Data effluent will soon grace your lovely ankles. At this very moment, AI is scraping the teeming floor of our data oceans. Every single data-collecting corporation you trust is selling us by the pound. Whether it’s Bible stories or child porn, AI is eating the worst parts of our online culture with equal zeal. Today a new AI image generator is accidentally pumping out child porn. The victims came from a massive child porn database accidentally released during a ransomware infection. This isn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. Tomorrow an offshore criminal AI will feed on every photo you ever posted of your children. Like a goose force-fed to make foie gras they will also feed it countless child porn databases. This time it’s no accident. This is how Mary’s garden grows. This AI image generator will then deliver an endless new supply of porn with fresh new faces. With synthetic voices, your children will scream in criminal AI child porn databases for years to come. An AI hero may emerge one day to pull the single ingredients out of this data effluent stew. It may even delete your children from this nightmare but, that’s a distant future. Today, this data effluent is flowing.
We’re too stupid and distracted to notice the worst of it. Most people don’t even know they’re drinking untreated data sewage. They sip it slowly in the dark of walled gardens and can’t taste the fecal matter by the light of their phones. It’s all flowing downstream in rivulets of corporate filth few can smell. We’re bogged, mired in platitudinous post-pandemic muck. From books to films and every cultural byproduct therein, everything still smells like the backed up septic tank of political messaging. Layers of bullshit laminate our best intentions. The status quo pumps hard on -“We’re all in this together” but, get this straight – “we” were never in anything “together”. There were some of us on this dry bank of the cultural effluent flow watching the rest drown in their own data waste. That was the only vantage point. We watched as you were swallowed. This spellchecker keeps swapping effluent for affluent. I have to hunt for the word “effluent” and make sure it remains unchanged. The spellchecker has also destroyed the “its” rules. As I write this it fights me to write “it’s” because idiots programmed this. These same idiots are programming our collective AI future, one that will in turn replace programmers. When my patience is pushed too far, I write in elegant cursive with a pencil on paper and I am nostalgic for no machines.
