By: Mike Sciabica
I usually take a peek at Facebook in the morning, while I have a cup of coffee. There are a few Facebook pages that catch my interest. My high school graduating class has one, as does my high school in general. Since I liked my high school years, I look at those. I check out a few car pages, and a few train pages, because my kid-days love of trains never died. Sadly, it seems that every other post is of a political nature. I had to learn a new talent; I call it “Whack The X-Button Mole With the Mouse.” I believe what I believe; I don’t need to watch/listen to you rant, on both sides of the fence. Though, I did notice one where Josh Shapiro kind of looked like an opossum. I rather liked that.
Some posts feature information that is patently false. There are crazy railroad fans out there (we call them “foamers,” as in “foaming at the mouth”) who will throw anything up there and think that the rest of us will believe it. I’m thinking, “Don’t feed me this crap. An SD-40-2 locomotive has six axles, and three radiator fans. I know; RJ Corman has a bunch of them here in Clearfield. You just tried to pass off a GP-38 as that. Go wipe the foam off your mouth.”
Another annoying part of Facebook are the inane posts that people with nothing else to do who will post there. One was titled, “All Things Pennsylvania.” Though, the author (I use that word loosely) could have gone with “All Things Philadelphia” or “All Things Potholes.”
These sorts of posts typically feature artwork that was the result of AI (notice that I didn’t say “handiwork”). Some of them are so ridiculous that I’m starting to believe that the high school graduation rate in the Keystone State is a lie.
Let’s face it–any moron can come up with something with the use of Artificial Intelligence. But that’s the point. It’s artificial intelligence, which has absolutely nothing to do with common sense or everyday intelligence. I saw a “Pennsylvania” post where there was a map of Pennsylvania in the background, with the counties outlined. I never knew that the southern border of our state wasn’t a straight line (it is). I tried to find Clearfield County, and Centre County, where I grew up. No can do. In fact, I couldn’t recognize the outlines of any of the 67 counties, except for Philadelphia. Though, I would be happy with just 66 counties if we could hand Brotherly Love off to New Jersey.
I thought to myself, “The moron who composed this probably was asleep during Pennsylvania History class in high school. He probably can’t name more than five of the counties in our state.”
Since I wasn’t asleep during Pa History in ninth grade, I grabbed a pen and paper, gave myself ten minutes, and I wrote down as many of the counties that I could think of. I got 60 out of 67. I whiffed on Montour, Monroe, Wyoming, Franklin, Crawford, Northampton, and Lebanon.
Lebanon–the home of Lebanon Bologna! How could I have forgotten that?
Sixty out of 67…that’s 90 percent. A solid B-plus in real schools, an A where they’ve decided to water down the grading some. Not too bad for a 73-year-old. And then, I printed a map of Pa, with all the counties outlined. I got all 60 of mine in the right places. Then, I took the other seven and easily found their locations.
By now, I’m confident that my faithful readers are realizing that AI has its places. And, those places are not in the hands of people who are idiots to begin with. There is no way that AI can fill in the gaps for someone who treated his or her school days as naptime. If you had decided to go through life dumb, then AI will not change that. To borrow from my favorite comedian Ron White, AI can’t fix stupid. You have to fix it yourself.
