I like to joke, probably just here, once, in an old post, that it's not the running that's against the rules at my library, it's the falling.
This may come in handy up ahead.
Recently I posted some bit of highly manufactured AI bewitchery to the cold, cruel Internet (yes, this is the Internet here, but it's so far away from everything that you're probably safe). I think it was a cat that I posted, who was come to life in a library, and the cat was made of rainbows. I thought the rainbow people on Reddit might not be mean about it because it was all about rainbows, and they were all about rainbows, so maybe a couple of them would like it.
It reminded me of a time long ago at our local co-op when the rent-a-cop they hired to deter robberies shot a couple of teenage robbers in the back as they fled the scene. And all the peace loving gentle vegetarian hippies were like:
"Gosh, I hope Officer Tim is okay after having to murder some people."
There are no hippies.
The rainbow is a lie.
When I posted my rainbow cat, someone wrote something like: "So you just get a machine to do all the work for you, and then you take all the credit."
It wasn't a question.
Then everyone in all of rainbow world downvoted me, right in the back, like a bunch of cops.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Internet, downvoting is just like upvoting, only more unjust.
But let's get back to this machine thing.
Aren't machines supposed to do the work for you?
Like, if someone is gardening with their little gloves and their hand trowel, would it be fair to be like "Sure, your hand trowel does all the work, but you think you're the gardener?"
And out among my vast readership, a hand trowel is silently thinking:
"Well, and why not?"
Great, now I've boxed myself in a corner.
Maybe it's my keyboard's fault.
I'm kidding. It can't be my keyboards fault. Keyboards are not sentient!
And you know what else isn't sentient? Any of what we call AI's, despite the murkiness of their name and ability.
Only trowels are sentient, and whales, and octopus, and elephants, and PEOPLE.
So it's okay to make machines do work for you, but it's evil to make people work for you!
Which somehow brings us around to the distorted, abiding rule of the Internet:
It doesn't matter how much of the Internet is AI, just so long as no one finds out.
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