Westwhirled

~ Patrick O'Grady
Just ask the guys at the shop how that whole robotic-workforce thing is working out for them. (BRAIN/2018)

A couple weeks back, while trying to discover what exactly the fuck was up with the “Report” button that mysteriously appeared next to “Reply” in comments, I found myself wandering through the bleak, shabby A.I. wilderness, like Ted and the gang in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”

I still had a mouth, and I was screaming, albeit virtually. But at whom?

First at bat was a bot, because of course it was. They reign supreme in Lower Supportistan and Customerservicesylvania. This level is tasked with solving the easy problems, which mostly I am not. Ask any publisher.

With the bot dispatched, next up was a WordPress “Happiness Engineer.” Could’ve been from MeatWorld®, maybe ESL with an A.I. assist, but felt slightly off, like the HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission, etc. Or maybe the reassuring, yet slightly menacing drone of The President from “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.” Occasionally one longs for a Marvin the Paranoid Android from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Still, one never knows. Automattic (with its sidekicks WordPress, Akismet, Jetpack, et al.) has big feet, one in MeatWorld® and the other on the Infobahn. So I dialed back the attitude, got a side of actual help with the platitudes, fired off an email to Akismet support, and went about my business.

Until I got a chipper reply from Akismet’s “Happy Bot” asking whether I was happy too. Ignoring that earned me a followup from — well, I have no idea what. Happy Bot ratted me out to someone, or something, which asked:

Since we haven’t heard back, we’re just checking in to see if the AI-generated response answered all your questions. Our goal is to ensure you get the help you need efficiently. If you require additional support from one of our experts, please reply to this email.

Well. Shit. Lead with your chin, why don’t you? So reply I did, recapitulating the original snark-laden complaint that led me down this digital rabbit hole.

And finally, I got an actual human response.

I think.

Which brings me to this piece in The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel. He writes:

Across so many levels of culture, there’s a feeling of control slipping ever so slightly away. You, me, all of us, whether or not we enjoy or use these tools, are living through a crisis of agency. The agita and paranoia, even the excitement—over AI’s encroachment on work, education, art, and culture—is the by-product of a cultural and technological moment in which humans are sliding into a more passive role in many activities. One way to look at the generative-AI boom is as a massive societal experiment foisted on us by Silicon Valley, the animating question of which is: What is a human for?

There’s much more to it, of course. And you should definitely read the Sam Kriss essay Warzel links to.

The Jetpack “Happiness Engineer” who was my last point of contact regarding this gripe professed humanity. My suspicions about the use of British spellings and semicolons were addressed (my correspondent mentioned having lived in the UK, writing detective novels on the side, and happily claimed semicolon usage as “proof of life”).

And my problem with the “Report” button? It too was addressed, and resolved:

Where things stand now: the developers who built this feature evaluated the results and determined it wasn’t delivering enough value to justify the concerns it raised, including exactly the kind of concerns you described. The Report button has been completely removed. It is no longer appearing on any site, including yours, regardless of your Akismet settings. You don’t need to do anything.

Y’hear that? I don’t need to do anything.

So … I’m happy? I guess. I think so. Yeah, sure, I’m happy.

But isn’t that exactly what they want? (Cue the spooky music. …)

15 thoughts on “Westwhirled”

  1. You are one happy meat thing. Makes me wonder how big and negative the response was to the “report” button?
    In the meantime, I think the AI bubble will break in the next year, and the impact on Wall Street will not be pretty. Privatize profit, make losses public. This shit will not make a big profit, except perhaps small AI models for specific uses as tools for meat things. A forensic accounting model looking at Trump worlds stock and commodity trades would be a start.

    Reply

    1. I’m thinking the reaction must have been both big and negative. I mean, I’m obviously hypersensitive to this sort of thing, but I can’t be the only one who looked at that “Report” button and thought, “Who reanimated Joe Stalin, and since when does he run WordPress?”

      It was stupid, and now it’s gone. But that was just the dumbest camel’s nose under the tent. There will be others.

      This is one of the passages that struck me in Warzel’s piece:

      The AI companies and boosters speak the language of empowerment. They’re not wrong in the sense that the tools are powerful and, in many cases, quite useful. But it’s tough to overstate how much these tools represent a reversal of the early promise of the weird and wild internet; of user-generated content; of stumbling upon information, people, and communities; of the crackling-static feeling of real people on the other end of the modem. In 2011, the writer Paul Ford described the internet as a “customer service medium,” arguing that “humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.” Ford was describing the impulse behind the creation of user-generated-content sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia but also the rise of comment sections, likes and thumbs-up reactions to posts and videos, and the very instincts that led to the rise of social media, before it became quite so algorithmically mediated.

      That’s why people came to this blog. And why I moved it from a self-hosted setup to WordPress.com, so all y’all could post comments. The “weird and wild internet,” with “real people on the other end of the modem.” Consulted and engaged, exercising knowledge and power.

      Where’s all the fun in a bunch of bots yapping at each other? It’ll be like watching sports instead of doing them.

      Reply

  2. We’re screwed.

    And we all know that we’re screwed.

    But Team Bezos has conditioned us that Convenience Uber Alles, so slouching away we go.

    Pew Research:
    https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/

    About half say AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships
    https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/ps_2024-9-15_ai-and-its-impact_00-01/

    Why these college grads booed AI:

    https://thenewthings.com/p/why-this-college-grad-booed-ai

    https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/

    And finally:
    Are These Dueling AI Necklaces the Solution to Male Loneliness? Ronny Investigates | The Daily Show

    Reply

    1. I saw something the other day on one of the lefty blogs I speed-read (and immediately forgot where I saw it) that suggested we will need a Committee To Unfuck Ourselves once this mess is behind us, if it ever is.

      Ouf! Talk about your heavy lifting. …

      Reply

    1. Here’s a keeper from that one:

      Habermas was in his 90s when he wrote about social media, and if anything, he underestimated the challenge it poses—not just to liberal democracy, but to his own thought and worldview. The most sinister effect of the internet on today’s politics isn’t just that it foments division. It’s that the weightlessness of online existence breeds a kind of gleeful nihilism. Instead of discourse, social media encourages trolling—the principle that it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as people pay attention to you.

      Reply

  4. It’s worth 21 minutes to see what Open AI, Larry Elison, and Softbank think about climate change. More carbon dioxide baby, and plenty of it. So get the fuck out of the way so these rich folks can get richer, subsidized by us.

    Reply

      1. Love the funk guitar, drummer working those cymbals, vocal harmony, that bass solo, and the whole arrangement. The lyrics connect the dots! Good tenor sax solo. If you ain’t moving, check your pulse. Thanks Patrick.

        Reply

  6. Aw hell Pat I guess I’d better report myself too and have a limeade and Goslings Black rum cocktail while I’m at it. My report might run 30 pages or more. I expect to be drunker than Six Kings before I finish the report.

    Reply

    1. Turning into a Maoist self-criticism session this is. Or maybe an AA meeting.

      I’ve always been opposed to ratting myself out. They’re gonna have to catch me.

      Reply

Leave a comment