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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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But for the average person it's being sold as "you can now do all this yourself because the AI will do it all for you". Someone who says "put a QR code in this flyer" assumes that the AI is like a human being that you would ask to do this, and the human would understand what was meant. They don't know that the AI doesn't understand and that you have to be very exact in your prompt, because the sales pitch is "This is your friendly helpful assistant who is a real person too, talk to Claude or Bob or Iris or Sally the chatbot for what you want!"

Giving human names to the machine is all part of the deliberate pitch to humanise the product and sell it as "this can replace a person, now you don't need to pay an artist or a designer or a secretary to do this for you" and that's not true as of yet. Saying people are stupid for not knowing what they have not been told they need to know is dismissive and condescending.

No, I get that, I don't like the marketing campaigns. But at some point you have to pay attention to what you're doing. If you're putting up flyers with a QR code, why haven't you scanned them at least once to know they work? And if you find they don't work, and I'm guessing 'work' here means 'link to your website' then why don't you ask the AI why they're not doing that? And if you've got no idea what you want the QR code to do, why are you asking for a QR code?

Managing AI is very much like managing humans. In both cases half the job is clarifying your thinking and soliciting follow-up questions and checking you're on the same page all the time, and "Well, I know what I want," doesn't work for AI or humans.