“Unfortunately, as none of us can fail to be aware, we live in an age of bullshit,” wrote Kate Davies in her survey of Knitting Bullshit. Davies suffered through several hours of L.L.M.-generated knitting podcasts from the depressing slop hose that used to be Wondery, as well as a generated animation ostensibly about the history of knitting, and observed that they are “specifically intended to make you feel good in general, and to feel good about knitting in particular—so of course you are left with a warm, fuzzy, happy feeling having sat through it.” But, she concludes:
…one of the most pernicious things about this particular kind of bullshit is the way it casts any form of critical scrutiny as a terrible failure of sensibility. On these grounds you might argue that my problem with this lovely video simply comes down to the fact that I’m so clearly unsentimental, so unfeeling, so terribly bound up with tedious points of detail, such as the film’s weird historical inaccuracies and false claims, its bizarre lack of concern with actual knitting practices (or even embodied gestures), its complete failure to engage with the contested and complicated narratives that have made the craft what it is today; its manifest lack of connection to knitting’s basic reality… and countless other similar matters of small consequence.
Meanwhile, in the New Yorker for some reason, Jay Caspian Kang continues his maniacal campaign to expose the cultural élite to our most brain poisoned A.I. hardliners in an extremely deferential Q&A with University of Utah English professor and Twitter research LARPer Hollis Robbins. To establish her credibility (I guess?) Kang cites Robbins’ February 2025 Substack post “It's Later Than You Think,” in which she wrote:
The AI systems of 2024 were tools, limited to tasks like writing essays or analyzing data. Artificial General Intelligence is different. The AGI systems launching now can reason, learn, and solve problems across all domains, at or above human level.
This seems like the kind of claim that, more than a year later, Kang could easily take a moment to assess the basic truth of. But he shan’t, because Robbins is too busy serving up delectable dumplings of bullshit like:
…in my ideal vision of the academy, you’re going to be in class with a mentor who isn’t going to have to teach you Chemistry 101 but will want to quickly move to where the edges are, to do something new. Maybe they would decide together to 3-D-print some new material that has never been printed before, or what have you.
“Or what have you” indeed. And how about “a couple of predictions and distinctions:”
Social science is going to matter so much less when your daughter goes to college. It is already on its way out. A.I. can do it. And here’s an example of the type of inquiry I’m talking about: I have a weird, funny Twitter group about life on Mars. Someone will ask, for instance, if it’s true that you’re going to need kidney dialysis on the way back from Mars. Another person is theorizing about a 3-D printer that’s going to use Mars soil, which will allow people to build on Mars using its materials instead of shipping everything there. These sorts of inquiries are obscure, specialist, niche, at the edge.
This is extremely embarrassing stuff, even for Kang. Toward the end of Robbins’ Substack post she inserted this A.I. generated illustration:
Source: some bot.
I know, A.I. illustration is repulsive to look at, but give this one a few seconds of attention. You can kind of triangulate what the prompt was right? Something about technology eclipsing the university. So there’s the quad of good old College U., and the Circuit Board of Artificial Intelligence eclipsing the Sun of Traditional Instruction or whatever. How would the light look on the ground during an eclipse? Probably like a spotlight with a round shade on it, right? Where the sun only shines on the part of the ground that’s like, behind the moon. And eclipse pictures often have a round notch out of the sun, so we’ll throw one of those in too. Perfetto!
I know, I know. “I’m so… terribly bound up with tedious points of detail.” Of course A.I. is capable of better illustration than this,1 I don’t point all this out to critique the technology that created it. I call your attention to these flaws because the human being who looked at this dreadful piece of shit and thought “yeah dog, nailed it!” is an idiot.
This is what Kate Davies’ described as “bizarre lack of concern with actual… practices” and “manifest lack of connection to… basic reality” again. Every proclamation floats freely in the bullshitosphere, untethered to any core reality. An eclipsed sun has a little bite out of it or whatever. Knitting could work any kind of way, as long as there’s yarn and maybe some sticks involved. Perhaps it comes straight out of your brain!
But there’s one fundamental ground truth that every A.I. huckster always, eventually, reveals that they do believe. Here’s Robbins’ version of it:
The big flagships are going to stay the same, because they have the football players and all the other things. I’m at the University of Utah—I think it’s going to be fine. We’re going to pick up the lifeboats from the places that crumble.
They believe that you all are probably fucked, but they’re gonna be just fine. 👍
Elsewhere in A.I.: “to my fellow bay area residents visiting cities other than san francisco: if you could try not to tweet like the smoke aliens from Arrival first encountering humanity after you go to exotic places like ‘new york,’ i would really appreciate it” —Mike Isaac. ChatGPT plays Claude in Scrabble. But what about: ✅ OLEICAT? At least one New York financier2 “is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and more humanities students instead” according to Gillian Tett in FT. Angela Collier on the Genesis Mission: a hastily generated pile of bullshit that is also the only way the federal government will fund science now. And Bryant Rousseau, the white man suing the New York Times for employment discrimination according to Charlotte Klein, also has a giant website of garbage art for sale, including a whole A.I. section.
Should we all start smoking again? Should we all start drinking again? Is there a flaw in time itself? Would you like to reëvaluate your answers to the first two questions in light of the third?
In 2020 we almost got a Cord Jefferson / Max Read helmed Apple TV series about a Gawker-like website but Tim Cook killed it because he’s a pissbaby. The Hollywood Reporter had a memorial conversation with Read, Jefferson, Emma Carmichael, and Elizabeth Spiers for the tenth anniversary of Peter Thiel’s Gawker murder. Also today in ex-Gawkers, Lindsey Adler talked to David Foster Wallace’s sister Amy for A.J. Daulerio’s newsletter The Small Bow.
Today in Crabs: Thinking about the immortality of the crab.
Today’s Song: The Specials, “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think”
But it’s not too late to become a paid subscriber to Tabs, where we only include A.I. generated content in order to make fun of it.
Next week I’ll be in New York for the National Magazine Awards where we’ll find out who is better at newslettering: me, or the upstarts at Bloomberg News and New York Magazine. But before that I’ll be back this Friday with another pile of unfortunate bullshit to show you, probably.
1 Allegedly.
2 Not that one.
