By “Chad,” I’m refering to Chat GPT, or any of the other goofy AI apps available from every digital so-and-so on the planet these days.

Sippican Cottage is not a heavily traveled website in the scheme of things. My niche is being pleasant, more or less, and the audience for that is vanishingly small on the intertunnel, and getting smaller all the time. Que sera sera.

This website if very popular with bots, however. I block many of them, but it’s essentially impossible to get them all without blocking lots of regular people in the dragnet. And boy, do the bots misbehave. They occasionally hit the server so frequently that they amount to a Denial of Service attack. I have lots of bandwidth, but it’s an annoyance. The only bot from any of the big search engines that actually behaves itself is Yandex, which is a Russian bot. I have no idea why that’s so.

But the preponderance of bad bots these days are AI bots. There are many, many of them, and not just the ones you’ve heard of. Lots of mid-tier companies are assembling their own slopbots, I gather. They scrape the intertunnels willy-nilly, because they can. I thought you’d like to see what the end result of their scraping and reassembling the internet looks like, from someone who notices such things. Let’s start here:

I saw the following on somebody’s Fumblr page. I didn’t save the link, but it really doesn’t matter. Fumblr is Lord of the Flies for copyright anyway. Besides, I’m pretty certain the image isn’t copyrightable. Why? I’d bet folding money Chad made it. Viz.:

Most social media feeds like Fumblr and Instahole are aspirational.

Aspirational, sure. They are of course also full of merde. People are trying to project an image of a lifestyle or a vibe that they’ll never achieve, mostly because they’re not really trying to attain it in the first place. Their aspirations are strictly of the Potemkin variety. For example, Americana+ is always showing pictures of posh island getaways, top-shelf arm candy, and mixed drinks (mixed by someone else, natch). The website is harmless, I’m not bagging on them. In their mind they’re only posting pleasant things, which is rare enough on the intertunnel. But I always picture the proprietors living in a trailer park somewhere with a lot of skewed Live Laugh Love signs on the wall over their particle board kitchen table, with scads of Olive Garden coupons scattered around, and empty Natty Ice cans lined up on the windowsills.

I once saw a picture on their Fumblr page of a river scene, taken in autumn, with the leaves scattering their golden and scarlet casualties on the water. Quite scenic. Aspirational image, I guess. The problem with that sort of aspiration is that more information can ruin it. I recognized the exact spot. The picture was taken almost directly behind my ramshackle house, in my (former) walking-on-its-uppers town, within shouting distance of a reeking paper mill. If you aspired to live there, you certainly could have. That house cost the same as a used Kia. But reality doesn’t intrude much on these here aspirational intertunnels.

Back to our image. I instantly recognized the image when I saw it. That’s not to say it’s simply cut and pasted from elsewhere. It is a shade, a doppelganger of something familiar. It was recognizable, like a message being shouted underwater. I knew it was made by some form of Chad, and from what materials.

Here’s a picture I took and posted here of a real, live Mexican cantina, back in March:

One of the reasons Chad likes Sippican Cottage so much is that despite my loopy writing style and generous sprinkling of fart jokes, there’s rather a lot of information on the pages. You certainly can find a lot more pictures of the places we visited in Mexico on other people’s feeds, but I’ll bet no one has more descriptive text.

So I put the first image into Tineye, to see if I could find where it came from, but it had only one hit. Now it will have two, I guess. I think someone put “Draw me an illustration of a Mexican Cantina” into Chad, and got that back. Let’s look at them side by each, as they say in Woonsocket:

C’mon, man. The proportions of the doorframes, the height of the rusticated plinths, gray in one, red in the other, but the same proportions. Never mind that. Look at the sign that reads “CANTINA” over the door. Same font, same kerning. They’re both on a block background. The left-hand leg of the A and the right-hand leg of the N align with the outside edges of the doorframes perfectly. Even the angle of the wall itself is the same. I took the picture while standing in the street, and the building is raised on a sidewalk base, making it seem to lean back in the snapshot. They both do.

So that’s what Chad does. It learns things. It knows what a cantina doorway looks like, because people like me told him (it) what it looks like. It throws up a different set of swinging doors, but the swinging doors are at the same height. It knows that red and gold is a very popular color scheme down there, so it tosses it in. You can see the hinge-butt edge of the doors in my photo, so Chad shows them closed, and found the right sort of door to display. It’s a good representation of the thing, without being the thing.

I also figure that  Chad did it, because Tineye hasn’t referenced my image yet, but all the various Chads have crawled it lots of times already:

So what’s it all mean? Well, let me put it like this: People almost unanimously reject the “intelligence” part of “artificial intelligence” when it’s mentioned. Everyone says that all the various Chads are dumb, because they’re able to ask it dumb questions, and get dumb answers in return. All I know is that Chad is intelligent enough to trust what I publish on the internet. It trusts it enough to transmogrify it into something similar, a dispositive image of a thing,while very few real people are intelligent enough to even look at it in the first place. Case closed. Chad might be dumb, but it’s smarter than an average person on the internet.