Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…

I knew some folks that used to own a “dented can” grocery store named Dirt Cheap Grocery. They would find all sorts of deals on entire lots of nearly expired canned and frozen goods and what ever various other things they could find through their various connections. There would always be something different, and they would have some pretty incredible deals sometimes. I remember buying an entire case of frozen hash brown patties for $5. There were six 5 lb bags in there. we split it up with my wife’s sisters families. Another time they had those Michelina’s frozen pasta dishes that had just expired for 10 for $1. My favorite deodorant scent had been recently discontinued and they just so happened to get a hold of a big display bin full of hundreds of them and sold them for $1 a piece. It took me several years before I finally ran out…

Learned that lesson… I work developing e-learning, and all of our stuff was built in Flash. Our development and delivery systems also relied heavily on Flash components cooperating with HTML and Javascript. It was a monumental undertaking when we had to convert everything to HTML5. When our system was first developed and implemented, we couldn’t foresee the death of Flash, and as mobile devices became more ubiquitous, we never imagined anyone would want to take our training on those little bitty phone screens. Boy were we wrong. There was a time when I really wanted to tell Steve Jobs he could take his IOS and cram it up his cram-hole…