Corin Dann and the Prime Minister and The LeagueMate can each alone kill my interest in listening to the radio. So when all three collided in the airwaves over Aotearoa this morning, I went downstairs to make coffee.
No need to worry about missing an important story. Online life means that every last piece of the rubbish will have soon washed up onto your shore.
Before long I was learning that the PM was as usual happily ignoring his tiny little nub of empathy and looking past our multiple states of emergency to get excited about some footy.
State of Origin mate!
To be played right here in New Zealand mate!
This will bring heaps of money mate!
And more money being spent means more money for doctors and policemen and teachers.
Let me know if I’m going too fast for you voter-cretins I want you to get why this is really cool.
No, that’s not verbatim, but it’s pretty true to the tenor.
I swear this man has helped me to locate, with my rolling eyeballs, recesses of my skull I did not know existed.
Sometimes when I need to vent, I turn to the same social media I so often like to vent about.
Kaz responded helpfully with this little extra piece of context.
What a triumph of asskissery and suckup! Do tell us more, will you, Nancy Lu MP, about this god among men who has the rare genius, confronted by rain, to get out an umbrella!
To be fair it could be something of a revelation if you are steeped in the creeds of selfish individualism and self-reliance as so many in the National party manifestly are, to witness a person offering help to another in a moment of need. Especially when that person is your very-own empathy-deficient Prime Minister.
But do you notice something else that’s a bit non-human about this?
Correct! It has all the look and feel of the finest AI slop.
For example, staccato bullet lists such as:
Kind. Grounded. Energetic. Action-oriented.
For example, the platitudinous bilge to which AI nevitably turns when it’s time to wrap things up:
Sometimes the smallest gestures say the most.
Nancy Lu MP very much appears to have got the old AI machine to do the work here. I don’t usually mention the generous pay our MPs get, I don’t begrudge it. But this does make me wonder just what democratic value we’re getting from the middleperson here.
You know what I would very much like to see this election?
I would like to know which candidates are happy to make this pledge:
I will not be using AI to do my thinking and speaking.
I have been making a list of all things I greatly dislike about AI. It is already a very long list. By the time you get to read it this weekend, I may have had to use a machine to whittle it down to size.
