How are you celebrating AI Appreciation Day?

If you haven't already heard by now, July 16 is AI Appreciation Day. Yes, really. I hope you're all wearing your propeller hats, eating Fried Cheese Stuffed Doritos, and binge-watching Big Bang Theory.

Unlike most marketer-created holidays, AIAD is not a conspiracy to fill the coffers of the Floral and Candy Cartels or make the shareholders of Hallmark Cards as wealthy as King Croesus. It's really just an excuse for PR people desperate for coverage to pitch reporters desperate for something to write about [1].

Like this pitch I got last week:

AI Appreciation Day, celebrated every July 16, is kind of like a love letter to the invisible magic shaping our daily lives. From the playlists that somehow know our moods to the voice assistants helping us juggle busy mornings, AI is everywhere, often quietly working behind the scenes to make things a little smoother, a little smarter. But this day isn’t just about the tech; it’s about the people behind it, the dreamers, coders, scientists, and ethicists who pour their energy into building systems that (hopefully) make the world better.

You can stop retching now. Or perhaps you can't.

AI Appreciation Day is an actual thing — well, as actual as most made-up 'day's are. This one was apparently invented in 2021 by a company calling itself AI Heart LLC that allegedly offers "expert guidance on AI implementation." AI Heart's website offers zero details, but does contain generic endorsements from people with names like Symphony Jones, so I'm sure it's legit. [2]

Love letters to robots

Do I seem a bit cynical about all this? Not at all! For example, I totally appreciate this bit of invisible magic shaping our daily lives:

What happens when a drug-addled Nazi-saluting megalomaniac sperm fountain decides to build his own anti-woke AI model? Exactly what you would expect would happen: Hitler Hitler Hitler, all day long.

Oh, by the way: The US military just signed a $200 million deal with xAI to use Grok (aka 'MechaHitler') to "address critical national security challenges." I appreciate that, too.

Not content with spewing antisemitic vitriol, Musk's pet AI also excels at generating potty-mouthed, soft porn anime characters, which enterprising users have already hacked to make even more explicit.

Magical.

No news is bad news

Aside from Musk, there are legitimate concerns AI may soon destroy whatever is left of the news-gathering and reporting industry by siphoning off any remaining traffic their websites might still be receiving.

Here's Axios reporter Ashley Gold explaining this to NPR reporter Steve Inskeep:

"[W]ith these AI chatbots and these AI summaries, people are starting to no longer explore the web themselves, doing their own research, falling down rabbit holes of information, stumbling into something new. They're having the internet explain to them through AI summaries, through chatbots.... Most AI summaries, they do have links and citations attached to them, but they're not super prominent....So click-through rates to websites have plummeted... They see the AI summary, and they say, oh, great. I have my answer now."

That might explain the constant rounds of layoffs we are seeing in the news trade. And of course, journalists are far from the only ones who will be replaced augmented by robots.

And while we don't know what DOGE is planning to do with all the extremely personal data of tens of millions of Americans they stole from the IRS and other government agencies, I have a pretty good guess as to where that's all going.

Tireless investigative reporter Brian Krebs posted this two days ago:

Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans with a deep sense of confidence to learn that Mr. Elez over the weekend inadvertently published a private key that allowed anyone to interact directly with more than four dozen large language models (LLMs) developed by Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI.

Two obvious conclusions:

1. DOGE et al are definitely feeding our data to multiple AI models, and

2. Odds are good this data has already been hacked -- or if not, it soon will be.

When you've got pandas and unicorns, it can't be all bad

To be fair: In addition to both the evil uses of AI and the excessive hype around how it's going to make the world better, there are a lot of legitimately helpful applications for AI. I write about them all the damned time. AI will take away a lot of our day-to-day drudgery. It will speed the development of new drugs. It will keep our machines running more smoothly and help reduce gridlock. And so on.

And it can also draw pictures of a giant stuffed panda riding a unicorn surrounded by rainbows:

That's certainly something worth celebrating. Right?

How are you spending AI Day? Share your thoughts in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] Your honor, I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.

[2] The entire website looks like it was built in five minutes by ChatGPT 1.0. The company phone number (which no longer connects) tracks back to Splendora, Texas (population 1,683), and the street address is a virtual mailbox in Houston. There's at least a 50% chance AI Heart LLC was created as a joke — or maybe just entirely to create a fake Internet holiday that people are actually buying into. If so, bravo, whoever you are.