"A sense of closeness and carefree happiness"

     Monday's column on media maven Robert Feder — the man who urged me to join Twitter a decade and a half ago — getting tossed off Facebook drew a lot of response. One anonymous comment stood out:

     "Having noticed Facebook's sharp decline over the last few years, I think they're just making sure actual human-created content doesn't get in the way of the AI-generated pink slime that clutters the platform now."

      I've noticed that myself. We are always being told how AI is getting better and better. But most of what I read from it is near gibberish, like the above, recently plucked off Facebook. 

     I can't be sure it was produced by AI — it could, I suppose, been written by someone in some unimaginable basement boiler room in Mumbai, grabbing historical photos and slapping blocks of words under them.

     But it has the wordy obliviousness of AI. The suggestion that the photo "exudes a nostalgic allure" not only uses four words where one would do ("nostalgic") but it almost entirely wrong. That description might make sense to a machine or harried sweatshop habitue. But the photo is obviously a piece of 1920s cheesecake. Which becomes clear, if it isn't already, when you consider the woman's bare arms, stockinged leg and — most significantly — the man's right hand planted on her ass.
      Yes, I realize that pooh-poohing AI has become the go-to move for me, and I imagine I'll be doing it until the day the Sun-Times quietly lets me go and substitutes an AI-generated version of my column, dubbed "Ne*l Ste*nberg" or some other barely legal expropriation.
     Kidding. They'd never go to the effort. When I'm gone, the newshole will just close around me, like the surface of a pond after a stone has been thrown in, as if I were never there.