No.

I am more than a little tired--just five years into the so-called AI revolution--about people banging on about everything AI can purportedly do.

(Have you yet to see a great AI-ism in the wild? Something nuanced? Astute? Beautiful? Surprising? Funny? Smart? Satisfying?)

Frankly, AI reminds me of the old thesis that if you give enough monkeys enough typewriters they can eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare.

Or at least Marlowe.

I couldn't give a rat's rectum about what AI can do. What AI can do is a parlor trick. Look! It made a movie! 

AI reminds me of an arcade they used to have down in Chinatown. They kept a chicken in a cage. If you deposited fifty cents, you could play a game of tic-tac-toe against the chicken. The chicken always won.

The difference is back then no one said "we're turning our marketing over to captive poultry. Chickens are better than humans and you can pay them....chicken feed."

I'm not interested in what AI can do.

I am much more interested in what humans can do.

It's Friday afternoon as I write this. 

I've had a helluva week--a long week of writing proposals, doing work and hand-holding clients on four continents.

I'm tired. Exhausterated, in fact.

But I've written this blog virtually every working day since 2017, and if I don't write a post or two on the weekend, I'm behind the eight-ball when the next work-week starts.

In thinking about next week post's, I thought about the "Wobbly Chair" ad above.

AI couldn't.

AI is "perfect." (Except for the hallucination thing.) And, mostly, AI pretends it can't make a mistake. Worse, the people promoting AI, the same people who promoted the last 27 or 91 things that we're going to change everything, act as if AI can't make a mistake. They act like somehow a mistake, in the case above, a wobbly chair, is a failure.

And we don't talk about failures. We and AI like to pretend they can be eliminated. All we have to do is copy something that worked. Or follow best-practices. Or listen to some marketing guru who no longer markets anything, really, but himself.

Or win an award. As if awards mean something.

I quickly found the wobbly chair ad.

I remember when Julian Koenig, the man who wrote the ad died, his daughter Sarah, the producer and creator of the wildly popular podcast "Serial," created a radio tribute to her dad. She spoke about Koenig's long-running feud with his ex-partner, George Lois, who had the reputation of stealing credit for work he didn't do.

George claimed authorship of the Harvey Probber ad above, though it was Julian's. George's behavior so incensed Julian that with his own money Koenig took out an ad in Adweek attacking Lois. 

The headline told the entire story: "Low, Lower, Lois."

In any event, I don't think AI can admit its lack of perfection. Most people can't. How could a machine?

AI could never create this picture. Or even realize the difference between how things are and how we want to pretend they are. The gap--ever-widening--between reality and AI-fantasy.

AI will never work unless it learns to make honest, human mistakes. Honest, human mistakes are what humans learn from. Honest, human mistakes are the true origin of our species. They're how we went from poking things with a stick to a three-speed variable multi-rachet 72-bit power drill. We didn't invent such a thing. We mistaked our way into it.

I took a minute as I sat to write this, and I retyped Julian Koenig's copy. I tried to match the typeface and the line breaks. But I'm no whiz at these things. I amn't a typographer and I can't even touch-type.

But I typed it all over again.

Maybe so today we can marvel, for a moment, at really good writing that was done in the service of selling an expensive product to people who cared about design and longevity. And writing.

It's not a bad practice every now and again to type over something you like. To "feel" the words in your fingertips. I think it might make you not just a better writer, but maybe a better person, too.

Here's the entirety of the copy, except for the mouse type, which I couldn't read.

Here's the sentence that really nailed the whole thing for me, and maybe sums up my feelings about a lot of today's current bushwa about AI and the anti-human feelings a lot of humans have.

In this era of AI when corporate titans are bent on making people a thing of the past so they can get richer, don't for a second forget about those unique machines most of us still possess.

It's too easy to.

I mean don't overlook your eyes, your hands, your brain, your soul, and mostly your heart.