Fuck, I hate AI.
What should have been the culmination of almost a century’s worth of genius, going arguably as far back as Alan Turing’s 1936 ‘Universal Machine’ concept and World War II’s ENIAC, has left us with the pile of shit that is being forced on us today and we are often forced to engage with against our will.
“Back in my day, we had to find our own porn on the internet, clear our browsing history, and carry on with life as if this secret part of us didn’t exist. We didn’t have a machine to create weird shit for us, and we liked it that way!”
The torch was passed, among many others, through the great minds of the likes of Ada Lovelace, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates (cough, cough. Pervert) and more recent chaotic geniuses like Sergey Brin and Elon Musk, but has devolved into a circus of greed, poor implementation, lack of skills, ethical violations and mountains of stress for regular consumers who are now forced to engage with an untrained, unequipped and unsupported “Chat Bot” as opposed to a regular human or a simple menu-driven interface.
My wife is a die-hard Premium ChatGPT user (we don’t agree on everything). Mostly for “clever analyst work,” but of course for messing around. Those with a basic understanding of AI know that we actually need to mess around with it, so it can “learn.”
I said to her the other day “ask your AI why AI is so bad?”
We actually got a pretty impressive response. In short: money. Companies have invested a fortune in AI solutions in order to stay “a step ahead” and now need to recover those “investments.” Actually understandable from a business perspective, but they are trying too hard to be cool and their failures are coming at the expense of their customers.
Poorly implemented solutions, lack of understanding within the organisations, removal of the very staff that actually understand the business and how to resolve its problems, all in favour of a poorly thought out “wonder solution” created to “improve service delivery” (read: remove the humans that take sick leave and have opinions).
Essentially, business is on a massive cost recovery drive to pay for a solution that nobody ever asked for.
A prime local example of a “Hero to Zero” company with a failed AI rollout is Gian Visser’s Afrihost.
Once the darling of ISPs with multiple ISP of the Year awards under their belt (They “won” the MyBroadband ISP of the Year award in 2026 again, even though we are only in March and Afrihost are conveniently one of MyBroadband’s biggest advertisers), is now a circus of poorly implemented AI, bottom of the barrel service, chat loops, ignored customers and “coverage” that is punted by its AI yet non-existent in the field.
And of course the AI Bot that you are forced to engage with cannot fathom the problem, and what’s worse, some genius (Gian, I will have to assume) decided to have the AI Chatbots pretend they are real humans…
I don’t base my experience on a little router back home a few years ago that became slightly worse when I moved provinces. Over the years:
- 37 Servers at Internet Solutions in Bryanston, managed by a then phenomenal Afrihost team.
- Web Hosting (At least Client Zone has not been badly affected. 1 win for the customers, Client Zone was always good).
- 2 hospitality businesses covered by Afrihost, and another solution at home.
- Afrihost Mobile. I have no idea if it’s even still going, and I am too terrified to try.
I remember the Glory Days when I would send an email to my Afrihost Account Manager and get a response fairly soon after, along the lines of “Hey, Longfellow! Thank you for finally placing the order for the switch you’ve been needing, I’ll get right on it. I take it you and Pucky are finally working hard instead of hardly working?”
Now it’s just “Dear {‘First Name ‘ ‘Last Name’}. Thank you for contacting Afrihost. No one will read this mail and we do not care that you are experiencing issues for weeks on end. Our debit order collection is still running like clockwork, and look at all this money we are saving with our shiny new AI solution! Here is your reference number, so no one can follow up with you. Sucker!”
If you haven’t signed up to Afrihost’s AI “revolution” yet: run. Run far, run fast.
Anyway, enough customer service ranting.
The one thing I love about humanity is our ability to adapt to almost anything, accept we have been done in, and then create memes and jokes to make ourselves feel better.
It didn’t take long for us to come up with a slur for AI Chat Bots, much how religious folk might refer to Schalkie as a “Kopleser:”
Clanker!
*Footnote: I’ve always been a Google Fanboy, and I’ve actually been engaging with Gemini a bit recently (Heads Up: Gemini reads all your WhatsApp messages by default unless you specifically disable it in settings). Mostly for spell checks, but also for random questions that Google can’t answer anymore as their results have been fully polluted by advertising and “SEO Experts” who insist their information must be seen, even if it’s of no relevance.
AI should have been the greatest revolution in history, a solution so far-reaching it can provide education to the most remote individuals who otherwise would not have had access to any education at all, assist with medical diagnoses, provide case law references in seconds, automate mundane tasks and for the most part help humanity save its most precious commodity: time.
But greed screwed it up for the rest of us. Again.
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