May
9
2025

AIsplaining

Well, I thought I had come up with a clever new term. Turns out it's old, maybe already tired. From a year ago:

But I did find a pretty good example. Starting from this morning's Bleat from James Lileks, which dug out this old newspaper clipping:

Interesting, because I used to live in Nebraska, and zoomed back and forth on I-80 quite a bit.

James also provides a recent Google Street View of "Erma's Desire", one of the sculptures:

But I wanted to see the rest of that article! Where's page 14B?! So I googled the headline "Bicentennial art fails Nebraska road test" and … failed, alas.

But I did check Google's "AI Mode". Which contained (among other things) an indication of what the AI thought might be the Real Issue:

"Lack of Understanding: Some residents struggled to grasp the meaning or artistic merit of the modern sculptures, fueling criticism and debate."

Reader, that's AIsplaining.

For the record, I can no longer duplicate that result. But I swear it's accurate!

(It turns out "Erma's Revenge Desire" is eminently Googleable, so if you're interested…)