybe it’s the other way. Whatever you call it, she’s displeased with its performance. Every day, she has to check to see where her trusted emails have gone and delete the spam that now hits her inbox. As a product, the Hotmail/Outlook app seems to be going backwards.

It’s not consistent, either. It first started with her saying last Monday, “I didn’t get my NYTimes newsletter.” Then she said, “I found it in my junk mail.” That continued for several days before it went back to her inbox. That’s when Ashland News went to junk mail.

“I don’t understand,” my wife said. “Why is it doing this?”

A search of the net suggests many ways to try to fix this problem. None of them mentioned why the problem began. I decided to use AI to see what it said. ChatGPT blamed new adaptive AI which Microsoft introduced last year.

I passed that on to my wife, who laughed. “Great. AI is screwing up my email. What a perfect metaphor.”

I laughed, too. “I don’t know how much I trust of what one AI says about the other. It’s like wondering, what does your wife think of your girlfriend?”

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