This is why I hate AI

this wasn't even the post I was going to write.

I was GOING to write a post that showed a naturalistic experiment showing why I think using AI for writing is a bad idea (let alone for moral reasons.) What I was going to do—and will still do, tomorrow—was show how people that are using it for creativity tasks—the type of tasks that writers do—are absolutely deluding themselves. I was willing to test this against with own work without skewing the results: mainly by taking things I have done in the past, and giving AI a chance to do those same tasks, then you could see who did them better, then I would talk about why human artists are better, should be better, will be better. The reason why I was picking tasks I had already completed was so I wouldn’t stack the deck in my favor. The three tasks were: 1) coming up with a book title for my first book based on knowing what the book is about and naming conventions of modern mysteries 2) same task with my second book (in both cases I actually have lists of the unselected names for both books) and 3) doing a plot exercise that I did earlier on this Substack and seeing if the AI comes up with more creative answers, which I guess AI proponents think that it will..? (my overall point is that if you need an AI to brainstorm as a writer, your brain isn’t all that stormy.)

The below isn’t even what I intended this substack post to be. Watch what happened when I attempted to just SET UP THE FUCKING THING.

I needed a list of published book titles. The reason for this is because PUBLISHED books have already been vetted to have “good” titles (according to marketing, the publisher, etc.) Ideally I would just find a list of thrillers that I could easily pull from but five minutes of searching showed this to be annoying because I wanted a text list and not a bunch of pictures and links. I may have actually come up with a better list if I kept looking, but what I ended up doing was taking the Edgar nominees and winners from 2010-2025 (because we want modern titles because naming conventions may have changed.) This is easy to copy from the page and paste into Excel like so:

Note that there are 180 books.

Cool, we are rolling. The first thing I need to do is give the list (only column B) to the AI (in this case Google’s Gemini). Because I don’t trust AIs, I give them one thing at a time to make sure they understand. I wanted it to receive the list, then I could say, judging from what you can derive from titles, and given other information (jacket copy of the book), come up with suggestions for a book title.

I want you to see how far I got.

[the expanded list is long and starts with 2025 nominees. You can see the above screenshot of the excel of the end of the list]. Now I want to do the most basic “hey did you get the data?” task. Like when I have data loaded into SPSS one of the first things I would do is run a basic frequency to see that something didn’t get fucked up in uploading the data.

[this is true. the last title is A Beautiful Place to Die. The first is The Tainted Cup]

I truncated the table in the middle but it starts out correct- we start with the 2025 nominees.

Here’s the end of the list tho

I knew this mfer was lying to me, but didn’t immediately see WHERE because I’m used to things like Excel that don’t lie to me. The thing that is annoying about AI is that I never know what TYPE of lie I am getting because every time I attempt to see if AI is useful, I end up getting a different type of lie. (earlier this week, I was seeing if AI could do a tedious categorization task and it was making up items that didn’t exist.)

(Incidentally, if I was working in excel, it takes me two seconds to find duplicates.)

Ah, so the problem is that I’m a fucking idiot?

Hmm. That is the 180th item on the list.

The correct answer to this question is 150, not 148. The last item on the list is not the 150th item. The last item on the list is 180.

This is correct.

This where I saw exactly what it was doing wrong.

The actual numbers of the above books:

The Weight of Silence 178

The Last Child 179

A Beautiful Place to Die 180

Potboiler 143

Sunset 144

The Gods of Gotham 145

The Lost Ones 146

Bent Road 147

All Cry Chaos 148

This is where I stopped because my braincells were dying.

There may be a naysayer out there saying, hey AIs aren’t good at counting, this isn’t fair. Yeah, and there are individuals who are as we speak currently firing tens of thousands of experienced workers because they are convinced that AIs can easily replace them, despite not actually understanding, respecting, or even asking what those workers do.. But the thing thats going to replace everyone can’t even fucking count. I even gave it an out because I know AIs aren’t good at counting- the make a table thing. Making the table does the counting for you—the AI doesn’t have to count, just retrieve the last row from the table. Even then. In its last answer, it contradicts itself, unaware of what it just said. Never mind that the work that actual people do is far more complicated than.. counting items or querying one row of a table. The day I wrote this, I did something at work that required math, counting, defining a problem and seeing what data could address that problem when that previously hadn’t been defined, knowing which groups have which experts and which of those experts were most likely to answer a cold email, framing a problem in ways that will elicit responses from said experts even though they are busy, weighing apples and oranges, understanding the costs of actually weighing those apples and oranges, ie, the orange lovers might be mad, but the apples are about to be made into a pie which is more urgent, understanding geopolitics, I could go on and on. Also, in between that work and doggedly following the Papal conclave, undoubtedly someone asked me a question and I in my great humility said, I don’t know, something neither an AI nor a destructive techbro has ever uttered, apparently.

I DIDNT EVEN GET TO THE ACTUAL COMPETITION BETWEEN ME AND THE AI BC OF HOW STUPID THIS IS

sigh, anyway. Obviously I’m angry. And I don’t want to deliver a post to you that doesn’t really give you something other than my anger, so I’m actually going to plow through and try to do this task. that post is coming tomorrow.