Bunker Hill, AI, and the End of Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to make us smarter — which we know to be true, because when I asked an AI chatbot if that were true, it said yes. I’m glad that in the future we’ll all have 200 IQ and shall live in peace and harmony, our giant AI-augmented intellects having solved all the world’s problems.

Before that happens, please be advised that AI is a galling, tiresome cesspool. There are untold reasons why, but in this case, I’m going to focus on the fact that I was willing to look the other way (first they came for the…) until, of course, they messed with Bunker Hill.

The other day I saw this —

— which has, as of this writing, 67,000 views. It is breathtakingly stupid trash; heck, I’ll go further and say it’s breathtakingly evil trash. Of course, the magic learning box that is the internet keeps us supplied with no lack of irritating nonsense, whether it be fraudulent fabrications about Chavez Ravine or some counterfeit history of Disneyland.

But this one is a fulsome festival of AI, dealing with not only Bunker Hill, but the built environment of Victorian-era Los Angeles in general. You may recall I recently published an entire book about just that subject, so, forgive me if I find this AI escapade of absurd and foolish drivel especially irksome.

Full disclosure: I have used, and enjoyed using, AI. A couple years ago, when I learned of Bing’s Image Creator, I concocted a whole slew of goofy Christmas pictures and a few months later, made a mess of Easter images. Their manufacture provided me no small amount of giggles. Of course, no-one is going to believe there exists an actual photograph of a shotgun-toting Santa Claus standing in a swamp full of blood, or of a mad scientist Easter Bunny reanimating corpses. Harmless fun, I reasoned, because while I was told AI steals food from the mouths of actual artists!, I wasn’t going to hire an actual artist to produce these images anyway. And when told the more you use it, the smarter it grows, and Skynet will get sentient and kill us all!, I figured bring it on, because our wholesale slaughter by robots will at least be preferable to the morass of civilizational collapse into which we currently sink. But, now that AI has come and defiled my beloved Old L.A., I’ve got some pointed things to say on the matter.

Before I pontificate further about AI, though, let’s set the stage, and see what in particular the shoddy sloppers makin’ shoddy slop have been up to. Few months ago a new YouTube channel emerged, called Stone & Script.

OH LOOK they did one! Lace up your olde-tymie boots because we’re going to walk the streets of yesterday. (I embedded it above, but should you want to watch it in another window, click here.) Here are some screen grabs; be advised I’m only showing you a mere fraction of the nonsense.

The “Los Angeles 1880 Reconstruction” commences with this image:

Uhhhh, that doesn’t bode well. Leave aside an inability to depict vintage Los Angeles, they couldn’t even figure out modern Los Angeles. Yes, this shot has the Library Tower and the Wilshire Grand Center (and, vaguely, Cal Plaza), but aside from that and some requisite mountains-in-the-distance, this opening image bears no relation to Los Angeles geographically or topographically (or even geologically, since the mountains are in the west?). Seriously, if you can’t source a picture of Los Angeles taken yesterday, maybe Los Angeles of 140 years ago is best left to the grown-ups. Well then, let’s see how they proceed.

We’ll start with the one above. First thing to note about the dozens of images Script & Stone use, they give zero attribution for the shots they’ve stolen off the internet. Par for the course, I know, but still, bad form, old boy, bad form. Here, while “you can see the PICO House” you can not, in fact, see the Pico House. (And why is Pío Pico’s name in allcaps? Did they check his FICO score? Did he have a RICO indictment against him?) Stone & Script stole this image from the LAPL and if you read the metadata it clearly states that the large building is the Sisters of Charity at Macy & Alameda.

It’s odd because this video had shown the Pico House, which then morphed into this —

There are no end to these goofy “here’s a picture of Old Los Angeles” in this thing. I could go on and on, picking at each one individually, but you get the point. Here’s a grouping for your edification:

Needless to say, none of these images depict structures that existed.

This being a Bunker Hill blog, here’s an image of Bunker Hill, from a postcard produced by the Melrose Hotel. It’s a fairly common image, found all over the internet. Script & Stone decided to put it into one of those “image-to-video” apps, so that we cruise south “down the street”—

— at which point we see the Melrose’s neighbor to the south. I mean, what the hell is that supposed to be? Those porches conjure up the Mesmer house (about which I wrote here), sure, but this ain’t that. I wouldn’t find the wholesale invention of the Melrose neighbor so objectionable if I hadn’t written so damn much about the actual house that stood there.

And now, folks, if you don’t agree that this video is the most insultingly useless excrement you’ve ever seen, may I present, Bunker Hill!

Yes, they actually used this, 3,000 miles away, to represent downtown Los Angeles.

Hey, you say, lighten up dude, that’s actually pretty hilarious! I don’t disagree. I chuckled, but it was a dark chuckle.

Made me wonder, is there ever an opportunity to meld Bunker Hill and AI for the good of mankind? The answer is…maybe? I gave it a shot. You might remember this image from the last post I did:

I figured, what’s the harm if I “bring it to life?” Ergo:

Still left a bad taste in my mouth. Yes, making two ladies talk to each other is about the most anodyne thing ever. Yes, colorizing/animating Nadel’s photo might just interest new people in Bunker Hill…because God forbid they have to look at a static, black-and-white image. Ugh, now the taste in my mouth got worse. Which brings us to —

Final thoughts, as Jerry Springer used to say.

After being criticized for using AI, I’ve given the subject considerable thought.  Most of my friends, being artists and musicians, decry the harm it has done to their work.  I’d like to address its troubling relationship to historical revision.

AI is an unprecedented tool for manipulating information and rewriting history on a massive scale.  It now produces many of the patently fictitious “historical” narratives found online, with apparent coherence, consistency, and at an industrial scale unmatched by human capacity.  Historical revisionism is being automated — bad actors fabricating entire historical events.  The millions of variations on false narrative makes fact-checking nearly impossible; the erosion of consensus reality creates an environment where people retreat into tribal information silos, unable to agree on basic facts.  I fear human judgment will be no match to automated deception.

I titled this post “The End of Intelligence.”  By that I mean AI could potentially make authentic human intelligence obsolete in key areas.  Why master complex skills when AI can generate code, write papers, or solve problems instantly?  Cognitive offloading will result in a population technically “educated” but functionally incompetent without AI assistance, and worse, devoid of critical thinking skills.  As our information ecosystems are flooded with algorithmically produced artificial content, how will we distinguish it from either truth or simple humanity?  History is about struggle — the struggle to understand through research, weighing evidence, making mistakes, and arriving at understanding.  Intelligence may involve processing information and  “knowing things” but those things are useless without a vast quantity of wisdom, judgment, and character.  Those are human qualities no algorithm can replicate.