It’s right there in the title. If the word offends you, just stop, now.

TL;DR

Generative AI is a bullshit machine, but that’s fine because we need machines to do the bullshit jobs.

Military Grade Bullshit

I first heard the phrase ‘Bullshit Baffles Brains’ in my early days in the Navy, and I would hear it many more times during my service. It came to encapsulate everything that I ended up hating the most about the Navy – the idea that performative nonsense would routinely triumph over substance.

A quick search of the term turned up this amusing dit, which is a more generous spin than anything I saw.

My own interpretation was that a bit of spit and polish, and the resultant shiny thing would be enough to distract the attention of the senior officer carrying out the inspection (or whatever).

AI Bullshit

This post is (of course) about the present AI zeitgeist, and accompanying investment bubble.

There’s a wonderful paper that was published a few weeks back with the not at all subtle title of ‘ChatGPT is Bullshit‘. It painstakingly explains (scientifically and with proper academic references) what bullshit is, then goes on to detail why the large language models (LLMs) behind ChatGPT and the raft of other ‘generative AI’ things are such tremendous bullshit generators.

It’s no surprise sadly, that the executive class are taken in by it. Too busy to pay attention to the details, and easily distracted by a shiny demo… Bullshit Baffles Brains.

Calling out the Bullshit

Back when I still did Twitter, one of my favourite accounts was @callin_bull, from the awesome callingbullshit.org team ‘The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World’. They did a great job of harpooning (and lampooning) some of the bullshit that’s out there.

People are (quite rightly) starting to notice that AI isn’t the panacea it’s being pedaled as, with my favourite recent rant post being ‘… If You Mention AI Again‘. Though for a toot size version this from @[email protected] is also excellent at summarising the state of grift.

There are two huge (and overlapping) problems at play here:

1. AI is sucking up almost all of the (discretionary) time and treasure, at least in the IT industry[2].
2. None of this stuff works as advertised unless you’re prepared to make sure that the foundational stuff is taken care of – clean data, a solid operating philosophy, good teams with strong psychological safety.

Of course I jest. All work on 2 has ceased while every ounce of effort goes into 1. AI makes line go up!

Bullshit Jobs

It seems that the main reason execs are so allured by AI is the notion that they can replace all those pesky unreliable people that work for them.

For those paying attention, we’ve seen this show before, with Robotic Process Automation (RPA)[3] – software that got (extortionately) licensed by the ‘virtual person’ so that middle managers could keep their empires (albeit with a staff of glorified bash scripts rather than actual people to boss around – I guess it makes annual review season much less of a hassle).

But… this time it’s different. Not only have models been trained, at enormous expense, and by scraping every bit of text that wasn’t safely hidden away. But also the chatbots can do a decent impression of generating plausible sentences[1], especially if you’re the trademark ‘moron in a hurry‘.

There is sadly a whole class of ‘Bullshit Jobs‘ as articulated by David Graeber. If the purpose of the job is to create bullshit, then a bullshit spawning AI is the perfect fit.

So maybe there’s a happy ending here. Maybe the truth of AI taking peoples’ jobs is bullshit AI taking peoples’ bullshit jobs. The disruption is going to be awkward, but hopefully we all get to spend our time more meaningfully.

Notes

[1] Cory Doctorow has been using the term ‘plausible sentence generators‘ to describe what an LLM does, and I think it’s a description that perfectly nails things. If you substitute ‘AI’ or ‘Generative AI’ or ‘LLM’ for ‘plausible sentence generator’ then it brings things properly into perspective. Cory also has an excellent piece on ‘How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars‘.
[2] And since arguably the IT industry is the only thing that’s been driving economic growth for decades, so it kind of matters.
[3] In $LASTJOB I used to have a list of ‘preferred ways of automating things’ with RPA dead last (after API based automation and CLI tools), though that also presumed that something was worth automating rather than eliminating, or doing better. There’s a snippet of my operating philosophy.