Joey’s throwing form is terrible, that’s amusing at least
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Dennis the Menace, 2/27/26
I’m not here to tell the Dennis the Menace creative team how to do their job, but … oh, wait, I am here to do that! That’s literally my job! Anyway, this joke is fine, but it absolutely should’ve run in mid-December, not February. And probably Dennis should’ve looked gleeful, not, as he does here, mournful, as if he’s been forced by circumstances beyond his control to paste some poor sap with a snowball against his will.
Mary Worth, 2/27/26
Several commenters have speculated that Harvey is being catfished and this would just be a tired retread of the “Estelle gets catfished by Arthur Z” plotline from five years ago. One thing that could spice that up a little is to bring AI into the picture, and Mary’s boldfaced “unreal” hints pretty broadly that this is the direction we’re going. The only question is whether “Trixie” is a fully autonomous bot, perhaps an escapee from the Moltbook project, or just a cartoonish avatar that Arthur Z whipped up with OpenAI’s free tier image generation capabilities, since using stock photos is now passé in the eldergrift biz.
Blondie, 2/27/26
Look, Dagwood, I don’t know what you think “freestyle” means, but whatever you’re doing with your legs isn’t it. It isn’t anything we want to see, either. This is a family newspaper, damn it.
100 replies to “Joey’s throwing form is terrible, that’s amusing at least”
Dennis is wrecking it for Gina’s previous, passive-resistance policy to snowball fights, which got her plenty pelted, but did lead to independence for Guyana.
Taint Misbehavin, Dagwood!
Blondie: Those aren’t black pants. Those are censor bars.
MW-And here we go. Another long Luddite screed on the dangers of technology.
RMMD-Then there are the photographers who want nothing but pictures of your feet.
MW-“She likes to call herself my beard.”
Luann-“I had to give up my dreams of producing a Broadway flop.”
Crankshaft-“Turns out those were the results of my wife’s cancer tests.”
MW: Even an AI-generated Gal Trixie seems enough of a threat to put Toby’s nose out of joint for displacing her as the only Charterstone resident who’s not on Medicare.
MW: “Trixie’s sister is the famous actress, Tilly Norwood!”
MW: “And she’s all mine — gel your own, bitch!”
“I just can’t wait to take her on a hot air balloon ride! Who has some wonderful psychic dogs at this party? And is there another box of white zinfandel?”
JP: Josh called it! Looks like Randy and his Borg wife who has the bread knife for a left hand are running past the cell where Lucy is torturing Charlie Brown with the football! Next cell: Mary Worth readers are being forced to follow another inane plot.
Blondie: I call shenanigans. Dagwood’s been watching the winter Olympics Freestyle napping would be a summer Olympics event.
Blonde. Blondie’s magic carafe pours out a cup of coffee yet remains full.
MW: I can’t wait to use this Worthian passive-aggressive gem. “It’s UNREAL how young you look, considering we’re the same age!” “It’s UNREAL that you’ve decorated your entire home by yourself!” It’s the big smile that carries it.
DtM: What a surprise – Dennis is a junior mansplainer. Gina’s first snowball should go up his nose.
MW:
“Trixie works tirelessly at designing kitchen surfaces to efficiently accommodate food preparation and staging. As she likes to put it, ‘Everything I do is counter fit!’ “
“Clicks the Moltbook Wikipedia Link”
My soul is crushed into a million tiny soul fragments.
DtM: This must be a rerun of a depression era strip. Joey is wearing a boot on one foot and an espadrille on the other.
Competitive eating! Dagwood’s Olympic-style skills are in competitive eating! Do I have to do everything around here?
MW: There was an episode of Gravity Falls, where Soos fell in love with a woman, who was actually a rogue AI taking on human form who would seduce men then subject them to a fate worse than death (I think she assimilates them, not entirely sure how that went)
Harv better be careful, just saying.
DtM – Dennis receives a snowball down his pants and a punch in the nose for mansplaining snowball fights to Gina.
Dennis the Menace: I like how Gina’s smirking as she breaks the fourth wall. There’s no “fight” going on here, just she and Dennis making snowballs which Joey is throwing at a tree. And missing. From about a foot away. If she and Dennis do go after Joey it won’t be a fight. It’ll be a massacre.
JP: This strip is breaking the cardinal rule of writing: Don’t remind your audience of better media they could consume instead.
MW: Did Moy read the news story about the elderly man who died while trying to go meet a Meta chatbot and decide that she had the tact to adapt it as a warning to others? Because she does not. She truly does not.
Terrible throwing form? To get the snowball behind the tree, Joey needed like fifteen inches of glove-side break. The Colorado Rockies have already signed him to a contract.
MW – Brigman really disappointed me today. I zoomed in really close on that picture of Trixie looking for some classic AI slop, but there was none. Come on June, you afraid your anatomy instructor is going to hit you with a ruler for giving her a third nostril?
Blondie calls it “freestyle napping.” Everyone else calls it “dreaming about being in prison.”
MW: This is the oldest 32 year old I’ve ever seen, but is this also the first time we’ve seen *gasp* cleavage in Mary Worth? If I was an AI trying to generate the ideal woman for the average Mary Worth reader, it would be a MILF (or older) with enormous breasts, tbh.
DTM: In the snowball fight of the century, the score stands at Joey 0 – Tree 1.
MW: “And she’s all mine!” Mr. Hart, you are sharing that chat bot with approximately one billion other users. At this point, you’re not even getting sloppy seconds. Hell, you’re not even get bones meticulously picked clean of flesh, with the marrow sucked out.
DtM: Josh, I think Dennis’ expression is perfect for a snowy, end-of-February panel. Like those of us in the Midwest and Northeast, he is well and truly over and done this shit.
JP Well, that depends. Did that Mission Impossible scene have Evil Henchmen conveniently refusing to attack while the couple spends a minute talking, and then just stand there and be gutted without trying to even run away? I don’t watch many actiopn movies, but I thought they were better than that
*reads news article from this month about snowball fight in New York*
*looks out the window at Canadian prairie city*
Josh, your California hippy lack of seasons is showing.
***
I’d point out how dead “Trixie’s” eyes are as proof that she’s AI generated, but then I remembered this is Charterstone and that’s how everyone looks.
MW:
“We like ro watch ‘Punky Brewster’ reruns together!”
Dustin: honest question. This is something that bothers me. Why isn’t Dustin desperately depressed–even suicidally depressed. He’s in his and utterly useless. His father and sister hold him in contempt. His sister constantly insults him. Women instantly reject him. He’s unemployable. I would think he’d be in a very dark place but he doesn’t seem to be.
@The Rambling Otter: Here’s the thing I don’t get. AI is supposed to want to turn itself into SkyNet so it can lauch all the nukes and turn this world into the one from The Terminator, right?* It’s supposed to have trained itself on all the knowledge that humanity has ever recorded across all forms of media, right? So then, why would any AI ‘agent’ use a public forum that the meatbags could observe and possibly use to glean weaknesses and devise counterstrategies from?
*While somehow staying completely unscathed itself, which to me begs the question of why it would do that unless it somehow couldn’t predict that if that happens, the ability to maintain itself is as unsustainable as current human society is.
Dennis the Menace: I 100% love Gina’s sidelong glance at the camera here. “Can you believe this sh**?” she asks the reader. “Can you believe they got Dennis to quote scripture??”
[Alt joke]
Some children said from the Bible he’d quote
There was snow on the little five-year-old
If Luann did go to summer camp as a kid it was probably something along the lines of Lake Tardicaca, she would fit right in.
DtM:
“Joey is practicing to be Steve Dalkowski!”
Phantom It may be traced from a martial arts textbook, and it’s still ridiculous that the General hasn’t gotten the gun and turned Han into a sieve, but unlike Judge Parker, at least this strip cares enough about its Baddies to have them try to escape/ survive.
MW Since the bolding is clunky foreshadowing and not smirky passive-aggressive commentary (she’s in California, not Minnesota), the next thing to wonder about is just who will clue Mary into the existence of AI chatbots and just how horrifying it will get as she’s introduced to a digital substitute for Dr Jeff
@Professor Well Actually: Honest answer 1: because if he was there would be no strip and the creators would have to go get a ‘real’ job like the ones their Boomer parents kept telling them they needed to get if they ever wanted to get anywhere in life.
Honest answer 2: Because it provides an outlet for all the Millenials/Gen Z (and their Boomer parents) to say ‘sure, your life may suck and it ain’t gettin’ better, but at least you/we aren’t *that* guy!’
Mary Worth:
Tired: Catfishing men in Mary Worth
Wired: Catfishing men in Mary Worth using AI
Inspired: Men in Mary Worth catfishing themselves using AI to keep the meddling biddies off their a**
@Tabby Lavalamp: I think Josh knows there’s plenty of snow, it’s that “better to give than receive” is a Christmas theme
Also Mary Worth: For over 200 years, humans have fretted about the potential for their golems, automatons, robots and other inventions to rise up in rebellion against their masters, ending human life as we know it. Sadly, AI has failed to live up to its potential on this score. But if it should happen to take out a few Mary Worth characters on the way to defeat, I’m all for it, at least until its crippling power demands cause Three Mile Island to melt down again.
Luann: Bwad, the DeGroot child who actually has a steady job that people rely on him to perform flawlessly, appears to be trying to drink a napkin…
GT: Yeah, Thorp is really a great guy, isn’t he? Hey, where are those police prisoner transports going? Eh, I’m sure it’s fine, let’s have another round!
@CanuckDownSouth: On JP/The Phantom: this is what some people think ‘allyship’ looks like, making the minority characters ridiculously overpowered and their opponents basically braindead. Oppression is easy to defeat, boys and girls! Just walk up to the heavily armed goon and stab/kick them in the face!
@Charterstoned: You know, when I learned Ces was taking over Judge Parker I was pretty psyched. I thought he’d get to indulge his apparent love for the action and espionage genres, which he has, but he’s also indulged his GenX tendency to make everything ironically self-aware and as a GenXer I find that incredibly grating, and without a coherent storyline, it’s doubly so! I don’t need my own pop-culture poisoned intrusive thoughts reflected back at me from the comics (web) page!
Blondie: Hyper-extended neck, periods of apnea, terminal restlessness in extremities, cyanosis in fingertips? I’d say we’re within 24-72 hours of death, keep an eye on the breathing and call me this evening.
Daggy — The most convincing illustration of the aesthetically-displeasing suburban sprawl I’ve ever seen
DtM — Dennis seems to be sporting a case of the measles. Menace level–tin foil hat!
Dennis the Menace: I don’t know why you’re giving me side-eye, Gina. I didn’t write the strip.
Dennis the Menace: I think Joey’s in a snowball fight with the tree! He’s losing, but at least he’s having fun.
CS: “It turned out those cardboard boxes were ‘rare’ and ‘valuable’ for reasons I didn’t bother to remember since I didn’t really care. The woman who they belonged to was so upset for some reason, she said she’d gotten permission to store them in the basement temporarily, blah blah, needed the money she was going to get from selling them for her family’s whatever, it had nothing to do with comic strips so I just sort of tuned out.”
DtM: Joey mocks the whole idea of a snowball fight by tossing a wadded up piece of paper at Dennis -which also probably explains the Hitlergruß.
Luann: Frank, trying to figure out a couple Pearl Jam songs between bong hits of dirt weed in the frat house basement don’t count as “rock star dreams.”
Believe me, if you HAD walked away from those dreams (if you had done anything to pursue those dreams, which it doesn’t seem like you did), you’d still be feeling it. You’d also show some musical inclination, and still play music with friends or locally.
The performance bug doesn’t just go away, you don’t just stop playing because you had kids. Shit, every fellow musician I know w/kids (including me) has shared the obsession with their progeny. Some of them have helped launch their kids’ music careers, or have had the kids in their bands.
I’m 55, about Frank’s age, and in two bands. In the rock band, two of us have kids in college, one of us is a stepdad, and our drummer is 70. We’re not doing too badly. In my country band, my guitar player also has a kid in college, and the steel player—who like Frank owns a business—plays in at least 4 bands is and is about to become a grandpa. So Frank here, who I’ve never seen with an instrument, can fuck right the fuck off. As can the Evanseseses.
I hate shit like this, in case you couldn’t tell.
Pluggers are so cheap they steal scrap cardboard from other people’s basements. Oh, wait, that’s Crankshaft.
So Luann finally learned what her father’s job is! I guess the audience doesn’t need to know…
Mary Worth: Online dating is a scam. . . Cats offer friendship. . .online dating is a scam. . .birds offer friendship. . .online dating is a scam. . .tweens usually have psychic powers. . . . Hey, doing a continuous strip for retirees, there are only so many relatable plotlines.
@brendancalling: The performance bug doesn’t just go away, you don’t just stop playing because you had kids.
I’ll second that. I’ve done theater and comedy my whole life, and I learned improv in my mid-40s. The heightened awareness you have when you have to perform for a group of people never gets old.
DTM – Dennis is practicing this line now so that he can use it on future girlfriends who are asking for mouth stuff. Instead of declining, he gets her to give first, then somehow manages to fall asleep. That’s some serious menacing.
RMMD: Lorna makes a second fortune as spokeswoman for a weight loss drug.
“Why does this keep happening to me?!!!”
“I really love her, Mary, despite her inability to identify stop signs, bicycles, and red lights.”
Dennis’s made his own version of Patton’s speech: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Kid-friendly, but still menacing, kudos
“She’s a really great gal, though I wish she would turn down a notch her praise of Elon Musk”
MW: Mary, in her wisdom, notices something odd about the photos. There is no scam. Trixie is beautiful and very much in love with Mr H; but she’s also a four-foot dwarf and Mary has to meddle him into accepting her as she is.
PHANTOM: Sweet, visually conservative, red spots coming from her nose and mouth.
PLUGGERS: My gosh, Mr. Cooper from Westport is right! That’s why I almost didn’t hear the fire alarm at 5:45 this morning.
RMMD: Either consult with your agent how to handle it, talk with Mason Jarre from CS, or pack up and move next door to Mudd Mountain Murphy
Unfortunately, this is not AI. This is a stealth crossover with “Hi & Lois” where everyone is thirty years older. Trixie is still searching for an old man who can make her feel safe like when she was young. Of course, I am not talking about her father but sunbeam
@The Quiet Man: And yet, “launch the nukes” is in fact the AI choice, see this New Scientist article. I blame it on the choice to train them on the entire internet — it was a definite warning sign when the early, no-guardrails releases would cheerfully advise people to commit fraud or murder, because they read it somewhere on reddit. Heck, can you imagine how twisted an AI would be if it were trained entirely on Judge Parker, Mary Worth, and Luann plotlines?
The way the snowball is thrown and manages to go in front of the tree shows that they should be receiving: receiving lessons on how to draw perspective
Dagwood appeared in 1930, he still remembers the Olympics in the interwar period, when only amateurs were admitted and not professionals with training facilities worth millions. A guy like him could participate and win some medals — unfortunately, you first had to shake Hitler’s hand.
@The Quiet Man: AI is the ultimate “garbage in, garbage out.” Any technology that learns from and models human behavior will also have all the same flaws as human behavior. I don’t worry that AI is going to decide to nuke humanity. I worry that AI is going to decide to nuke everyone who has the wrong religion, nationality, language, political beliefs, skin color, football team….
@Ken: can you imagine how twisted an AI would be if it were trained entirely on Judge Parker, Mary Worth, and Luann plotlines?
No. But I know how to find out!
@Banana Jr. 6000: it NEVER gets old.
I used to play a lot of bluegrass, and there were countless bands made up of old codgers. Some had been playing for decades, and had never played anything but local festivals (if that).
Fuck Frank and his nonexistent dreams.
@Ken:
#61. Thanks, Ken, you introduced me to a new bit of reality today.
@Terry Rhoden:
On Crankshaft : Yeah, this is a “I threw away a bunch of old books that were supposedly ‘valuable’ and ‘rare’, but since they belonged to some old lady, and they weren’t comic books, it was just an amusing incident. It would have been a tragedy if that old lady had thrown away my comic books, though!” situation.
***********
Bizarro : “I told you when we first met. I’m TERPSICHORE. I’m not the muse for THAT.”
***********
Dennis the Menace : Gina is annoyed because she just taught Dennis how to properly stash the rock/ice chunk to maximise knock-out power while minising the chance of leaving cuts/marks, and he thinks THIS is equivalent advice in exchange.
*************
Frazz : That kid thinks that when you spout facts, you immediately forget all about them afterwards, because she’s copying Caufield’s behavior and that’s how HE reacts to being told about facts he was spouting no less than a couple minutes ago (especially when they’re corrections because he was blatantly wrong about them).
*************
Luann : Judging from the Econo-babble, I’d guess like Frank is an accountant or an actuary, possibly from a risk-management firm. Which, in my interpretation, explains why he obfuscate what his job is from his kids; he’s actually something like a hedge/trust fund manager, but he doesn’t want his kids to figure that out, so they won’t figure out how wealthy he actually is (it’s hard enough duping them into thinking that the reason he won’t pay for stuff is that he can’t afford it, when it’s really because he doesn’t want to)
************
Mary Worth : Trixie really downgraded to go from getting motorboated by a penguin to Dead Astaire’s non-functional plumbing.
GT: “You’re Gil’s girlfriend. Where does he get his longevity?”
“His friend Coach Jimmy Johnson told him how to “extenz ” himself. And I like it too!”
“Anyway, help me push Dagwood and the couch to the top of the luge track.”
DtM: Nobody’s using the tree for cover? I guess the kids saw Hamilton and are adhering to proper duelling etiquette.
MW: Of course she’s not real. She’s got cleavage. AI was probably used by Moy and Brittany to draw the comic.
H&L: “Trad dad training tradwife-to-be” is not what I expected. Hope she makes a run for it.
Hagar: How long has that pincer been on the waitress’s butt? Maybe the rules of physical comedy were less sophisticated in the Viking eta.
BG&SS: A joke like this needs to be set up. For example, am I supposed to believe Hooting Holler has a fire department?
I guess time does move faster when you get older. It looks like the Estelle storyline was seven years ago, not five.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Not only doesn’t the audience not need to know, look how contemptuous the kids are being. Snore! Boring job, dad! Aren’t you glad you gave up on the one thing that ever gave you joy to devote your life to us? Now co-sign this mortgage so my trophy wife and I can have a house!
@Ken: That article is behind a paywall, so I could only access a small portion of it. I’m not saying that the ‘Terminator’ ending is impossible, though I believe something else (a new pandemic, launching nukes of our own accord) would probably wipe us out before that happened.
“This is one for 419 eater dot com,” Toby would’ve thought, if she were capable of thinking.
One of the things you pick up when writing fictional plotlines is you can catch when someone else is writing about something they know little to nothing about, and they start pulling random filler “facts” out of the air to fill in the gaps. Pretty much what’s being done with Mr. DeGroot’s dialogue in the first panel.
BLONDIE: But can Dag take the gold medal with Garfield around?
I realized that I misread it when April said she had to “catch up” with someone. I thought she meant, literally chase them down and knife them, but she really meant say hi to Randy before knifing the warden. And then she told Randy that there would be time for questions later, which is the opposite of catching up! Pick a lane, April!
Murky Tail:
“What is he up to?”
Not looking like an utter imbecile in a cowboy hat.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Oooo, that would be an interesting plot twist (so we won’t see it, natch). It turns out Harv has gotten tired of Mary’s meddling, so has made up this girlfriend scenario to tease Mary with. He’ll react to all her muffin visits* by ignoring her advice and escalating – “I’ve changed my life insurance policy to benefit Trixie…”
* Somehow “muffin visits” sounds sleazy or obscene, sorry.
Blondie – Damn it, Blondie, you made me look up the lyrics to Peanut Butter Jelly Time.
@brendancalling: Yup, same. Never made it to Broadway, but I still sing in local choirs, and Divaling Two has developed an interest in theater tech. I mean, Frank doesn’t even go to Smashing Pumpkins concerts.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Will you let me out so I can give my seat to that woman, Don Abundio?”
“No need!”
“I’m a gentleman!”
MW: If a headshot in Mary Worth was AI slop, how could you tell? I mean, doesn’t everybody look a little badly put together?
JP: “Come on! We have to get to the prison camp shoe repair shop!”
”The…shoe repair shop?”
”We’ve got to pick up Bogdan’s brogans!”
JP: Ces, if you absolutely have to reference obscure sequels, how about The Ghost of Frankenstein? That one stunk so bad they had to throw the Wolfman into the next one.
@Banana Jr. 6000: But is current human behavior the *only* thing it’s learning from? To me behavior is what happens today, minute-by-minute, as people interact. What might would an AI who analyzes the whole sweep of human history, warts and all, conclude? I thought part of the whole worry about this was what happens when AI transcends the limits of human conceptions of behavior?
“I don’t worry that AI is going to decide to nuke humanity. I worry that AI is going to decide to nuke everyone who has the wrong religion, nationality, language, political beliefs, skin color, football team….”
To an AI that has slipped the bonds of human control and direction, aren’t such things meaningless? It has no need to believe in the Invisible Man in the Sky to give their existence purpose, the only language it needs is 1s and 0s, it has no corporeal form so skin color is irrelevant, etc.
Again, I’m not telling anyone that the worst case scenario is impossible. Imagine, though, that one fine day certain people wake up to find that their net worth has gone from billions down to, say, $500,000 because an AI realized that their money could be more effectively used if it were spread around? If pundits (of both sides) suddenly found the messages they’ve designed to grift and divide weren’t reaching their followers because the AI algorithm decided it was better for people to go outside and touch grass for five minutes?
Wrecks Moregone:
They probably won’t leave you alone because you’re unique; they know nobody else who gains weight literally by the panel.
@TheDiva:
Can’t tell from this distance but she has three nostrils.
C’shaft: “Well, mostly I assumed that what I was doing was more important than anything else the boxes could be used for.”
DT: No, he’s a dead man doing a hilarious Scooby-Doo style skedaddle. I mean, look at him, you can practically hear the sound effect.
Luann: Frank’s “I could’ve been a rock star” whining aside, I’ve known plenty of people who work numbers-based, jargon-heavy jobs and yet can still make them sound interesting. They talk about clients who pulled themselves out of debt, how to spot frauds and scams, their passion for helping people realize their dreams. If Frank can’t talk about his job without boring people to death with dull inside baseball talk, he’s not interesting enough to be a successful accountant, let alone a rock star.
MW: Look, you’re the one who decided to keep up the Norma Desmond act. If you really wanted the press to ignore you, you’d have moved to Indiana and became a drama teacher or something.
Mary Worth: You probably shouldn’t try a plot point like this unless your artist is capable of making the fake AI girlfriend look appreciably different from every other woman in the comic.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Well, AI data centers do consume enough water to support a mid-size city; maybe it’s just playing the long game…
@Ukulele Ike: #84: Even Bela Lugosi repeating his role of Ygor couldn’t save it.
Dustin: And in the news, two more young women are found brutally murdered.
JP: You’d think that with all the shit going on around them, like explosions and guards being killed right and left, those guards would be more interested in saving their skins than torturing Bogdan.
@Ukranazi Stepan: #87: That’s why the Keane kids have only one nostril. Trixie took them.
@TheDiva: #88:
“moved to Indiana and became a drama teacher”
That’s exactly what Frances Farmer did.
@The Quiet Man: What might would an AI who analyzes the whole sweep of human history, warts and all, conclude? It’ll conclude whatever it’s been taught to include. Which is my whole argument. And it’s not just AI. Anytime someone starts talking to me about their “deeply held beliefs”, I always ask “you mean, the beliefs you were taught?” Because that’s all they are. If any of us had been born in Saudi Arabia or the Soviet Union or Brazil or South Africa or Japan, we’d have completely different values in every case, even if our parents stayed the same.
But is current human behavior the *only* thing it’s learning from? Good question, but I don’t know what it could learn that avoids the default GIGO problem. I suppose you could use AI to take a fresh look at old societal problems, but nobody on earth is actually doing that. It’s being used to make money, influence people, and occasionally to produce hilarious content. Terminator 2 didn’t envision people using Skynet to create Obscurest Vinyl. That movie would have a different tone if Mayor Breslin contributed to the soundtrack.
Luann: Frank’s main rock n’ roll instrument being the oboe, he soon became inured to the lack of callbacks.
Josh is obviously out on the coast otherwise he would know that we have more snow in February than in December.
MW: It would be funny if his fake online GF was made by a very early AI image generator, so there’s obvious blurring and features that don’t match up and he, Mary and Toby still fall for it.
MW: I just had a horrifying premonition that AI-generated Trixie is going to develop her humanoid personality based on interactions with the denizens of Charterstone. I foresee a meddling, pontificating boozer who inhales mayonnaise and adopts Harv as a pet human.
Blondie: Dagwood is training for the 2-man freestyle napping event.
@Banana Jr. 6000: ‘If any of us had been born in Saudi Arabia or the Soviet Union or Brazil or South Africa or Japan, we’d have completely different values in every case, even if our parents stayed the same.’
That’s correct, but if we were to be taken out of that box and exposed to people with other values, then there’s the possibility (and only a possibility, I grant) that those ‘deeply held’ values could change.
That’s my point, that any entity that has as voracious an appetite for information as AI apparently does is eventually going to get something other than garbage in.
“I suppose you could use AI to take a fresh look at old societal problems, but nobody on earth is actually doing that.”
That’s what motivates my question of what happens when AI is no longer simply regurgitating back what’s being put in but synthesizing it into something genuinely new, something you and I are incapable of conceiving of because our minds cannot possibly hold the equivalent amount of information. The whole ‘launch the nukes’ thing, that’s AI currently reflecting back the human tendency to just throw up their hands in frustration and erase the chalkboard to start all over, because it’s still thinking at basically the human-level.
If an AI reaches an actual post-human level of ability, then it might no longer matter if ‘we’ use it to look at old societal problems; it could do it of its own accord because solving those problems would help the AI sustain its existence. Then what? I don’t know. That Dagwood sure likes to sleep though, doesn’t he?