further obsolete

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some time ago - i believe five or so months, look you see - i, on a whim, and after a conversation with a good friend opted (or elected) to find out what sort of job one of these artificial intelligence (or "ai") things would do of writing something for here. the result of that can be found here, should you be interested at all. 

for those not inclined to look at that, well, it more or less confirmed what i suspected about what gets described as "ai" in the present day. which is that it is absolutely nothing of the sort. no, i am no expert, but from what i can tell (or ascertain) "all" that is happening is exceptionally fast processing and filtering of data with a result or "conclusion" being thrown out. by this i mean it really isn't ai, for it still does not think for itself, still does not ask questions. 

i am quite sure that them what have made all this stuff have better things to do that work on (more) better ways to produce posts for here, but all the same i was curious enough to see what happened when i tried again. results are, at the risk of a spoiler, a bit of a step backwards. 

to start with, some images. which do underline the point i made above somewhat. and that "point" is that these ai things are really only capable of producing a result from what you give them, rather than actually, genuinely or really creating something itself. first off i asked for it to produce an image to go o this blog, and got this. 

quite rubbish generic stuff, really, although to be fair some of you might (possibly)consider that quite an apt way to describe whatever it is i put here. looks like the cover of a bad mid-90s PC game to me. so, moving on, all it did was create what i asked, which is an image for this blog. it did not want nor seek clarification. again, just filtering and sorting based on what you give it. 

tried again, then, and asked it to produce an image to go with a post on this blog. results of that are below, and very much a case of oh dear. 

can sort of do business on the typewriter and the coffee, but do i really mention rockets, starfish or any form of rudimentary compass all that much? 

bit of a "spoiler" in the next image. finally, or for the third one, then, i asked it to create an image for a post here, but an image based on one line from the article it produced. and this is what it came up with. 

yes, i appreciate it is "free", but still. if one assumes (or takes as a given) that there will be in excess of one thousand selfies of me, is this really the best image of moi it can come up with? quite flattering, true, but inaccurate. and i think it has been almost a decade since i last willingly wore a shirt that had a collar. 

and now to the article (or post) that i requested chat gpt (or whatever it is) to write - 

There’s a particular kind of quiet that only arrives after something has already gone wrong.

Not the dramatic kind—the slammed doors, the raised voices, the cinematic rain. No, this is the quieter failure. The one that hums faintly in the background while you’re making tea, or answering emails, or pretending that everything is, broadly speaking, fine.

It usually starts small. A missed message. A conversation you meant to have but didn’t. A feeling you carefully stepped around because you didn’t have the energy to pick it up properly. And then, over time, those small avoidances stack up like unopened letters in a hallway you no longer walk down.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that hallway.

About how easy it is to convince yourself that leaving things alone is the same as keeping the peace. That silence is neutral. That not deciding is, somehow, a decision in itself. (It is, but not the kind you think you’re making.)

The truth is, neglect has a direction. It leans. Quietly, persistently, it tilts things away from where they were supposed to be. Not violently—just enough that, one day, you look up and realise you’re no longer where you thought you were heading.

And by then, of course, the quiet has settled in.

There’s a temptation at that point to assign blame. To rewind everything and look for the precise moment it all slipped. As if there were a single hinge on which the entire thing turned. But most of the time, there isn’t. It’s not one decision—it’s the absence of many.

That’s the uncomfortable part.

Because it means the fix isn’t dramatic either. There’s no single grand gesture that restores everything to its former shape. No sweeping apology or late-night revelation that resets the trajectory. Instead, it’s smaller than that. Quieter.

It’s answering the message.

It’s having the slightly awkward conversation.

It’s naming the thing you were hoping would resolve itself if you just gave it enough time.

None of these feel significant in isolation. They’re easy to postpone precisely because they don’t feel urgent. But they are the difference between a hallway that fills up and one that stays clear.

I don’t think we’re very good at respecting small actions. We like scale. We like turning points. We like the idea that change arrives with a clear before and after. But most of life doesn’t work like that. It’s incremental. Directional. Shaped by things that barely register in the moment.

Which is both frustrating and, if you look at it properly, oddly reassuring.

Because if things can drift off course quietly, they can also be corrected the same way.

Not all at once. Not perfectly. But enough.

Enough to change the angle.

Enough to make the hallway walkable again.

 

rubbish, that is, as an article in the style of my blog. oh, make no mistake, i am not suggesting that what i have gone done write before is "better". but this just misses style and quirks, like my  lack of interest in use of capital letters, my penchant (or passion) for loads of stuff in brackets (like this) and so on. also i am always very mindful not to start consecutive paragraphs with words that start with the same letter, which this has clearly overlooked. 

no, i am not "anti" all this ai stuff, or fighting against it despite being stuck in the past with most things. far from it really, i am looking forward to naked Austrians of the future turning up and doing some boss retro assassinations. it just strikes me as being disingenuous to call this big data management artificial intelligence, because it is nothing of the sort.  

effectively, then, the only actual artificial intelligence we have in the present day is that which we have had for well north of 50 years - any computer chess program. true, they mostly (or for the most part) rely heavily on the data given, but they use that to "ask" a question of an opponent and "think" of what move to make next. 

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