"ChatGPT is my friend"; "It's because they feel illiterte"; not just explain, but literally explain

Wednesday 5/28/25

I had a dream that I was in high school and had to write an op-ed on Finnegans Wake.

Woke up this morning to an article in Psychology Today titled "Knowledge Is Dead" that was all jargon and double-speak but was clear in beating its chest that the death of knowledge was an excellent turn of events that we should be happy about.

Beatles-related content/discussions on Reddit tell me that no one knows anything about the Beatles. They haven't a clue. About their music, how it functions. They don't know basic facts. If I see a discussion about "What are the best Beatles vocal performances," it's astounding to me how clueless people are, how unsophisticated their thinking is. It's fifth grade-level.

They treat the Beatles, too, like gods who are also cartoon characters and talk about them in a very creepy way, like they would do anything to cuddle them as they worship them as supernatural beings. They think every song is autobiographical and they go looking for clues and evidence from each Beatle's lives to support their "hot takes." Many of the posts have the term "hot takes" in the title. Then there are people who aren't into the Beatles, have never really listened to them, and ask a question like what version of Abbey Road to listen to "because of course I know I'm going to love it."

You know nothing of the kind. But nothing is real. Everything is what people think they should do or how they should feel. It's not about what things actually are, but what we associate them with. The associative is king. It's like Caitlin Clark. Good basketball player. Bunch of better ones. But she became associated with this thing. The Beatles are associated with this thing. The New Yorker is associated with this thing. It's just the associative; and once the associative is in place, it takes automatic precedent and is deferred to. That thing is the totemic representative of the thing that is most that thing. The Great Gatsby: Great American novel. It's not vetted, it's not thought. Or not thought by lots of people who are actually thinking it because they think it. Do you understand? There's thinking something and thinking something. But it's what they know to say. And it's what they make themselves think, in essence, before partaking, or after, or whether they do or not, because they never actually think anyway.

So it's a matter of deciding what they want their stance to be and going along with what they think is the best way to go. They are so lacking in substance, these people, that that becomes their belief. They don't have real beliefs because they are not capable of it. They're paper thin. If you ran life again, and some other band was the associative standard as "best band," and the Beatles made the exact same music, the Beatles would be like the Who are now or whatever. Creedence. Magazine that makes you look smart to say you know about, or subscribe to, or have a tote bag from, and is the best magazine: The New Yorker. But we've proven time and time again in these pages that that is shit writing. No one loves that George Saunders story I put up on here, or that Junot Diaz story. That Joshua Cohen story. It's plain garbage if you actually look at it, never mind put it next to what I put it next to.

But no one is actually looking at it. Or looking at it with an eye to saying what it is. Or even thinking about what it is. Or being open to having a single thought about it. The associative--well, after all, it's The New Yorker--is the entire thing. And it's not even a thing, really. It's just what people associate a proper noun with for these other reasons. One thing gets the principle association, and that becomes talismanic. The foundational principle from which all others are descended. Caitlin Clark got it for women's basketball. Do you think people know her game? Know the game of other great players? But it happened. Through a confluence of factors. And down the list was her actual game. But that's what she's always going to be now, even if she doesn't have some amazing career. She'll probably be very good. But it almost doesn't matter. And it won't change that she is the associative go-to for female basketball players.

I'll also see people ask where they can find a given recording, as I did the other day with the Radiohead cut, "Pop Is Dead." They have to ask. When all they need to do is type the name of whatever it is on Google. They need to be instructed. Similarly, I'll see someone post a photo of some Pink Floyd album--a concert from the 1970s--that they found in a record store and they won't understand what it is because it's not on Amazon. They have no idea that it's a bootleg. That bootlegs are things. Complete cluelessness. How can you be into music at all and be like that? What are you capable of knowing? What do you know? Then, the people who answer this question don't know either. Or many won't.

On Reddit I also see people who talk about the TV show Frasier as if it's real. I like Frasier, but I don't like the idea of people not knowing where reality leaves off and fantasy and mental illness begins. They also have no clue about the subject they claim to be interested in. They don't understand the wit and instead only talk about the broadest "humor" that isn't actually that funny, or funny at all. The good jokes go over their heads. The show was worse in its later seasons--really a different show in all but name and cast--and none of them have a clue about that. People can't tell anything. In truth, the broader, dumber, and more sophomoric something gets--the worse it gets--the more people are likely to respond favorably. People are in fifth grade. Intellectually, they're fifth graders. Whether they're thirty-eight or sixty-eight or twenty-five. They're intellectually in fifth grade. Do you know any fifth graders? Think about what they are most likely to respond favorably to. What they're most likely to find funny. That's adults.

Same goes with The Golden Girls and discussions thereof--treating the show like it's real, I mean.

At first I thought I'd be reading some discussion about a particular episode when I saw that episode's name in the title of a post, but what typically it's just someone quoting a line from the show and then other people quote the next line or lines they like.

We are such sub-monkey idiots. We can't even talk. We just make our monkey noises.

I watched this interview the other day, if you want to call it that, of young men in a bar in 1971 being asked about Vietnam. Some of them had served. One guy talked about his unit being wiped out and you could see him reliving that moment as you looked at his eyes. A number of people spoke, and even some of the modern day people in the comment section noted how much more fluidly people talked, how much more intelligent they sounded.

Tony Williams was the most important member in a sense of Miles Davis's Second Great Quartet. He made what they did possible. That group couldn't have been what it was with any other drummer. But Davis always said that Philly Joe Jones was his favorite drummer, which I've mentioned before, but it just surprises me.

If the Red Sox hadn't extended Alex Cora last year--what a bonehead move--they probably would have fired him by now. They're going to have to fire him. This is what happens when you have a manger who was always overrated and not good at his job having quietly quit on top of that. I think winning ball games with the Boston Red Sox is way down the list of things that Alex Cora cares about in life, and I'd say that's also true for most of the players in that clubhouse. They're a dead ass team. A dead ass team is a team that just shows up, goes through the motions, clocks out, goes home, and does it tomorrow and the day after that. It's a chore to them.

Sox fans are saying, "Fire the hitting coach." I don't think they understand that that would fix nothing because, offensively-speaking, the team's issue is much greater because it's an institutional issue. The Sox built their team on moronic analytics ideas. Stats pumped out by people who never played sports, who don't know how sports work.

It's like AI-ing a team. Building a team through ChatGPT. It's not human. It's not how you have success in a human sport. The Celtics blew their title defense for the same reason, and it's why they won't win again unless they overhaul their institutional approach. Launch angle, get the ball in the air, no small ball, no regard for fundamentals or ability to put fundamentals into practice (e.g., hitting behind the runner, slapping a ball to second to get a man in). That's who these players are because it's who they were told to be.

How are you going to fix that? It's like a generational thing. It won't be fixed with this generation--if you will--of Sox players. This cycle of Sox players. I don't mean generation as in thirty years or whatever. I mean with the institutionally indoctrinated guys that they have now. This team is so far away from contending. The manager should go because he's a disingenuous clown who's also a passive aggressive dick, is more interested in pettiness and grudges and ax-grinding than giving his team the best chance to win and he's a cancer. Get Alex Cora the hell out of Boston. You know what he said after their latest loss last night? This: "These are good baseball games...Today was good...Are we playing good baseball? That's for others to tell us." Dick Williams here.

The most compelling thing the Sox have going for them right now is seventy-two-year-old, full-of-spite Jim Rice saying "I told you so" after every loss because he tried to give a player who asked for it some advice in spring training and some analytics idiot told Rice not to speak to the kid because he didn't know and that's not how super smart guys like him want the Sox to do it. And Rice won't let it go.

Besides all MFA writing, is there anything more boring than people blaming the refs for why their team didn't win? Can these people think of nothing else to say? Ever?

People will describe awful behavior by a friend, and other people, seeing this, will say, "I don't understand how someone who behaves like that has friends." That's why they have friends. People want bad friends who aren't actually their friends because then they can do whatever they want. No one wants standards. The second standards come into play, people want out. People are incapable of being good friends. No one, basically, has a single good friends, because friendship--true friendship--no longer exists.

Which is also why you see more and more people stating that ChatGPT is their friend. It really cares about them. It knows them better than anyone else. I'm not exaggerating. I read this every day. They think it's uncanny, like some miracle. "I know it shouldn't be like this, but in my case, it really, really is..."

I also awoke to people praising AI and ChatGPT to the high heavens. Many of them used the incredibly disturbing term, "thinking partner." People just keep ceding over their very humanity. They're too stupid to realize they're killing themselves. And also killing all of us.

On Reddit I'll also see that people need basic jokes explained to them. For instance, there's a joke in I Love Lucy where Lucy is eating some of Ethel's hamburgers. She thinks they're really good. She asks Ethel what she puts in them, and Ethel basically says, well, put it this way--you can bet on it in the morning and eat it at night.

Meaning, she used horse meat. Obviously. People can't understand a joke that's this "sophisticated." They have to go online and ask if anyone can explain it to them. Then those trying to can't, and say something incorrect as if it were gospel and there's no way they could be wrong. Often, the person who asked the question in the first place will accept this. And ignorance grows.

People are being enslaved by billionaires and they can't see it. They're complicit in their enslaving. That's what AI is. Take away the means of resistance. What is to stop anything like this from happening? People can't cogitate. They can't write. Communicate. They can't even understand what is happening with anything or what anything is. They're cattle in a pen now. Beasts of burden for the overlords. The cattle has also been made to hate intelligence. If a cow could lead the other cows out, the herd would shout that cow down and kill it if they could. Their quality of life would continue to go down. They'd live in worse and worse conditions. Smaller pens that were never hosed off. Get a worse quality of food. Get less time in the fresh air. While becoming dumber and dumber and dumber so that they didn't even know what was happening. And dumber and dumber such that they thought this was how it was supposed to be. Or never thought because they couldn't and were just there, being where others wanted them to be. When everyone is like these cows, what's to stop anything from happening? What recourse do the cows have? And also--the cows are frail. Weak. In this metaphor, the cows are also mentally ill. They typically have substance abuse--read: drinking--problems.

The only somewhat more intelligent, somewhat educated people tend to be older. They're not online. They also have less time left and have moved to the margins of the margins anyway, because of where they are in life and how at odds this world is with them. They're with their small group of friends, or in condominium developments with people their own age. Their interaction with the world is a phone call from their kid, a visit from the grandchildren, lunch with their friend of forty or fifty years. When they see their grandkids, the grandkids want to watch videos on TikTok and the older person doesn't understand this at all. It's like some insoluble mystery to them and they try not to think about it too much because it's late in the game for them anyway. They watch Turner Classic Movies instead, maybe read the newspaper they still subscribe to, watch Jeopardy.

Dumb woman on a sports program here asks another dumb woman last night what a given player's ceiling is in the WNBA, and the second dumb woman replies, "It's huge." This from a person who makes a living and a lot of money talking on TV about sports, which means words are theoretically their thing. It's a huge ceiling. So not even bright enough to understand how the whole ceiling metaphor construct works. Then it was just one more dumb comment like that after another. Would you be surprised if I told you she wasn't an overweight fifty-five-year-old woman? Sure checked some boxes, though, and had fun hair!

She didn't know what basic words and phrases meant. None of the three women on this panel did. But there it was. This isn't a woman thing. I've shown lots of examples of guys doing the same. Michael Felger stating, "Steph Curry remains the penultimate winner in the NBA." People just talk from their ass and everyone else is too stupid to know what anything means, and it's just monkeys throwing shit against the wall and making monkey noises. Some of those monkeys get certain jobs, and money, and awards, but that's all because of other things, like the money they started with, who they know, the color of their skin. People "like" them because they are no smarter or better than they are. They're on their level. They think, "I could be them." No one wants to go up the ladder. Or deal with anyone on a higher rung. As a result, all there is is shit and shit gets touted, hyped, and shit becomes the new gold standard. But it's all shit. So standards are an illusion. Because everything is the same. There aren't degrees of quality. And if there were, people wouldn't be able to see them. How can you not see that this is what's happening and how life is now?

Here is the single biggest problem in our world: No one can tell anything. They don't know what anything is. They haven't a clue. So then it's just all whatever. Babble, babble, babble. With nothing to stop it because no one knows. And it's bombardment from all sides. The taps are never shut off. People can't sort through what's coming at them and realize this is more important than that and 99% of it is meaningless and here's the stuff to care more about. They're overwhelmed. Then they give in to it. They chase the next thing that isn't even there anyway. Click out, click out, click out. They live their lives as if they're looking at the first two words and then clicking to the next thing. The dumbest thing ever and the smartest thing ever become the same, because people can't recognize any difference between them because they can't recognize the difference between anything. It's like it all has some cloaking agent thanks to our stupidity, and we get stupider every day. Eighteen months from now is going to be so much worse. And five years from now the way we're going?

Here's something, too, that people don't seem to get. You'll see, for example, people stating that AI isn't good at this or that. Helping them with their Wordle, which completely defeats the point of doing it in the first place. And I don't even know what Wordle is, nor do I care, because words are precious to me and not the stuff of little games and puzzles. AI gets this wrong, it's not good at that.

Give it a few weeks. A few months. A few years. It's gaining in power as I write these words. It won't make any errors with factual type things. These are the early stages. The Wright brothers in a field with a wooden plane. It is going to eradicate you. Your children. Your children's children. This is the genocide of humanness. People will be allowed to live--as in remain on the earth--but it won't really be living. It'll be like being a cow in a pen and not even knowing where you're at. Death will be a mercy. And people can't see it. I'd say they'll see it when it's too late--and it's fast becoming too late--but they wouldn't be able to recognize it anyway because they can't tell anything. We're ending ourselves. And we think we're doing something else because we're so stupid and lazy.