The Impossibirds

I guess it’s okay that most of our plant and animal species are headed toward extinction, because there are all sorts of new ones coming on board, and they’re plumb adorable. They live only on the internet, and they reproduce by Sharing.

About once a week, when I get cranky, I feel compelled to point out that the adorable picture or video someone posted is created by artificial intelligence. I could do it ten times a day but I hold back, mostly. It’s not a popular move.

Do you want to educate people even though nobody asked you to, Murr, or are you just an asshole who doesn’t want anyone to have any fun?

Hey, now. Two things can be true at the same time.

Well, why should I care if people enjoy fake plants and animals that are being passed off as real? Maybe it’s art! Although none of this was created; this was…ordered up. But it’s harmless, isn’t it?

Beats me. But we’ll ignore for now the observation that AI is a voracious operation that is rapidly consuming land and energy at a wildly unsustainable rate, and instead of it being used to solve the problems of the world, it is feeding us adorable baby fantasy birds that deaden us to wonder. Hey. Everything on this marble is a freakin’ miracle. We don’t need monkey-face orchids with nostrils and eye makeup when we have real monkey-face orchids that you’d think were really cool if there weren’t a fake one that looks like it is about to throw poo on you. There are flowers that look and smell so much like female wasps that male wasps pollinate the fuck out of them, or the other way around. There are caterpillars that avoid being eaten by looking like bird shit. Perfectly ordinary songbirds in your backyard punch out of a half-inch egg looking like a sentient booger and fly away from the nest two weeks later. We do not need the Magical White Baby Peacock when we have reality, if we can still recognize it.

That damn peacock is my Education Bird. An education bird is one that has been brought in for rehabilitation but was not able to be released back to the wild, so it is making the rounds of the schools and parks and whatnot helping teach people about its kind. Look at the peacock prancing on my hand! It has weird little pink toes and no wings. That sucker won’t fly. The precocious dickens is already fanning out its fuzzy tail feathers like an adult male on the strut and has a matching tiara. Here’s another: a bright speckled bird with breast feathers that bounce and flutter like sequins on a prom dress. Who is buying this shit?

Everybody! Thousands of commenters are swooning over it; it’s presented with the caption “Who knew baby peacocks were so cute?” and “Nature is so amazing!” and “Look at what God hath done.”

Here’s what God hath done. He hath whompetted up a primate with more brains than sense and that critter has evolved over a million years to create Artificial Intelligence, which could be used to solve the huge problems of the world—if it’s as smart as they say it is, it will eliminate us entirely, and I’m told that’s not out of the realm of possibility—but instead it is used to create fantasy objects to entertain us and anesthetize our souls, and probably sell us something, and in any case utterly blind us to the true wonders of Nature, which we might otherwise protect if we learned to love them.

Check out this whale video! There’s a few of these. Evidently whales get so encrusted with barnacles that they come up to ships hoping some fine sailor will scrub its back with a power washer and brush, and I’m a sucker for stories like that—many animals have been known to approach humans for help, plus who wouldn’t want a good scrubbing from a sailor? But do whales really suffer from barnacles? Just how sedentary ARE they? Oh—look. The whale has rolled slightly for a better camera angle, and—can it be? Yes! The whale is languidly lowering its eyelids to half-mast in a porny expression of pleasure and satisfaction. Right after the video ends it lights up a cigarette.

Bite me.

Now we can’t trust what we hear or see, even in civic life, and so we slide into a stupor of confusion, and we quit paying attention, and we reward ourselves with sugar hits like the Impossibirds. If we’re so easily taken in by a fantasy animal that reminds us, weirdly, of a human baby, what else are we missing? We’re being soothed. We’re being trained to ignore important things. We’re being trained to give up. And to trust that those who have acquired power have our best interests at heart. They don’t.

Meanwhile, the actual monkey-face orchid is nearing extinction from habitat destruction and collectors are scooping up the now-famous remainders. Thank goodness there’s a digitally manufactured version to replace it.

Artificial intelligence is designed to be smarter than us. It does that a few ways. One is by making us dumber.