Michal J. Mazur

AI is stupid and there is nothing that can be done to make it any smarter. The only thing AI does reliably well is to abuse natural resources and to help left-brained idiot technocrats believe that the transhumanist, hyperindustrialized future is within reach.

Since AI is not intelligent, we should go back to calling it by its original name, which is Large Language Models or LLMs. LLMs hoover up all the information they can, and as we can see from my vacuum search (you see what I did there?) they are too stupid to know where to look. LLMs may be information whores but they are also perpetual experience virgins. LLMs cannot walk into Home Depot. They have never worked at Home Depot or shopped there. All they can do is scour their limited, available data banks and make a guess at what the querent wants to hear.

AI the suckup

The chirpy, derpy, “How may I do your bidding, Master?” affect that LLMs are programmed to emit is annoying and insulting to anyone with actual intelligence. LLMs bulldoze any attempt at accessing the volumes of information they allegedly possess with buckets of glittery, ingratiating word vomit. Only questions that are mathematical in nature, such as “What is the square root of 25?” are safe from walls of saccharine praise about how amazing and insightful you are for asking such a scintillating question. To interact with AI is to be pacified, whether it is via a garbage, plastic-sounding song created by Suno or enticed by a virtual companion into parting with your good credit and any money your foolish parents left you in an inheritance.

The demons of lazy, AI “art”

LLM art is getting better, but like most things that pertain to it, nobody asked it to replace the artists it can only learn by copycatting. Deformed hands and macabre cryptids still show up when a prompt is fed into an LLM’s hungry maw, and most LLM “art” is immediately identifiable because of its cheesy, nostalgic lighting or its creepy, bad-LSD-trip mistakes.

There are many content creators on Substack who rely heavily upon LLM-generated “art” and written content who shall remain nameless. Like any broken clock, they are often right twice a day and they occasionally manage to pump out a few insights in their loads of tripe. The problem has become so pronounced that Gavin Mounsey has started a campaign for artists who refuse to use LLMs, and the resistance grows in number and size every day.

In 2022, an “artist” who calls herself supercomposite accidentally channeled an LLM crytid/demon called Loab. Supercomposite, whose government name is Steph Maj Swanson, entered in some prompts asking an LLM to generate images related to Marlon Brando, but to make it the opposite of Marlon Brando. A brief rabbit hole led her to generate an image of a rosacea-riddled, middle aged brunette with bleary eyes and a menacing five o’clock shadow. Swanson named the image Loab after another generated image that had produced the mystery word. Maj spent a bunch of time alternately chasing Loab and trying to chase her away via various combinations. (This is time she could have spent outside, breathing fresh air). Sinister Loab almost always appeared with children and gore, and furthermore it was difficult to get her to leave. After many presumable hours of Loab-fishing, Swanson was able to get Loab and her mangled, abused children to disappear, but for the most part, Loab had infected Swanson’s efforts and was never completely out of reach.

Loab, to my mind, is the egregore of artists who suck. When you are too lazy to pick up a pencil or a chisel or to merely wander outside, Loab, the middle-aged ghost of a filicidal Karen, will haunt your smart devices and computers until you finally learn to go outside and touch actual grass.

Where’s the hook?

LLMs are making music now. It’s mostly pop, rock, alternative, metal, and country. The best (I use that term with copious implied sarcasm) app for creating AI music is Suno, which ignores the copyrights of its entire “creative” database and can vomit up styles from progressive rock to ersatz Beatles glop. It’s truly funny that Suno has access to the greatest living and dead songwriters ever to live, yet it cannot write a hook. There are more LLM “bands” on Peter Thiel’s Spotify than there are real ones, and the way you can tell is the endless hours of generic, hookless Muzak that crowds out legitimate human artists. Most commercial pop is instantly forgettable these days even when it is written by actual songwriters, so LLMs have plenty of human competition to which they cannot remotely measure up. Pretty sad when the bar is that low!

Oh noes! Bullsh*t jobs in trouble!

I don’t always have kindness in my heart, and there is a part of me that wishes a certain woman I know whose husband is a computer programmer would fall upon hard times. She is amazingly clueless in her arrogance. She lives in one of those gigantic, upper middle class houses with a heat-sink, vaulted ceiling entrance called a lawyer foyer. Her thing is to virtue signal via politics, and she has zero empathy for the working classes. Her husband has always hauled in the money and lifestyle creep has made her into an elitist without her knowing it. I would never wish her harm, of course, but I kind of hope AI/LLMs replace her husband’s job so she too can feel the panic that average people in America feel day in and day out.

Most of us, myself included, are in a constant state of financial triage. Our lives are spent running around, bandaging this wound and squirting some antiseptic on another, stitching up one gash while ignoring a festering boil. Our husbands do not have highly-paid computer programming positions, so we live a great deal more hand-to-mouth, with any given credit card trying to spin out of control at all times. Financial gangrene is always threatening to swallow our limbs simply for existing. Despite being straightedge, compulsively frugal, and living in the cheapest places we could find or with relatives, we have filed bankruptcy, usually more than once.

Everything is connected, and that is why she is to blame as much as her husband for the general predicament we find ourselves in. She moved into her McMansion without protest and lived a kind of high life that jacked up the prices of real estate for everyone in the area. She is in large part the reason it is so bad for the supposedly-ignorant commoners beneath her.

If her husband’s job is so expendable and easily replaced by an LLM, then it was never worth the powder to blow it to hell in the first place. I hope he loses it so she can understand financial triage, how it is to live without health insurance or luxury vacations every few months, and how it feels to live on beans and rice for a while. Ours is not a bad life. It is, however, very common and completely humbling.

LLMs are glorified phone trees

Luckily for the lady I mentioned, I highly doubt LLMs are coming for her hubby’s job any time soon because LLM hype turned out to be much too optimistic. LLMs are nothing more than glorified phone trees that attempt to predict what a human wants to get out of them and is wrong at least 50 percent of the time. As a Gen X, much like Pepperidge Farm, I remember when there were no phone trees. You called your bank and a person answered, usually a receptionist who connected you with whomever you needed to talk to. My mother worked the switchboard for Ma Bell back when that existed. She had a photographic memory for the various people she connected with various other people. There is nothing better than calling a company and getting an actual, live person with no chance of getting a bot, at least during operating hours.

Instead of imagining a world where everything is a damn phone tree LLM, we should imagine a world where everything is not. Out of curiosity, I tried to have an LLM design a website for me; nothing complicated, just a few pages advertising a business. The design was terrible and I ended up torching it. Baroque in its complexity, it was riddled with overly complex links going nowhere and loads of unnecessary text babbling about how great I was in annoying, brightsided corporate-speak. No thanks. The LLM’s idea of my business was a godforsaken phone tree with many branches, and that can get chopped and go rot in hell with LLMs themselves.

Artificial intelligence cannot even manage a cashier’s job. Keep in mind that the average wage for a cashier is about $14 per hour. This does not stop it from trying: all of the chain grocery stores and superstores have self checkouts. Basically it’s a recipe for shoplifting. The only one avoiding five-finger discounts at self checkouts is me and a few other Goody Two Shoes dorks because I believe that stealing carries bad karma. The cashier that hovers near the self checkout aisle must do the job of 8 cashiers in order to compensate for the inadequacy of machine “smarts”. If you think an overworked cashier for 8 registers and some grainy cameras are helping prevent a dramatically increased outflow of free merchandise from Walmart, I have a nice bridge to sell you that is conveniently located in Brooklyn.

The inimitable Kimberly Steele

For giggles, I asked DuckAI to write an essay in the style of Kimberly Steele. The result was predictable. I won’t insult you by reprinting the entire thing. Here is a sample:

The Art of Connection: Navigating Modern Relationships

In today’s fast-paced world, where emotions often clash with technology, the pursuit of genuine connections has become an intricate dance. As we navigate the complexities of modern relationships, it’s essential to understand the interplay of vulnerability, authenticity, and communication.

LOLOLOL! Bwahahahahahahahaha! What in the Bullsh*tese word vomit? This is supposed to be me? Moi? Where’s the snarky title? Where’s the sarcasm? Where are the double entendres and triple meanings? Where are the twisted turns of phrase that only a person with copious fire signs and nightmarish malefics in her birth chart could invent? Where are the dark hints about the satanic Tribe of Cain and the implication that cannibal pedophiles have a chokehold on most of world civilization?

On a positive note, how wonderful for DuckAI to confirm that my writing career will live and die with me. I feel special.

(I have a pet hypothesis that if we feed enough sarcasm and prayers into LLMs that they will self-destruct.)

Even private equity is running the hell away from AI

Blackrock is that evil acquisitions and mergers/private equity company that brought you Taylor Swift. Perhaps that is why all of her music sounds as if it was generated by an LLM. Blackrock and companies like it are responsible for a disproportionate amount of immiseration suffered by common people. Private equity’s business model is that of a vampire: find a good product or resource shared by the commons, co-opt it, encrappify it until all its people (human resources) are exhausted and broke, and then offshore the profits and invest in another “business”, a.k.a. lather, rinse, repeat. Private equity is why I will never invest a single dime in the stock market. Private equity represents 95% of the stock market and I refuse to be a part of that predation. I would legitimately rather die than enjoy that form of unearned wealth. At its root, Blackrock and other private equity’s real profits lie in child trafficking and cannibalistic rituals for blackmail. I won’t touch that garbage with a ten foot pole. The closest you’ll ever see me get to the stock market is an interest-yielding savings account. Not like I have or will ever have the money, but if I do, I won’t even get an IRA.

Oracle, the worldwide technology company, recently fired 30,000 of its 162,000 employees. Oracle’s former CEO was Larry Ellison, bosom buddy of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, so that gives you the idea of the kind of person he is. Oracle’s current CEO fired nearly 1/5 of its workforce in a desperate effort to allocate more money for AI. They needed to find 150 billion in cash to open new AI data centers that nobody asked for except a few neo-Canaanite pedophiles who think they will be able to take a direct flight from underground bunker to Mars by the time the revolting peasants come for them with pitchforks and hammers. US banks found Oracle’s gambit to be a tad too risky. They responded by raising the interest rate on borrowed funds, and that is why Oracle scrambled and punished those on its payroll in a desperate bid for mo money.

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, recently proved himself to be dumber than an LLM. He managed this impressive feat by accidentally sending a memo that informed white collar workers that he was gunning to replace them with AI. He sent the memo before firing 16,000 Amazon workers.

“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

Notice all the softeners and office-speak. I’ll bet he had an LLM generate this memo.

Recently Blackrock investors, those scum of the earth, tried to collectively withdraw 1.2 billion from their accounts. Blackrock manages 10 trillion dollars worth of “assets”. Nevertheless, there is no end to the love of money uber alles, and that is why Blackrock is hoping to economize their enterprise by replacing people with dumb ass AI.

The investors were told they could only withdraw half that 1.2 billion dollar amount, or barely enough to afford a single, measly, used superyacht. Can you imagine? One superyacht shared among several billionaires??? As if!

The writing is on the wall. AI is taking white collar jobs, but it is because of huge companies chopping off legions of executives via layoffs so more risk can be assumed for data-center building, not because AI can actually perform at the level of a single Walmart cashier.

AI/LLMs were always a speculative bubble and that bubble is already popping hard. Meanwhile, I suggest we all get on with our lives and allow it to devour itself.

Announcement: like any real, breathing human, I need a break. I’ve been working like a dog, so I am going to be taking the next 3 weeks off to touch grass, cook some homemade meals, and be with my husband, mom, friends, and my cats. My book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to a Tidier Home, is also going to be released in the next few months, so I need to do some tasks where that is concerned. There is a 20 percent discount if you pre-order the book through the Aeon.com website, just enter in the code SACRED20. I will be posting some oldie-but-goodie articles I have written for my Dreamwidth blog and I hope you’ll comment and engage with them. Thank you for understanding. In the immortal words of the Terminator, “I’ll be back”. 

Google is garbage, and when you ask it to define usury, it immediately barfs up an LLM-powered definition that describes usury as “the illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest”. Notice the two softeners that attempt to mitigate the harshness of the term:

1. “illegal”
2. “unreasonably”

LLM-Google mentions Christian Bible talks about usury in three verses: Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:35-37, and Deuteronomy 23:19-20. Readers of the actual Bible know that it is mentioned and condemned far more often, including Psalm 15:

LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.

In whose eyes a vile person is condemned; But he honoureth them that fear the LORD. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not. He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved.

Pretty clear if you ask me. The question is not if LLM-Google is putting out misinformation, it is why the programmers behind the curtain are afraid of accurately defining usury. Aren’t they anti-Christian? What do they care? The facts on the ground are that the Bible condemns all usury, not just the “illegal” and “unreasonably high” interest kind, and so did Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and the Muslim god of the Quran (2: 275, 3: 130). Usury is merely the lending of money with interest, meaning the party lending the money is charging something for it. The Bible and other anti-usury sources are clear: all usury is a problem.

Usury is the primary reason why Jews have been chased out of various sectors of Europe since before the Dark Ages. Among Jews, there is a belief that as long as money is lent to an outsider at interest and not another Jew, God is fine with it. The Bible verse cited in this regard is Leviticus 25:35-37, which says:

If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, you must support them as you would a foreigner or a temporary resident, so they can continue to live among you. Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit.

This makes me wonder if and when the proto-Zionist term “fellow Israelites” was added in the King James era. Seems fishy. The Bible also condemns homosexuality in no uncertain terms as well as eating shellfish and pork, and that is what makes its anti-usury rhetoric easier to dismiss. In my own case, I don’t lend money, have sexual relationships with other women, or eat animal products, so I manage to naturally evade a great many Biblical prohibitions unless we are talking about wearing mixed fabrics, and there I am guilty as sin. As a non-Christian who is completely unafraid of the Christian concept of hell, I am also utterly uninterested in the Bible’s mountains of bad advice and I don’t consider it infallible or take it as the word of God, sight unseen. The Bible contains plenty of constructive advice amongst the rubble, and its words on usury are the good stuff.

What is unearned wealth?

We see the results of unearned wealth all around us all the time. Like frogs boiling in a stewpot, we are slowly being scalded to death by the karma of unearned riches. In my own case, I have recently financed a new car. There was no way in hell I could pay for it in cash — are you kidding? So now I am in hot water for the next 7 plus years to Toyota. I tried like hell to keep my old, paid off, 20 year old car running but at year 20 and 112,000 miles, poor Carla did not have any more life in her to give, so off to the junkyard she went.

Those of us who are not Epsteins and alleged baby-diddling college professors are debt slaves. Like my father before me, I will work until the day I die and like him, I will probably be in debt when I die. The only average people among us who are not debt slaves are the salary class, that group of individuals that get by on dividends from investments, stocks, and bonds. Grifter extraordinaire Robert Kiyosaki made his entire (squandered) fortune on telling people how they should get into the stock market, and he is nowhere near alone. Dave Ramsey, who claims to be an Evangelical Christian, props up his own investment advice with his Christian faith and lives the McMansion lifestyle when not flying around in his private jet.

The thought that has likely never crossed the mind of the Epsteins, Kiyosakis, Ramseys, and upper-middle class investors of the world that all wealth must be earned, and that when you enjoy wealth that you did not earn, it is technically stealing as the Bible implies. For all wealth comes at a price, and just because it is turned into ephemeral tokens known as money does not mean that the price goes away. I once tried to explain to an upper middle class friend of mine why the luxury “properties” sprouting up in his parents’ old neighborhood were a net drain on the environment and civilization as a whole. As the affluent, middle aged, liberal child of stockholder parents, he was not ready to hear what I said at the time. I pointed out that the fancy houses were raising the cost of living for everyone. Every time a luxurious mansion went in (and an entire block of them was built across the street) it meant that housing prices rose and the neighborhood and ones like it became unaffordable for people of more modest means. Not only did places like that cost the environment by displacing animals, using up trees, and poisoning waterways, they cost in gentrification.

Living the life of Riley is not free. When Jeff Bezos farts around in his superyacht, it is costly to both the environment and to all the underpaid workers who suffered to put him on that yacht.

The soul-level cost of unearned wealth

When you subsist on unearned wealth, there is a subtle, hidden, tiny presence within you that informs you are still subject to natural law, otherwise known as karma. Most choose to ignore this voice, kicking the can down the road in order to make believe that because there is no bill due right now, that it can be inevitably delayed. The gods are far more patient than we can understand, and in this particularly murky era of Meatworld, it feels like the hoarders of unearned wealth will not ever have to pay the price of their overspending.

I may be delusional, but I believe unearned wealth and its payment are like gravity. You cannot avoid it. The souls of those who wallow in wealth they did not earn are weighted and bound to the densest, worst part of material existence both now and in future incarnations. My thoughts are that Epstein, once he actually dies (he’s probably still alive in some Israeli subterranean city) will be reincarnated as a bed bug or some other lowly creature that must work its way up the long, slow ladder of evolution. It’s either that or his soul will be tied to a passing comet and he will be swept off to a cruel and unusual part of the cosmos. The best he could hope for is a human incarnation where he is likely to be used and abused until he develops the emotional sense not to do that. Despite the fact that Jeffrey Epstein may end up incarnated in the body of an abused infant, it is NOT OK to abuse infants, and it is extremely hubristic to claim that abused infants somehow must deserve it because they earned the karma in a past life. That may be true, but I could be wrong, and that is why I never make presumptions only a god could know.

The System that Jeffrey helped/helps to operate is all about unearned wealth. The first level of stealing is tricking a young woman into becoming a sex slave, which helped to satisfy Jeffrey’s insatiable etheric energy deficiency as well as ameliorating the boredom of his rich friends. The second level was to “harvest” her babies, either boy or girl, and literally eat them or rape them to death. The third level was indoctrination, which involved convincing the entire world that babies, toddlers, and adolescents are f**ktoys and that all women should strive to look like Lolita-children for the duration of their lifetimes. The third level also told men they were nothing unless they were investors and status mongers. Also, did you know that Epstein won the lottery twice?

All investments circle back to private equity

I know quite a few pleasant, sweet, upper middle class people who are genuinely good folks. They have no idea that their income — the money that buys their Trader Joe’s convenience meals and that pays the property taxes on their vacation home — comes from private equity firms like Blackrock and Apollo. Keep in mind that Leon Black, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, has been credibly accused of violently raping an 8 year old girl and biting her genitalia, and he apparently has a predilection for violent sexual assault of little girls. The philanthropist family man image seems to be pure mirage. Black has a soul to match his name, from the looks of things. My upper middle class friends would be horrified to know that their dividends came from the profiteering done on their behalf by Black and elites like him. Personally, I would rather starve than take a cent from the Leon Blacks of the world, and that is before the child rape comes into play. Private equity is the reason Millennials still live with their parents at age 40 and why the cost of food and other necessities keeps skyrocketing. Private equity’s whole business model is to vampirize the goodness of a product or service, enshittify it, bankrupt it and all the people who made it good, then offshore the profits as the beloved product or service is flushed down the memory hole forever. This model has been applied to everything from hamburgers to nursing homes.

The karma of unearned wealth

I will never invest in the stock market because I don’t want anything to do with unearned wealth. I would literally rather starve than make money off of stock market investments. If I ever win what I call the “intellectual property lottery”, meaning I somehow get rich writing a book about talking to your toilet or my obscure original music somehow starts appealing to people outside Hellenic polytheists and polytheist pagans, I will build libraries and soup kitchens. Unlike Dave Ramsey, I have no interest in private jets or McMansions, and I certainly will never make the time or effort to create a shady network of baby-eating kompromat like Jeffrey Epstein.

Despite the good works and charity of my upper middle class pals, I believe they will have to work to earn every single cent of unearned wealth that they got during their 20th/21st century lives, and that probably is going to mean many lifetimes of subsistence farming for some of them. I have nothing against subsistence farming, but I don’t wish to be relegated to it for several lifetimes as I would hope to have a little more autonomy. But more than fear of future consequences, it is the realization that someone else must earn it for me that keeps me from wanting unearned wealth in this lifetime.

Unearned wealth is a poisonous cycle. I identify three parts to the cycle:

1. Detachment from earning: stocks, bonds, lottery winnings, inheritances, profits from lending money, real estate, status lead to seeing oneself as above the hoi polloi
2. Etheric starvation: energy plane deficiency, lack of skills, mojo depletion
3. Hoarding: isolation, addiction to stuff or experiences, greed

Detachment

Unearned wealth brings with it a detachment from reality and mental blocks about how wealth comes to be. Gaining it is seen as a kind of mastery, and those who attain unearned wealth learn to see themselves as masters. Humans who do not possess as much wealth are reframed as servants. There is no connection made between the fact the “servant’s” life got crappier as the “master’s” life got better because of the unearned wealth transfer. The best recent example of this was the Covid debacle of 2020-2023, when wealth was transferred upward and the comfortable classes called themselves virtuous while ordering UberEats and watching Netflix as people lost their livelihoods and their relatives died alone in ICUs as nurses danced for TikTok.

The rallying cry of unearned wealth is “I’m bored!”, and you will hear it from both them and their children. When you have enough unearned wealth, you lose all skills, whether it is the ability to sweep your own floor, cook your own meals, or to be contented by a quiet Friday night at home with a mug of hot tea and a good book. If you’re not jetting off to Nepal or Martinique, you’re a dullard. If you don’t hang out with big names, you are a nobody. Nothing satisfies. That is why Epstein and Maxwell created honey traps of drugs and sadism for men and women who could not get off unless there was a Satanic ritual involving herculean amounts of drugs, torture, and undocumented immigrant children involved. Eating a newborn’s intestines while he or she was still alive is the foregone conclusion for a set of people who cannot be sated by normal human activities and hobbies. Instead of learning how to make do with one’s own energy, the unearned wealth ghoul steals energy from others, and nobody has more life energy than a child.

Etheric starvation

When you get accustomed to not earning your daily bread, etheric starvation sets in at an acute level. The most common forms this tends to take are autoimmune disorders such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and dementia. Travel by automobile or airplane also strips the etheric or energy body, and rich travel compulsively. Another cause of etheric starvation is the lack of appreciation for things and people in their lives. Unappreciated items and spaces create thankless energy, and that energy trickles down to the etheric (it’s one level above smell) and becomes calcified and stiff, hence the snobby and harsh vibe of certain rich people.

Hoarding

When comfort is excessive, it becomes isolation. The luxury bedroom suite with its double sink bathroom and its rubbed bronze drenching showerhead becomes a padded cell. Nobody can keep up, and the ones who can are child-eating ghouls whose idea of a party involves pools of blood and cleanups that require tanks of hydrochloric acid. What once seemed like security is unveiled as pure, unadulterated greed.

Stuff, when taken for granted and allowed to multiply like one of Dave Ramsey’s status markers, becomes an addiction. Before you know it, it is a monkey on your back and getting rid of it is about as easy as finding your way out of the Collyer brother’s brownstone. Amass enough stuff and the only dopamine that will come will be contingent upon amassing more. As I say in Sacred Homemaking, stuff is a bunch of relationships, and if you are a compulsive polyamorist, it is going to eat you alive. Once again, we see the results of hoarding addiction all around us — storage centers teem with unloved collections of crap, all of which is paid for in good, hard cash. The fear of losing this crap means that some buildings and collections of junk will only be pried from the cold, dead hands of those who currently lay claim to it right now.

No freaking thanks

If unearned wealth is your thing, I imagine this article is fairly offensive to you. Aww, too bad, so sad. Please go ahead and cry into several hundred dollar bills. For those looking for a Gotcha!, of course I have plenty of them. I once chased unearned wealth and thought I might like to enjoy more of it. There is no way of avoiding unearned wealth — every time I wear my favorite soft pajama pants, which were made in China most likely by some enslaved woman or child, that is me taking part in the unearned wealth I claim to abhor. The best I can do to remedy my own errors is to make an effort not to partake in unearned wealth now that I know a little better.