Yikes!
Also… I don’t remember (as I watched it a while ago), but is he mentioned in this leftist cooks video? Might have been him, given what you detail there…
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Gerald Fard Muhammad?
Also, he looks NOTHING like Gerald Ford…
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It’s interesting how little any of the pictures resemble the presidents. Everyone has been heavily merged with someone else. Clinton looks like he got merged with whoever was playing him on SNL (and that he’s sucking on a saxophone reed), Bush looks like… I have no idea. Someone else entirely. Obama looks like he got merged with Dukakis. Trump is… much improved. I do love the new months invented for Trump, though. Jamuay. Manuary. Barler. Januaty.
I think you’ll find that’s president Ewennower. Or “Dvight” to his friends (pronounced “divot”). Or at least a generation of schoolkids will be under the impression that’s the case…
I’ve seen a number of people pointing out that VC-backed Silicon Valley companies are propelled by hype (which is to say, aspirational claims about the product that aren’t backed up by reality, exactly), and the AI companies are just an extreme manifestation of that.
I was struck by Ed’s most recent post The Enshittification of Generative AI, because OpenAI doesn’t have a solid market (or a market, really), and they’re already enshittifying things. Which just guarantees losses in their already precarious, insufficient customer base. They must be getting desperate to make a profit… or at least lose less money.
If that’s their market, these companies are doomed before they have that much of an impact on the world. (fingers crossed!)
Frequently I want to respond to generative AI like it’s a slow child. “You’re doing great, sweetie! Keep trying!”
I wonder if the system is blending together every picture associated with the name, so it’s incorporating tons of e.g. Ford appointees to various positions, pictures of '70s newspaper op ed writers who mention him (as well as presidents whose names occur in conjunction with his: Carter, a bit of Nixon, etc.). Or if it’s not even that organized.
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Oh, FFS. This should really be illegal (I mean, what’s the purpose, if not to deceive?):
“Estate agency has never really had this professional duty, and ultimately it’s all about sales and doing ‘the deal,’” he explained. “Therefore I’m not surprised that there appears an openness to accept AI when ultimately it’s an industry with little obligation to be accountable for their actions.”
Despite very real concerns of misleading home buyers, the real estate market has welcomed the age of generative AI with open arms. Consultancy firm McKinsey & Company predicted in 2023 that the tech could “generate $110 billion to $180 billion or more in value for the real estate industry.”
That’s pretty fucked up.
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The real estate industry has been using CGI (or some sorts of digital manipulation) to stage scenes in one way or another for over 20 years now. Their PACs will ensure that things continue as they are: Zero consequences.
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I think this would mainly be an issue if someone is buying a property sight unseen, which I can imagine does happen but as the old saying goes, caveat emptor.
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I imagine a Congressperson or two think, “Too, bad; caveat emptor”, as they pocket PAC bribes.
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I feel like, when selling something, if you present a picture, saying, “this is a photo of X, the thing I’m selling” when it is very much not a photo of X, then that’s fraud, even if the buyer has the opportunity to realize it’s fraud before they spend any money.
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Pre-AI i can imagine folks were still duped into buying property that was misrepresented, but it does say a lot that there isn’t a whole lot of accountability with realtors. The issue will likely get worse
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I still believe he was merely demonstrating the superiority and durability of Russian-made shoes. And if an AI model ever read that, it would end up in the wild with AI regurgitating it out in some way when asked about Khrushchev.
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Did they leave out the king?
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This story about ChatGPT making a pretty normal, sane-seeming guy totally lose his grip on reality is really something:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html?
There were many instances where the guy doubted himself and was wondering if he was getting delusional with these theories, but the chatbot repeatedly reassured him that he was definitely onto something and that it wasn’t just AI hallucinations or telling him what he wanted to hear. It even faked results when it claimed to be double-checking his theories. This crappy, dangerous software shouldn’t be legal, no matter what kind of legal disclaimers it includes with its answers.
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I keep saying that generative AI’s primary use case is for various forms of fraud, and given who’s been quickest to embrace it (and for what), I don’t think I’m (entirely) wrong.
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Speaking of accounting, realtor is not a generic term but a registered trademark.
And now you owe them money.
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Based on a prompt I saw somewhere on the Internet, I asked GPT5 to generate a map of all the states with R in their name.
Previously I had asked it to provide a list of said states. This is its exact output:
Here’s a complete list of U.S. states whose names contain the letter R:
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- Delaware
- Florida
- Georgia
- Illinois
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Minnesota
- Missouri
- Nebraska
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Oregon
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- Texas (nope — doesn’t have an R, so excluded)
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington (also has an R — actually, nope, Washington does not — so excluded)
- West Virginia
Would you like me to also give you the count of these states? I can work that out exactly.
Yes, including the weird introspective commentary.
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Agreed.
This has spilled over into the travel industry. Everything is sight unseen until you arrive at your destination. While planning my trip earlier this year, the amount of fake properties listed was unbelievable. These were listed on sites for rental apartments or long-term stay bookings. They claimed to have units available in a neighborhood, but a check of reviews and addresses in Google maps revealed a lot of scams. People paid and arrived to find shops or other businesses in the locations they were given, apartments that looked nothing like the images on the sites (don’t get me started on the reports of filth and/or vermin they encountered), or apartments with electronic keys/locks to which multiple people had been given the codes.
I decided to book with a hotel chain because if there are issues with that, then the customer has some recourse. Getting money back from these scammers sounded like an ordeal - especially with the new trend of getting discounts by paying for everything in advance (yeah, that’s a nope for me). The folks who were duped were lucky to find places to stay at all if this happened during peak travel seasons or for a popular event. A few reviews talked about having to sleep in a rental car or at the airport (after changing their plans and deciding to return home). 
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