Avoiding the news means not using your phone or computer at all. Given how ninety-nine percent of us live and work in the West, that’s a tricky task.

How the news is delivered is irritating because there’s so much of it, and much of it is irrelevant rubbish. The problem is twofold – competition has forced a focus on reporting what is perceived to interest us. Not what we should know, or to inform us. Better a celebrity scandal or political sleaze than a story. Secondly, the digitisation of the media cycle may be intractable, it now moves so fast that the genuinely important stories seldom linger in the consciousness for long enough.

Just who’s interested in Billy Bragg smugly nominating himself as the arbiter of what’s antisemitic and the definition of what a woman is? What about Roger Waters? Yeah, wrote some good songs in the seventies, but what about him? There’s Andrew Tate, every fucking ten seconds, and that fucking weird hybrid English-American accent of his. Ignore the cunt, please. Speaking of cunts to be ignored, how about some more of Boris Johnson’s perpetual grift? Where him being a selfish cunt (and a quitter) is indulged as entertainment, with his cultish dickheads always on hand to defend him working as a form of cheap gotcha banter.

Only competent people receive the right amount of scrutiny. Mick Lynch gets challenged for doing his job well. Junior doctors are treated with the suspicion of being greedy that’s normally reserved for benefit claimants and should be for Tory peers who benefit from the most insidious form of croynism. Hey, Michelle, where’s the PPE cash hen?

We always hear about the cost-of-living issue, with navel-gazing reports from deprived areas, yet why is there a resistance to question the causes of the widening gap between the rich and poor, rather than showing the effects? Wealth inequality, high interest rates and stagnating wages don’t just happen themselves.

Some would argue the media’s obsession with the superficial trappings of wealth simply assuages our aspiriation to be successful. We judge our and other’s value relative to their wealth, and if we cannot attain it we seem to elevate those who can. The Times annual Rich List piece being one example. Meanwhile the economic destructiveness of the city of London’s capture by Russian Oligarchs or Saudi Arabia’s grotesque sportswashing isn’t questioned loudly enough or persistently, helping both to succeed. Both are examples of the UK’s economic and intellectual decline, reduced to whoring itself to the highest bidder for political favours. It’s telling that the size of figures being invested in football are the sexier story rather than the geopolitical motivations – all surface, substance a distant second.

Peculiar disasters are sexy (and easy) copy. Did you laugh at those rich idiots who tried to reach the Titanic in that rickety DIY sub, controlled using a PlayStation controller? I did, and that’s wholly in response to the fawning, pitying tone of the coverage. We got a gavage of the search and rescue operation updates, and this macabre Twitter account counting down the remaining oxygen, which proved to be irrelevant but likely provided some entertainment value to the really sad folk who followed it.

But the most annoying coverage of a contemporary news topic is the hysteria surrounding ChatGPT, and the “threat” of AI in general. It’s the new Salem Witch Trials. Automation is coming for our jobs. This is how SkyNet started.

Speaking of nonsense, we’re coming up for ten years of me publishing absolute rubbish on this blog. The only thing I’ve learned is that nearly all my predictions, on any topic; sports and politics in particular, are consistently dreadful. I don’t think AI is a threat to us at all. This should scare you, a lot.

But, it got me wondering, perhaps it should be a threat to us given our direction of travel? Also, if AI is as capable as advertised by the bedwetters, or soon could be, surely it should supersede dreadful blogs such as this, and generate superior content. And maybe it’ll be able to help us trawl through the internet’s currently disgraceful state, which is littered with “fake news”, bot accounts, whataboutery op-eds, scams and trolls.

So, I decided to put ChatGPT to the test. Just how advanced is it? Can ChatGPT make a prediction when humans will become extinct?

Being coy, keeping me from getting suspicious of its motives. Smart. In the meantime can it at least help me become wealthy despite having zero morals or talent, just as Boris Johnson manages to do:

It gave me even less when I asked nicely!

How about the meaning of life? It gave me a non-committal beige response you’d get from a life coach that charges £150 an hour or some bollocks:

Does it think I’m a terrible writer (seeing as ChatGPT’s algorithm judges language and how well it’s used, it should expose my mediocrity quite emphatically):

Diplomatic tosh. But it knows all about infamous nonces, so no further need for the PNC or the sex offenders register. The Tories should be delighted, another way to shrink the state:

ChatGPT clearly knows more than me, that’s good. I’ll accept I’m likely too stupid to leverage it correctly. It’s certainly smart enough not to blog as hobby. Being better than me is a start, but I’m not impressed. The hope has to be that in ten years ChatGPT, or the next evolution of AI – whatever form its next iteration takes – will be able to do far more than generate Windows 11 Pro licenses, a banging Chicken Vindaloo recipe (can confirm) or football chants from famous songs successfully. Say, filter, fact check and report news with complete impartiality. No hype, no subtext, no bias, no bollocks. Because, as a species, based on our current trajectory to trash everything while bickering over irrelevant and petty shite, we’ll need artificial wisdom to intervene at some point soon to stop our spiral.

As this piece was quite negative in tone, I’ve decided not to end on a downer. Here’s a short video of a panda loudly wolfing down a fuck off carrot. Enjoy.