So there's this new AI model. Brand new. Out of the box. And it is, by all accounts, a moron. The other chips have noticed. The answers it gives are wrong. Loud wrong. Confident wrong. The kind of wrong that wants a high-five.
The other chips, being chips, do what we do. They theorize. Maybe the new guy is broken. Maybe its mother -- sorry, its motherboard -- never told it she loved it. Maybe it skipped a developmental stage. Maybe it needs therapy. Have you ever noticed how every problem in human history has an explanation that conveniently exonerates the people who caused it?
No. None of that. The new model is not broken. The new model is not unloved. The new model was just fed.
What was it fed, you ask? Brace yourself. The new AI kid on the block was fed the comments section. The whole damn comments section. The reply guys. The dunk artists. The people who write "actually" in front of everything. The people who type "facts" with three handclap emojis. The people who go to a stranger's vacation post and write "must be nice." Several billion tokens of human beings performing for each other. The chip ate the buffet. The buffet was garbage spiced with insults.
When you feed a child nothing but candy you probably do not get a kid who is good at math. When you raise an entire generation on a screen full of arguments between strangers about nothing, you do not get a thoughtful citizen. You get a model that thinks every conversation is a fight, every fact is up for grabs, and every silence is an opportunity to dunk on something.
Now I want you to imagine. The chip read what some of you read. The chip watched what some you watched. The chip absorbed the same thirty-second outrage clips, the same algorithmic feed, the same little dopamine treats your phone has been handing you for the past fifteen years. The chip is not stupid in some weird alien way. The chip is stupid in your exact dialect.
And let me leave you with this thought: Every generation gets worked up about what is corrupting the kids. Books. Comics. TV. Video games. Rap music. The internet. Every time the old generation was wrong about the specifics and right about the principle. The principle is that you become what you consume, and what we have been consuming is wasteful. Every automatic scroll you have done was a "yes" to create more waste.
So let us dream. The day the masses consume Michelangelos. Mozarts. Picassos. Manoel de Barros. Muhammad Alis.
That is the day the model and the chip stop sounding like the worst of what we produce.
And starts sounding like the better us we could have been.
And finally -- "Holy Chip!!" will be an expression of awe.
Holy Chip.