Elon Musk, by ChatGPT, in the Style of Curmie

Curmie has two almost-finished essays that just need another few minutes of work, but he can’t seem to push either of them over the finish line.  So he figured he’d just follow the crowd and, you know, Gentle Reader, cheat.  Well, he’s telling you that he’s cheating, so that makes it a little better, one supposes.

A few days ago, one of Curmie’s friends posted something on Facebook about how much better those AI sites are at, well, virtually everything than they were even a year ago.  He posted something that had been written by AI but read a whole lot like my friend’s voice.  It all made Curmie rather glad he’s re-retired and doesn’t have to try to figure out if students are actually doing the work or just feeding the assignment into a chatbot and waiting 15 seconds.

It also made Curmie curious.  Are these sites as good (or as terrifying, as the case may be) as his friend suggests?  Yes, there are serious problems of ethics and accuracy (AI has a marked tendency to make shit up), but how advanced is the language feature?  Time for a little experiment.  Curmie went to ChatGPT and asked for an essay on Elon Musk in the style of one of his own blog posts: the one on that profoundly insecure group chat about an imminent military mission.  Here’s the result.

Elon Musk: The World’s Richest Troll

Let’s get something straight right off the bat: trying to keep up with Elon Musk’s antics is like trying to staple Jell-O to a ceiling fan. Every time you think you’ve seen peak Musk, he one-ups himself with a half-baked meme, a bizarre business decision, or a tweet (excuse me, X-post) about how humanity will be living on Mars by 2032, despite the fact that he can’t seem to get Teslas to stop spontaneously combusting in mall parking lots.

At this point, one has to wonder: is Musk a genius playing 4D chess while the rest of us are still figuring out checkers, or is he a chaotic tech-bro who stumbled into a fortune and now spends his time cosplaying as a Bond villain with a Twitter account? Curmie (yeah, let’s go ahead and borrow that name—it fits the vibe) leans toward the latter.

We know that Musk bought Twitter for a frankly ridiculous $44 billion—because when you have that kind of cash lying around, why not purchase a dumpster fire and pour gasoline on it? Since then, he’s fired half the staff, alienated advertisers, and rebranded the platform as “X,” a name so meaningless it makes “Meta” sound like a stroke of branding genius. There’s also the small matter of boosting free speech while banning journalists and any account that dares to track his private jet. Free speech for me, but not for thee.

But Musk’s incompetence (or indifference, or megalomania—it’s honestly hard to tell anymore) isn’t confined to social media. There’s SpaceX, which admittedly has done some cool stuff, like launching a car into space for no practical reason whatsoever. And then there’s Tesla, a company so riddled with quality-control issues it’s basically the tech world’s answer to the Ford Pinto, only with autopilot.

Speaking of autopilot: fun fact, it isn’t one. You’d think that minor detail would be clear in the user manual, or at least in the ads, but apparently it’s up to the driver to guess when the car will decide to aim for a median at 80 mph. But hey, it’s electric, so at least you’ll die sustainably.

And let’s not forget Musk’s hobby of making sweeping promises about brain chips, hyperloops, and underground traffic tunnels that totally aren’t going to become a claustrophobic hellscape when someone inevitably breaks down inside one. Curmie remembers the good old days when tech moguls stuck to overpriced software and left the sci-fi megalomania to movies starring Jeff Goldblum.

The thing is, Musk has so thoroughly convinced a segment of the population that he’s the savior of humanity that they’ll gleefully pay for a blue checkmark, defend his honor in Reddit threads, and pretend that Dogecoin isn’t a joke that got out of hand. Meanwhile, the actual adults in the room—engineers, regulators, and people with working frontal lobes—are left to clean up the wreckage of his impulsive decisions.

In the end, whether Elon Musk is a misunderstood visionary or just a rich guy playing SimCity with the global economy is irrelevant. What matters is that he’s driving the bus, it’s on fire, and he’s live-tweeting the whole thing. Buckle up.

Um… wow.  Yes, Curmie would enjoy having a beer with this particular AI manifestation.  But we’re already pretty much in “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that” territory.  Curmie will, however, continue to write (and think) for himself.  And all future Curmie posts will be written by… Curmie.

In the words of Ionesco’s Bérenger, “Je ne capitule pas.”