PicoBlog

Like AI, my high school English teacher majored in lit. Mr. (sorry, forgot his name) could channel the ethos of Jane Austen’s novels that include the word, “and,” in the title but couldn’t channel Jane’s math skills. That’s why neither he nor AI can answer, “What is 1+1+1+3+1+1+1-3+2+1+2+3?” This is so going to be my go-to line for AI’s shortcomings.

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In the last 14 months, VCs have plowed $18B into AI startups. And, that trend is accelerating. Bloomberg says that the market for AI that write, draw, and code will be $1.3T by 2032. I back of the enveloped this thing using a reasonable WACC, accounting for the debt tax shield, and by amortizing the national debt. That’s like an awfully big number in today’s dollars. Have the folks who sport Patagonia vests and toss around the term, “Generative” like Popeye ‘roided up on a tin of spinach heaves Bluto off the screen, vacated their senses and sensibilities?

Vacated. Like the characters did in that fixture of Christmas flicks, The Holiday. You know that one, right? Two pretty people trade houses to vacate their lives. It’s OK, you can nod, no one is watching. Then, you know Jude Law’s character weeps at a good book, a great film, the opera… he’s a major weepah.

Well, I’m a major gushah. I gush when smart people write smart stuff. Like this, “This newsletter cannot be written by AI. No piece of feature writing can be written by AI. No decent fiction can be written by AI. Some functional writing can be written by AI, with heavy human input. But what AI can currently do, is a serviceable job of writing LinkedIn content. LinkedIn even flags it as a feature, not a bug.”

At least I think that was written by a person. The account just goes by, “Explainable.” I mean, for all I know, it could be an elaborate hoax to foist AI writing as non-AI writing poking fun at the limitations of AI writing.

But that would be as circular as putting a1 = b1 + a1 in Excel. And I don’t think AI is that smart or that funny. On the other hand, you know who is that smart and that funny? Elon Musk. He wants to let X’s premium users tweet using Grok (his AI trained on tweets). My genuinely brilliant friend, Evan, outlined the circular logic thusly, “Grok writes tweets, Grok then ingests those tweets to shape itself, premium users are paid for impressions, Grok produces mucho content, users get paid for the content……..”

Before I failed math and after I failed economics and accounting, I failed English. Mucho time. Oh, and Spanish. Which qualifies me to post on social media, write this, and unwrap warped logic wrapped in leftover sandwich bags.

And, there it is. Sandwiched. Like so much banality that flies by us between a torrent of other words, “Serviceable… LinkedIn…” 

The big social media companies are worth, in total, $1.8T. If I’m not right, I’ll show my work for part marks. You’re welcome to include social adjacencies like Spotify, dating services, or Donald Trump’s thing.

My friend Darrin podcasts (is that a verb?). He does four things to get listeners: [1] plan a show, [2] produce a show, [3] promote the show on social platforms, and [4] interact with fans across multiple platforms — YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. to keep them coming back.

Since the beginning of social time, creators like Darrin have filled platforms to the brim with jibber-jabber. No offense meant, D. He knows sports and he knows the score. If you engage people on social, the algorithms show people your posts. If not… well… they don’t. And you don’t get seen.

Non-creative stuff is the least fun thing most creators do. Drudgery is a leading cause of creator burn out. And, creator burn out is bad for social platforms. Really bad.

To live, platforms need posts. That lopsided trade was how platforms forced people to post. It’s the dirty secret of the ad-driven Internet. We need to keep creating stuff to keep the social’s lights on.

Or do we?

Think for a sec. Why would Elon Musk give away even a tiny slice of his ad revenue to creators when AI creates the posts for them? Because he doesn’t need their content. He needs their personas. They’re just shilling mouthpieces to keep the game alive. Like Destiny’s Child used a drum machine on Say My Name. [feel free to gasp at any or all of this.]

I dropped a little Easter Egg into this story, “LinkedIn even flags it [AI] as a feature, not a bug.” Of course they do. They desperately need us to accept the “serviceable” things AI posts. Enough so that we return to keep reading it. In a perfect world, they need us to gush as about the dumbification of verse across the multitudes of platforms we visit. To take an extended holiday and vacate our senses and sensibilities.

If we’re cool with a generative drum machine laying down the rhythm while we wait for the next virtuoso Kardashian solo, the VCs may be OK while they wait for a real AI breakthrough.

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