As impressive as they are, sometimes AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be really, really dumb. Leaning into that dumbness, and away from the potentially terrifying and easily abused power of an amoral intelligence hooked straight into the internet, is a goofy little chatbot called "2dumb2destroy." Instead of ginormous datasets, it's trained on crap like all seven "Police Academy" movies, Pauly Shore features, Ralph Wiggum quotes, and a bunch of other useless schlock. And thankfully, as its name suggests, it's probably too incompetent to ever do humanity any harm. "Everyone's talking about AI right now, and our impulse is, how can we make this stupid?"

The world's preeminent linguist has spoken -- and he seems mighty tired of everyone's whining about artificial intelligence as it stands today. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Noam Chomsky said that although the current spate of AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing AI "have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence" -- the point at which AIs are able to think and act in ways superior to humans -- we absolutely are not anywhere near that level yet. "That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist mused. "However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains," Chomsky notes, there's no way that machine learning as it is today could compete with the human mind. Headlines about AI coming for our jobs and taking over our future are, as the public intellectual writes, like something out of a tragicomedy by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges -- and should be taken as such.