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Standup comedian John Mulaney was invited to do a set at an AI event in San Francisco last week that organizer Salesforce billed as the "largest AI event in the world," with roughly 45,000 people expected to be in attendance.
But little did they know Mulaney was about to eviscerate the company and the AI industry as a whole, delivering a lethal reality check to all those audience members at the Dreamforce event.
During his 45-minute set, Mulaney skewered the AI industry for its willingness to give up human agency, with often fundamentally flawed chatbots feeding users purported info about current events, work advice, and even medical diagnoses.
"If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die," a deadpan Mulaney told the crowd, as quoted by the San Francisco Standard. "So many of you feel imminently replaceable."
"Can AI sit there in a fleece vest?" he added. "Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?"
Mulaney also pointed out the fatal irony of hosting the event in a city that has faced a devastating housing crisis, crime, and drug overdose deaths.
"Let me get this straight," he said. "You’re hosting a ‘future of AI’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?"
Irony Poisoning
Mulaney also tapped into the industry's ongoing efforts to replace human workers with AI, a heated debate that has gained considerable traction over the last couple of years.
Mulaney took the opportunity to roast attendees and their navel-gazing and self-congratulating.
"Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days," he said. "The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title anymore."
He also thanked the crowd for fundamentally changing the world for his almost three-year-old son, ensuring that he "will never talk to an actual human again."
"Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot," Mulaney told audiences, referring to the fact that chatbots still have a strong tendency to "hallucinate" facts.
Mulaney even used an anecdote about himself and his son to send the message home.
"We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other," he said. "It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce."
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