fake inspiration

fake news   intelligence  inspiration

Look, it's just fake. It's artificial, all right, but it ain't intelligence. It doesn't even fake intelligence all that well for all that long. Can it fool you, if you're half-reading a thing and don't care very much about it? Sure, but that's YOU doing the work, covering for IT. There's only one intelligence in that exchange, and it's yours. And you're only half tuned in.

I used to use a nifty little thing named "Inspirobot" in class sometimes, back when I taught stuff where this was relevant. It's still around, and I still find it amusing, so I built it a little home in my sidebar there, and you can check it out. It's a brilliant internet timesuck and it is well prior to ChatGPT or Claude or any of those things.

I would ask the students to do an in-class writing exercise responding to these inspirational quotes and explain what they mean. And the students would diligently write paragraphs explaining these quotes. Until they stopped being able to make any kind of sense of them. Then we would talk about meaning, and how it was being generated, and by what/whom. 

Because back then, no one was tempted to think Inspirobot was actually doing the inspiring.