Another comic strip wonderfully rendered by Nadine Scholtes!
I mean, who knows? Maybe years from now, A.I. really will be all that. But for now, it feels like a bunch of very wealthy people have made a strategic decision to spend incomprehensible amounts of money pushing A.I. at us – at a considerable cost to the environment. Computer scientists Shaolei Ren and Adam Wierman wrote:
Even putting aside the environmental toll of chip manufacturing and supply chains, the training process for a single AI model, such as a large language model, can consume thousands of megawatt hours of electricity and emit hundreds of tons of carbon. This is roughly equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of hundreds of households in America. Furthermore, AI model training can lead to the evaporation of an astonishing amount of fresh water into the atmosphere for data center heat rejection, potentially exacerbating stress on our already limited freshwater resources.
All these environmental impacts are expected to escalate considerably, with the global AI energy demand projected to exponentially increase to at least 10 times the current level and exceed the annual electricity consumption of a small country like Belgium by 2026.
It would be one thing if A.I. was actually miraculously improving our lives. But although A.I. does have some genuine uses, most ordinary people’s encounters with A.I. are not just useless, but intrusive and sometimes actively harmful, in ways large, small, and stupid.
A.I. has created a great deal of work for teachers and professors trying to keep their students from having A.I. write their papers. The prestige science fiction magazine Clarkesworld had to stop accepting submissions because they were being flooded with terrible A.I.-generated stories.
I had to stop using Google to search, because Google insists on showing A.I. generated summaries above search results. But A.I. doesn’t reliably get even facts right, and the only way I have to tell if the information is accurate or not is… more searching. (I now use the Duck Duck Go.search engine, which is comparitively minimalistic and provides better results. )
(But apparently even Duck Duck Go occasionally offers A.I. summaries of search results, aaargh! I didn’t know that, I found that out searching as I was writing this Patreon post. Although, to be fair, they apparently come up infrequently and unobtrusively enough that I’ve never noticed, and that function can be shut off if you go to settings).
The annoyance I experienced with Google search’s intrusive A.I. is, obviously, an incredibly minor issue – but billions of people search with google (which has over 90% of the search market), and that adds up to a lot of minor annoyance. And a lot of energy usage. And virtually no one asked for this!
I’ve gotten distracted. The point of this cartoon – remember this cartoon? This is an essay about a cartoon – is that I just find the plethoric claims of A.I.’s hyperbolic pushers to make a funny contrast with the dull and annoying reality.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels, each showing a difference scene.
PANEL 1
A large caption at the top of the panel says “PITCH.”
The image shows a woman speed-walking while walking her dog. In the background, a homeless man sits against a wall reading a newspaper. The woman is wearing headphones, and a speech balloon points to the headphones.
HEADPHONES: Artificial Intelligence is almost here – and it’s gonna rock your world!
PANEL 2
A woman sits at a table scattered with board game pieces and reads a manual. In the background, a TV is on, and a slick-looking blonde man wearing a suit and tie is grinning and lifting his arms high in excitement.
MAN ON TV: Get ready! Your personal A.I. will do everything for you! Tax returns! Therapy! Pet care! Foot massages!
PANEL 3
Inside someone’s apartment. There’s no human in sight, but there is a dog and a cat. On the sofa is an open laptop, and on the laptop’s screen a blonde pitchwoman is grinning. The dog sits watching the laptop, tail wagging.
PITCHWOMAN: With Artificial Intelligence, no one will ever be sad or lonely again! A.I. is life!
PANEL 4
A large caption at the top of this panel says “REALITY.”
A young guy sits with his feet up on the sofa and his cat beside him. He’s reading his smartphone. A caption shows us what’s on his smartphone.
SMARTPHONE: A.I. powered toenail clippers $179.00
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is cartoonist slang for unnecessary (but hopefully amusing) details slipped into the cartoon. (You can stop reading now if you’re not interested.)
PANEL 1
The homeless man also has a dog, a cute little dog with a big white mustache – probably a schnauzer? The dog has a weary expression as it watches the bigger dog walking past.
The big dog walking past looks kind of snooty, and is wearing sunglasses.
There’s graffiti on the wall behind the homeless man. The graffiti says, respectively: “Steve.” “Sondheim.” “Lovett + Todd 4ever.” “Nice is different than good.” and “Withers wither with her.” Those are all references to the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. There’s also “BG,” which stands for “background.”
The homeless man’s newspaper is called “Background Tribune.” The headline says “Capybara to Rule World.” The sub headline says “‘It’s time for the grown-ups to take charge’ says adorable rodent.”
PANEL 2
The thick book the woman is reading is entitled “The Overly Complex Board Game Directions (vol 3 of 12)”. Parts scattered on the table include tokens, chips, six-sided dice, a twenty-sided die, a rook (the chess piece), an hourglass timer, playing cards, and a rubric’s cube.
On the TV, a chyron at the bottom of the screen says “Man loses sight from reading tiny print.”
PANEL 3
Apparently the pets have wrecked this apartment – the wallpaper is torn, the cat has done serious damage to the leg of the sofa, and there’s a urine puddle near the dog. The cat is sitting on the windowsill staring at a small bird on the other side of the window, who is sticking its tongue out at the cat and doing the thumbs-on-ears gesture that accompanies the tongue, as well as it can manage since it has wings.
PANEL 4
The cat is sitting like a human on its butt, back leaning against a cushion, with a bowl of food lying on its tummy. (I love this cat! 100% made up by Nadine.)
A magazine on the coffee table is entitled “Rich Pretty People.” The magazine shows a beautiful woman in a fancy gown with dollar bills falling down around her. The caption at the bottom of the cover says “They’re just like you but much better!”
The newspaper on the coffee table is entitled “End of Comic,” and the headline says “Goodbye!”
What continually puzzles me about AI is that it seems like a solution in search of a problem – it’s not making anyone’s life easier except for the unprincipled or dishonest (the story about the sci fi mag closing submissions was depressing as all get out) or those looking to replace human beings no matter how poor the replacement is just to replace human beings (which is in some circles considered prima facie a good thing not needing any additional explanation.)