A cowboy bot: NAJ screen shot
Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – Let me be perfectly clear. Artificial Intelligence is being funded by Wall Street and designed to replace us all.
It will consume all our clean water, over burden the power grid to the point of collapse, and instead of providing solutions to environmental problems and working to address climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels, it is accelerating the harmful trend.
The march of this unregulated technology will mean no more critical thinkers, writers, editors, photographers, or journalism teachers either. No more actors, producers or acting teachers. No more artists or art teachers. Certainly no more professional environmental groups or workers unions. Even political public relations men and women are on the chopping block, as are computer “coders,” who won’t be needed anymore when the bots can write their own code.
I am already on the verge of going out of business, as is everyone in the news business. The music business is also at risk, along with the movie business. I suspect even the days of podcasters and talking heads on TeeVee are numbered. Why would some big corporate conglomerate keep paying someone big bucks for their opinions when an A.I. bot can be created to spout nonsense that passes for news and entertainment?
Pretty soon they will be able to clone a Rachel Maddow, Steven Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel so we won’t even need comedians or comedy writers anymore. Soon they will bring Mark Twain back from the dead, turning old photos into videos complete with a clone of his voice. (I hope I did not just give them a brilliant idea).
Millions of people are already falling for this bullshit thanks to their addiction to social media. I guess it’s entertaining and certainly feeds the human desire for adrenaline and dopamine.
To be clear, I am not a Luddite. In fact I embraced the technology of the internet very early on. When I went back to grad school in the early to mid-1990s, I purchased a Power Mac computer on an Apple student computer loan and hooked up to the internet through the phone lines with AOL, and started reading the New York Times and Time magazine online – before there was even the Netflix web browser. I rarely read another newspaper or magazine in print after that, and started creating online publications by 1998.
Some journalism professors and certainly newspaper editors and publishers thought the net was a toy fad like the hula hoop and the slinky. Those of us involved in creating content thought it was the answer to a better news system that would help spread democracy around the world. The New York Times embraced it early on and did amazing things with it.
But because of the college dropouts who created social media and corrupt politicians willing to exploit the spread of ignorance over the net, autocracy is not just at our doorstep. It has taken over the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court – all three branches of our government. And it is spreading around the world as we see from Venezuela to Greenland.
Some of us tried to question President Joe Biden and candidate Vice President Kamala Harris back then about standing up to regulate this. We were ignored, because the President, D.O.D., N.S.A. and the C.I.A. wanted the technology in a fantasy to win a future war with China.
Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota wrote bills that never passed Congress to regulate it and force the billion-dollar companies to pay news outlets for the content they were using to train their bots. There are now lawsuits to sue A.I. companies for copyright violations and other offenses.
Who will stand up to it now? Will the courts? Under Trump? Where will it end? Is the world really watching? Or is everyone just falling in love with the bots?
Don’t think I don’t realize that I’m shouting into the wind in the wilderness, tilting at windmills like Don Quixote, writing up a storm like Hunter Thompson.
Sorry, but that is what writers do. They read, they think and they write. If this is obsolete technology, what is the alternative? You can’t even run away and join a carnival or the circus anymore. The bots will take over that business too.
So I’ve turned to radio in a small town in rural California, where a recent breaking news story taught me again something about how some people still live on a far distant planet, where the only news network that survives is the rumor mill. Since many of the few people remaining in this Gold Rush town are poor, the cell phone service is weak, and even internet access is hard to come by in the rolling hills and valleys in the west Sierra mountains, people gravitate to the streets by the Coulterville Cafe and Yosemite Visitors Center to find out what’s going on in town, the county, state, country and the world – by word of mouth.
While I’ve been here since September, about four months, this lack of connectivity has made it hard to network in some ways. And of course like any small town, there is some distrust of newcomers. Why would some writer from Alabama, who spent the better part of the last decade covering politics in Washington, D.C., want to move here of all places? Good question I guess. I’ve tried to answer it in my writing and audio files and videos already.
Good Morning Coulterville! Premiere Broadcast
But this week, the first real breaking news story involving a criminal and the cops happened here. I was not just the only journalist on the scene. I was an eye witness to some of the event. So I did what any trained news reporter would do. I started gathering facts, taking pictures, and covering the story.
Armed Man on the Loose in the Woods Around Coulterville
The next day, some locals flocked to town to find out about the story – word of mouth through the rumor mill. I told some of them I had the only real story about it on the web. Some didn’t seem to believe me.
“What? I don’t go online,” said one man who is quoted in the story because I talked to him when the cops still had the bridge closed and were looking for the fugitive using drones and dogs.
They seemed to trust each other’s accounts more than any factual reporting. Some started calling their friends to find out what they heard.
Yet when I shared it by email and all over social media in as many places as I could find, some people began to pick up on it. This is the first breaking news story we’ve covered here, and I suspect it will play a role in spreading the news that there is an actual reporter in town. It could begin to put us on the map around here. Let’s hope so.
To Wrap Up the A.I. Story
A friend and partner of mine in Tuscaloosa has been toying with using A.I. programs to write songs. I think it’s interesting and the results are sometimes quite hilarious. About the only reason I’m willing to play along is because I’ve decided that instead of totally shunning the use of A.I., I figure we should try to find ways to use the new technology against the bastards who are creating it, enriching themselves with it, and the politicians willing to use it to enhance their own political power and personal wealth.
At first he just prompted A.I. programs to write the lyrics and music to a song idea he had. Then I wrote the lyrics to a song idea I had, and he got the A.I. programs to record the music to it. I made a YouTube video out of it with Final Cut Pro, and posted it with a picture of an A.I. character on my YouTube channel. This is the result. I’ve since rewritten the lyrics some, and he is working on a video of that, when he gets time.
We both saw this story on “Inside Edition” and had another idea.
266,072 views – Nov 12, 2025: Country song “Walk My Walk” by singer Breaking Rust is number one on the country digital song sales chart. However, the singer and the song are all AI-generated. It’s been streamed 2.1 million times on Spotify, and 11.5 million times on YouTube. It is sparking a huge debate. It demonstrates how easy it is to create a song generated entirely by artificial intelligence using an AI music program.
So he took his song and made a video out of it. Some of the lyrics make no sense, so we are going to rewrite it and do another version of it when he has time. But I think this is enough for today to give you an idea where this story is going. Stay tuned for more.
That Man Ain’t Right by Stoney Gray
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