To be honest, I think I’ll wait until some weekend when it’s streaming for free on Netflix.
At a theater or drive-in near you
“Pen Avenue” for November 2025
Here’s this month’s “Pen Avenue,” my cartoon for Print, Pittsburgh’s East End newspaper.
Those Pittsburghers of a certain age will remember Pa Pitt, the personification of Pittsburgh popularized by the late Cy Hungerford, cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for almost 50 years. I have to admit, getting to draw Pa Pitt gave me goosebumps and I’m tempted to do it more often.
The cartoon itself is based on a 1992 cartoon by another legendary cartoonist Herb “Herblock” Block of the Washington Post, called “Your name Clinton?” I hope neither Mr. Hungerford or Mr. Block, wherever they are, are mad at me for stealing their ideas; I tried to give credit where credit is due.
Here’s Hungerford’s Pa Pitt:
And the Herblock cartoon to which I’m paying homage:
Print is not available online; you can only read it in (what else?) print. It’s available at Giant Eagle and other stores in Pittsburgh’s East End, or subscribe on the website.
You’re in good hands
Working from home today. Landline rings. Caller ID says “Sewickley, PA.” Someday I really need to start taping these calls:
Hello?
“Hello, sir. This is Justin from your Allstate agent. How are you today, sir?”
(We do not have Allstate Insurance. Also, he does not sound like a “Justin.” He sounds like a non-native speaker of English, at the very least.)
Oh, I’m really good, Justin, how are you?
“I’m fine, sir. This is a courtesy call about your Allstate policy. We’re doing surprise calls to our customers to explain how they can save money.”
Well that’s great!
“Sir, first of all, do you have a house and a car?”
Yes, we have cars.
“How many cars do you have, sir?”
Let me check. (Off-mike) One … two … three … uh … (on-mike) We have eight.
“Oh, my! Eight cars! Well, that is a blessing, sir. To have so many cars. And are these cars owned by you?”
Yes, I own all of them.
“Well, how lucky you are. Tell me, are these cars used for business or personal use?”
Well … a little of both. I mean, they’re demolition derby cars.
“Oh. Well. So would you say they’re more used for business?”
Hmm. I guess about 50/50, because the demolition derby is kind of a hobby, I don’t get paid.
“OK, then. So let’s say personal use. And are all of the cars running?”
Uh … no, only seven are running. The eighth one lost last weekend.
“OK then. So seven cars. What a blessing. Tell me, are they all insured?”
Oh, no. No, you can’t get insurance on demolition derby cars.
“Oh. Well. What about your house? Do you own your home?”
No, we’re squatting here.
“Oh. Well, in that case, we probably can’t help you over the phone. You’d have to go to your local Allstate office.”
Well, I’ll do that, Justin, thank you much.
“You have a blessed day, sir.”
Too lappy, boys
The curse of the social media age is that politeness and kindness don’t make you (in)famous — being nasty does
Some of you know I’m a big fan of Jack Benny, even though he died before I was born. (What difference should that make? I’ve been dying on the radio every weekend for 20 years.)
Benny was probably the greatest American comedian of the 1940s and 1950s, so it’s a shame he’s not better remembered today. He centered Black and female talent — Benny was never shy about giving Eddie Anderson (Rochester) or Mary Livingston punchlines that scored off of him — and he did a lot to mainstream Jewish humor for gentile audiences.
Anyway, I love Jack Benny. Not for nothing does our Internet radio station, Tube City Online Radio, run Jack Benny every Sunday night at 7 p.m., just as it aired on network radio “back in the day.” (We’re currently running shows from 1945 in order. Check it out some Sunday night.)
Though he never completed high school, Benny was well-read. He loved language and he appreciated writers. While other comedians tried to pretend they didn’t use writers, Benny wasn’t above bringing them on stage and mentioning their names. When you see Seth Meyers or Conan O’Brien or David Letterman feature their writers in sketches — that’s a technique more or less invented by Jack Benny.
Benny also was a master of timing and misdirection. He famously got laughs just out of a well-timed stare or an uncomfortable silence. He knew that if he suggested the punchline but stopped short of saying it out loud, the audience would complete the joke in their minds and their laughter would be even louder and longer and more appreciative.
In more recent times, Tina Fey and Seth Meyers have talked about how they hate “clapter.” “Clapter” is when the audience claps instead of laughing because you’ve told a joke that has an obvious punchline and the audience applauds to show they agree with your opinion. It’s the hack who comes out on stage and says, “Hey, how about that Donald Trump? Is that guy a clown or what?” And his audience claps, they don’t laugh.
I like Stephen Colbert, but I find a lot of his punchlines generate “clapter.” To be honest, a lot of Jimmy Kimmel’s political jokes also are designed for “clapter.” Seth Meyers is equally hard on Trump, but his jokes are more circuitous and absurdist; he’s also not shy about making himself the butt of the joke, and that makes me laugh.
Benny used to tell his writers not to make the punchlines “too lappy.” That “You’re throwing it into their laps. Too lappy.”
Since I don’t have a daily radio show, I use social media as my radio show. I try to write a least a couple of jokes every day. Most of them are pretty bad, but some of them make me laugh.
On Sunday night, as the Steelers were falling apart against the Los Angeles Chargers, the Democrats in the U.S. Senate were caving into Republican demands to reopen in government but getting very little in return, other than an empty promise to vote on health insurance subsidies in a few months. So I wrote, “The Steelers defense tonight must be getting coached by Chuck Schumer. But I hear the Chargers have promised to give them a chance to score some points in the fourth quarter.”
I got a fair amount of clapter, but one follower — Dana Simpson, who writes “Phoebe & Her Unicorn” — took me task for a gratuitous smack at Chuck Schumer, and you know what? She was right. It also was a lazy whack at Steelers coaching, which has become a reliable, hacky punchline in Pittsburgh over the last few years, like making fun of the Pirates (which I’ve also done). Like I said, I try to write some jokes every day, but they’re not all gems.
I was thinking about all of this after social media platform Bluesky suspended two people for making what the company called threats of violence. Sarah Kendzior, a best-selling author and former writer for the New York Daily News, Toronto Globe & Mail, and other prominent publication, was suspended after she made fun of an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jon Fasman. Fasman wrote that he had recently “discovered” a “deeply uncool” country music singer who he felt was more or less forgotten. The country music singer was Johnny Cash.
Lots of people dunked on the article — how does anyone grow up in America without knowing who Johnny Cash is? — and Kendzior quipped she wanted to shoot Fasman “just to watch him die,” quoting a line from Cash’s most famous song, “Folsom Prison Blues.” Bluesky called it a “credible threat of violence.”
And then, comedian Patton Oswalt, whose grouchy exterior and profane jokes mask a really sensitive soul, was suspended by Bluesky for making an off-color remark about podcaster Megyn Kelly. In the wake of the release of thousands of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, Kelly has been defending President Trump, who has a well-known interest in the sexual attractiveness of teen-age girls.
Kelly’s remarks have been cringeworthy, even by her (low) standards. Being sexually attracted to 15-year-old girls is no big deal, she suggested this week: “He wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
Oswalt — who has a 16-year-old daughter — posted some of Kelly’s remarks and then said, “Wood chipper. Feet first.”
Bluesky regarded that as a threat; as if Oswalt was going to kidnap Megyn Kelly and give her the “Fargo” treatment.
The curse of our social media age is that no one gets rewarded for being nice and calm and polite. Calm and sensible doesn’t go viral on TikTok or Twitter; huffing aerosol cans until you pass out or taking massive doses of Benadryl does. What else goes viral? Writing horrible things about other people.
I’ve been on the radio for 20 years and writing professionally since I was 18 years old, and I’ve mostly stayed out of trouble. (Not always, but that’s a story for another time.)
And by staying mostly out of trouble, I also haven’t become rich and famous. That’s the trade-off. As a former boss used to say, “If you want to run with the big dogs, you got to learn to pee in the tall grass.” If you want to get rich and (in)famous from your writing or broadcasting, you have to push the envelope, and sometimes that means going too far and being offensive — and getting fired from your job or kicked off of a platform. Just ask Howard Stern.
I don’t know if either Kendzior or Oswalt should have been suspended from Bluesky. Kendzior’s joke was a bit more open to misinterpretation; if someone didn’t know who Johnny Cash was, and had never heard the song “Folsom Prison Blues,” I guess they could have assumed she really was angry enough to shoot the Wall Street Journal writer. It’s a stretch, but I could see it happening. Oswalt’s suspension is stupid; he’s a world-famous comedian best known for telling raw and sometimes raunchy stories. No one seriously thinks he was going to put Megyn Kelly into a wood chipper.
I suppose the moral of the story, if there is one, is that if you want to avoid getting kicked off of any platform — whether it’s social media, your company’s Slack channel or a radio station — you’d best not be too “lappy.” Make the audience work for the joke, just like Jack Benny did. Don’t go for clapter and don’t make it too obvious. Your fans will appreciate being in on the joke but it will go over the heads of the humorless idiots who control much of the Internet.
Programming notes
Halloween is next week, so this Saturday’s show will feature a Halloween theme, including a salute to Pittsburgh’s own Joe Flaherty, who died last year.
On Sunday night, I’ll be at Arsenal Lanes in Lawrenceville for a Sunday Night Oldies Party from 9 p.m. to 12 midnight. I’ve already got my funny face on for that.
Coming up in a couple of weeks (Nov. 22), we’ll be broadcasting from McKeesport’s annual Salute to Santa Parade, which gets underway along Fifth Avenue at the McKees Point Marina at 11 a.m. I’ll be handling some of the live video commentary.
I’d love to do some more remote broadcasts on Saturdays, but generally no one asks. So if you have a non-profit event in the Mon Valley area and you’d like Uncle Jay to bring the oldies caravan to it from 12 to 3 p.m. on a Saturday, email me at jaythurbershow@gmail.com. There’s no charge for the service (and believe me, it’s worth every cent).
And for those of you who asked, I’m generally at Arsenal on the second and fourth Sundays of each month. The second Sunday is usually indie rock and alternative pop from the 1980s through today, while the fourth Sunday is an old-fashioned Mon Valley style oldies rock ‘n roll fest.
What are you lookin’ at, butthead?
President Trump this week ordered the demolition of the East Wing of The White House to begin construction of a $250 million ballroom that he says will be funded by donations.
Architects have now released this updated rendering of its replacement.
After some Democrats have criticized what they called the defacing of The White House, Republicans put them in headlocks and gave them noogies.
At a news conference at Donald Trump’s White House & Pleasure Paradise, the president dismissed his critics, saying, “why don’t they make like a tree and get out of here?”
Asked for comment, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said “this is the first I’ve heard of any of it.”
More news any moment.
“Pen Avenue” for October 2025
Here’s this month’s “Pen Avenue,” my cartoon for Print, Pittsburgh’s East End newspaper.
Drawing this cartoon, I learned that it’s surprisingly hard to figure out whether or not X the Owl and Lady Elaine Fairchilde have feet, because we only ever see them above the waist. So I made some guesses.
You can find a No Kings march here: https://www.nokings.org/
The League of Women Voters is sponsoring two events in Pittsburgh: https://lwvpgh.org/content.aspx?page_id=4002&club_id=554754&item_id=2732729
And there’s more information on Mobilize: https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/790386/
Print is not available online; you can only read it in (what else?) print. It’s available at Giant Eagle and other stores in Pittsburgh’s East End, or subscribe on the website.
The Kimmel mess
Disney/ABC is not the only Mickey Mouse operation in control of our national media apparatus
For those of you who missed Saturday’s show (Sept. 20), here’s a transcript of what I said about the Jimmy Kimmel situation. I don’t have a whole lot more to say because, frankly, the story’s been talked to death.
As always, opinions expressed on Radio 9 with Jay Thurber are those of the host, and not those of WRCT Radio Inc., Carnegie Mellon University, Tube City Online Radio, or Tube City Community Media.
I’ve been trying to decide if I wanted to say anything about this or not, but what the heck — until they drag me off the air, I might as well, right?
If anybody wants to try to get me fired from WRCT, by the way, the joke’s on you …. they don’t pay me anything! (It makes it difficult to fire someone who doesn’t make any money, doesn’t it?)
But if you wanna try to get my show taken off the air, the email address is info@wrct.org, or you can write to WRCT Radio, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh 15213. That goes for the chairman of the FCC, too, if he’s listening.
So, the chairman of the FCC threatened the licenses of TV stations that carry “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” And as a response, Nexstar — which I think owns 200 TV stations around the country — pulled Kimmel’s show.
This is one of the problems right now — there used to be a rule in this country that you could own “seven, seven and seven.” In other words, you could own seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations and seven TV stations. Then they increased it to 10, and then — thank you Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich — back in the 1990s, they eliminated basically all of the rules. Now, you essentially can own as many as you can get your grubby little booger-hooks into. So we have companies like Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns Channel 22 and Channel 53 here in Pittsburgh, and we have Nexstar, and a couple of these big conglomerates that have gobbled up all the local TV stations.
Well, Nexstar wants to merge with another big, giant company, and they need FCC approval.
As for Jimmy Kimmel — and I’m not a huge Jimmy Kimmel fan; I’m more of a Seth Meyers person — but Jimmy Kimmel has been going after the administration pretty hot and heavy this year. Obviously our greatest president — your favorite president — doesn’t like that.
So he put pressure on the FCC — the Friendly Candy Corporation, which also governs radio stations. The chairman of the FCC wears a picture of the president on his lapel, and I’m not making that up. He has a tiny gold pin — well, it’s not that tiny, probably an inch wide (that’s what she said) — that he wears on his lapel that is in the shape of President Trump’s face.
The FCC has the final say whether or not these giant companies are allowed to get even more ginormous; he doesn’t like Jimmy Kimmel; the stations feel threatened; so ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air on Wednesday, apparently with very little warning. Supposedly, they were literally getting ready to tape the show when the word came down from the network, “we’re gonna run Celebrity Family Feud instead.”
Something to know about the First Amendment: It’s not “censorship” if WRCT decides my show stinks — and my God, they’ve had 20 years, if they haven’t figured out this show stinks by now — but if the program director decides this show stinks and takes me off because no one is listening, that’s not censorship. That’s not a violation of the First Amendment.
But if the government tells the station to take me off for any reason, that is a violation of the First Amendment, and what we have here pretty clearly is the government putting pressure on the TV station owners; the TV station owners losing their minds, as you might expect, with the government threatening them; and ABC deciding “let’s put Jimmy Kimmel’s stuff in a wet paper box and throw it out on the curb.”
This comes about a month after CBS announced they were no longer renewing Stephen Colbert’s show. Now, Stephen Colbert has spent his whole career going after Donald Trump; but when they cancelled Colbert, they said “well, the show cost so much money,” and they said “we’re just gonna let his contract expire next year,” so there was some plausible deniability that OK, maybe they were just doing this to save money.
I don’t think there’s anybody thinks that what happened last week was anything other than the President of the United States got his feelings hurt, and the FCC is punishing him for it.
And this is where if you want to get my show taken off the air, by all means, email info@wrct.org, and tell them you were listening to Radio 9 on Saturday afternoon.
Here are the comments that Jimmy Kimmel made that were so outrageous that people lost their minds. Are you ready?
And I should say first of all, last week, after a lunatic shot Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, here’s what Jimmy Kimmel had to say:
“Can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human? On behalf of my family we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”
OK. That’s what Jimmy Kimmel said last week; and here’s what he said on Tuesday that got his show canceled indefinitely:
“The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered. Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, doing everything they can to score political points from it. And in-between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
Was that comment in bad taste? I guess that’s up to you. Was the comment offensive? Again, I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder.
Was the comment factually wrong? Well, we don’t know yet the motives of this crazy person that shot Charlie Kirk; he hasn’t been cooperating the police.
But those those are the controversial comments they canceled Jimmy Kimmel for, indefinitely. And now the TV station owners — these two big companies that want to become even bigger companies — they’re demanding that Jimmy Kimmel apologize for this, and also make a donation to Charlie Kirk’s organization.
If you saw the chairman of the FCC talking about this, his comments could only be described as Tony Soprano-esque — about the revenge that they are looking for.
David Letterman was on a panel discussion this week sponsored by The Atlantic magazine and here’s what he had to say:
“In the world of somebody who’s an authoritarian, maybe a dictatorship, everyone is going to be touched. For 30 years I did this for a living, so I see this happen of Colbert; that was inexcusable. The man deserves a great deal of credit. He’s in the hall of fame nine times and to be treated like that — all because the Ellison family didn’t want trouble with Donald Trump? With this move, they got rid of him, you’re not gonna have to worry about anything, Larry (Ellison); it’s all gone, fine, goodnight.
“And then my friend Jimmy. I just feel bad because you see where this going, correct? It’s managed media, it’s no good, it’s ridiculous, and you can’t go around firing somebody because you are fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office; that’s just not how this works.
“The FCC chairman — this guy, Brendan Carr — says ‘we can do things the easy way, or we can do things the hard way.’
“Who’s hiring these goons, Mario Puzo?
“For God’s sakes, when I was a kid, I was like 20 years old and I wanted to work at a radio station, so I went to Chicago to the FCC. You take a test, you pass the test, you have your third-phone radio broadcasting license; that’s what the FCC does. You’re a 50,000 watt clear-channel radio station, and once a year they come and check to make sure you’re not broadcasting at 55-thousand watts, and God forbid you are, then you get an $8 fine. That’s the FCC.
[…]
“The institution of the President of the United States ought to be bigger than worrying about a talk show. He really ought to be bigger than that … It would be hilarious it wasn’t something that we may never recover from.
“Here’s the thing that’s up my nose these days. People keep saying, ‘by God, we have get to work on those midterms.’ Well, I think the midterm elections will be elections in name only, I’m sorry. The Republicans have raised billions of dollars; the Democrats i think are staggering a bit behind in terms of fundraising.
“I’m not exactly of full-minded understanding of what Jimmy said, or what he was trying to say, and what mistake was made, but this is something that was predicted by our president right after Stephen Colbert was walked off, so you’re telling me this isn’t premeditated at some level?”
That’s David Letterman at The Atlantic Festival on a panel discussion talking about free speech; you can find out more at The Atlantic website, or you can see the whole discussion there.
And I think that’s where my thoughts on this situation lie, and I’ve taken up enough time.
“Pen Avenue” for September 2025
Here’s this month’s “Pen Avenue,” my cartoon for Print, Pittsburgh’s East End newspaper.
Print is not available online; you can only read it in (what else?) print. It’s available at Giant Eagle and other stores in Pittsburgh’s East End, or subscribe on the website.
A.I.-ay-yi-yi-yi
Good grief, we’re burning up massive amounts of electricity to create three-eyed Snoopys
Someone posted this A.I.-generated image on Facebook recently:
Great job, ChatGPT! I’d recognize the famous “Penoots” character “Snoppy” anywhere.
Take a good look at this abomination. Snoopy’s smile is sideways, and he appears to have either two noses, or a sideways eyeball. It’s hard to tell. A six-year-old child could draw a better picture of Snoopy, and also could tell you why this image is messed up.
But “artificial intelligence” (sic) can’t, because “artificial intelligence” (sic) isn’t actually “intelligent” in any human way. It doesn’t have the reasoning power of a six-year-old child.
Charles Schulz had a very simple but sophisticated drawing style that reduced mouths to lines and eyes to ovals. Nevertheless, a six-year-old can intuit that a vertical oval represents Snoopy’s eye and a horizontal oval represents Snoopy’s nose, because human brains are great at spotting faces.
Computers have to have that explained to them.
I’ve written about this before, but I think it bears repeating, especially as Pittsburgh’s elected officials are all eagerly touting “A.I.” (sic) as the Next Big Thing That is Going to Save Western Pennsylvania from its ongoing population decline.
(Previous things that were going to save us from population decline, during my lifetime, have included tourism, new professional sport stadiums, foodie culture, a bigger airport, more hotels, the Mon-Fayette Expressway, a bigger convention center, legalized gambling, and I’m sure I’m missing some things. During that time, Pittsburgh has slipped from the top 10 metropolitan areas in the United States to barely hanging on in the top 30.)
“The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh” also didn’t save Pittsburgh.
Behind the original concept of “artificial intelligence” was the idea that science could create computers that solved problems like a human solves problems. Beginning in the 1950s, computer scientists, psychologists, neurologists and others — many of them in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University — worked to develop models of the human brain, understand human reasoning, and create computer programs that could emulate the thinking process.
Their goal was a “thinking machine.” At times, they got close, but understanding human thought has proved very elusive, and we still don’t know exactly how the human brain acquires information, stores memories and synthesizes it all into new ideas.
At the same time, computer memory has gotten incredibly cheap. You can buy a multi-terabyte hard drive for under $100. You can buy a 128 gigabyte flash memory card at Walmart or Target for $20.
Computer processors have gotten cheaper and cheaper, too. A computer chip that cost the equivalent of $800 in 1970 now costs $1.58 today, but don’t bother buying it; it’s been obsolete for decades.
Meanwhile, an Intel processor with 12 cores, which is almost unimaginably more powerful than the primitive 1970 technology, costs under $200.
So beginning just after the turn of the 21st century, research into computer problem-solving machines moved from “trying to create a thinking machine” to “throwing lots of cheap memory and cheap computer chips at the problems” and solving them through brute force.
And it worked! With enough cheap computer power thrown at difficult problems, you could come up with solutions. It was an enormous achievement.
Most computer scientists, rightly, didn’t call this “artificial intelligence,” because they knew better. It wasn’t “intelligent.” They called them “large language models” or “statistical machine learning.”
But “statistical machine learning” sounds dull. Investors and marketing people have labeled it “artificial intelligence” because that’s way sexier.
And when they started pushing it as “artificial intelligence” that could replace human workers and make bigger profits for companies that use A.I., money from Wall Street followed.
Some day, I expect, probably sooner than we think, scientists will invent machines that can reason and think like a human, and those machines will be able to create art and music from scratch.
But they’re not there yet; right now, every “A.I.” still relies on sucking up vast amounts of data — whether it’s words or pictures or sounds — turning it into numbers, slicing and dicing and processing them, and then crunching them back out.
It’s still brute-force, and assigning an “A.I.” program or a chat-bot a personality, or assuming it has motives or feelings, strikes me as foolish and incredibly dangerous.
“A.I.” can’t create anything. It can only look at everything that came before it, and using probability and statistics, create a simulation from those inputs that looks like the previous things. It’s a copy of a copy. It’s not creativity.
I find A.I. is incredibly useful … for some things. I use A.I. software to generate transcripts of long audio files. I’ve also used A.I. to make summaries of long documents. In both cases, the results aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty darned good, and they are time-savers. The brute-force approach works really well at taking a big giant amount of data and smooshing it down into a smaller amount of data, just as a paper filter works really well at extracting delicious coffee from ground-up beans.
But I would never just pour random shit into the coffee pot and drink whatever comes out, and I would never use A.I. to generate something out of thin air.
Nor would it trust it to answer questions for me. When you ask an A.I. a question, the A.I. can’t know if the answers are actually correct, or even logical. It’s taking guesses, based on crunching massive amounts of data and simulating what it’s seen before; sometimes it’s guessing right, sometimes it’s guessing wrong. If garbage went in, garbage will come out.
As a for-instance, a colleague recently asked a chat-bot to examine his website for broken links. It spit out a page full of broken links and he asked if I’d help fix them. When I logged into the website, I found that the pages the chat-bot had decided were “broken” didn’t actually exist.
In fact, the URLs — the web addresses at the top of browser windows that show where web pages can be found — included directories and subdirectories that weren’t even on that website. No human being would have typed those addresses into Safari or Chrome, because a human would have instantly realized the URLs didn’t make sense. I couldn’t figure out why the chat-bot found broken pages that weren’t even there.
I just happened to be having lunch with a computer scientist friend that day, so I explained the problem. “Oh, that,” he said. “The A.I. made them up. You gave it a task — find broken links on the website — so it did its best to find some broken links on the website to answer your question.
“Basically, it hallucinated them,” he said.
Let’s set aside for a minute, if we can, that “A.I.” (sic) programs require theft and plagiarism. For example, to generate our “Snoppy” picture at the top of the page, the “A.I.” (sic) had to scrape thousands of images of “Peanuts” cartoons, turn them into numbers, chop them into bites of data, and determine what kinds of shapes and colors are typical of “Snoopy.” That’s copyright infringement. A lot of people get stuck at this very point — “A.I.” (sic) companies are profiting by stealing work done by humans. Eventually, if you take humans out of the creative process, there will be nothing for “A.I.” (sic) to steal except for products squeezed out by other “A.I.” (sic).
And let’s set aside for a minute that “A.I.” (sic) requires enormous, massive amounts of electrical power and massive amounts of water to cool down the computers. Remember, when you ask “A.I.” (sic) to generate a picture or write a memo for you, it’s solving that problem by firing up huge networks of computer chips and storage systems.
Since 2021, according to some estimates, electricity prices for residential customers have gone up 10 to 20 percent and prices for commercial customers are up about 30 percent. The rapid construction of power-hungry data-processing centers is being cited as a major cause of the increase in costs. And water levels are rapidly going down as water is diverted to cool those computer centers. It’s resource intense and contributes to climate change; this is another objection that many people have to “A.I.” (sic).
So “Artificial Intelligence” (sic) relies on stealing other people’s work, using massive amounts of electricity (creating more pollution) and using massive amounts of water … but is it at least producing something that’s useful? Is there at least a trade-off?
It’s not clear to me that there is. Right now, the amount of damage that “A.I.” (sic) is doing far outweighs any meager benefits.
To go back to the example of our picture at the top of the page:
First: Snoopy is probably the most popular cartoon character in the entire world after Mickey Mouse. Since 1950, Snoopy has been depicted in movies, TV shows, books and (of course) newspapers, and plastered on everything from blimps to T-shirts to lunchboxes. There is no need for a computer to be able to generate fake images of Snoopy. We don’t need it.
And second, despite all of the expense involving in running an A.I. data center, and all of the pollution it creates, A.I. can’t even generate a good image of Snoopy.
Does that sound like a good deal to you? It sounds lousy to me.
If you went to McDonald’s and every third hamburger they made was actually a giant, basketball-sized meatball instead, and it cost you $500, you’d be pretty pissed off.
“A.I.” (sic) is not a toy. It’s an insanely expensive giant meatball generator. It’s a powerful tool, but so is a power saw, and if you misuse either one of them, you can hurt yourself.
It’s also not “intelligent.” It’s dumb. That may change some day — I’d be willing to say it will change some day — but it hasn’t yet.
Anyone who tells you that “artificial intelligence is here, now, and we don’t need humans to create movies or images or write books any more, or even doctors or nurses to diagnose diseases, because computers can do that work!” is dumb enough to buy a picture of a three-eyed Snoopy and call it art.
And don’t let them pick up food at McDonald’s for you or use your power saw without strict supervision.