Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Porto Alegre, Brazil City Councilman Ramiro Rosário

A city in southern Brazil just enacted the country’s first legislation entirely written by AI bot ChatGPT. Normally the misadventures of a Brazilian local pol wouldn’t turn up on the EA radar, but you know—you know—that this story’s eqivilent is coming soon to our shores, if it isn’t here already

The Associated Press reports that Porto Alegre city councilman Ramiro Rosário admitted to having ChatGPT to write a proposed law aimed at preventing the city from forcing locals to pay for replacing stolen water consumption meters. He didn’t make a single change to the AI generated bill, and didn’t even tell the city council that he didn’t write it. “If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote,” Rosarío told the AP. “It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence.”

It’s unfair to let the public know that they are being governed by machines, or that their elected officials are too lazy or dumb to compose their own bills. Got it.

Porto Alegre’s council president Hamilton Sossmeier extolled the new law on social media and was embarrassed when its true author was revealed. He then called letting bots write legislation a “dangerous precedent.” Ya think? Massachusetts state senator Barry Finegold says that he has used AI to draft bills, but that he wants “work that is ChatGPT generated to be watermarked….I’m in favor of people using ChatGPT to write bills as long as it’s clear.” I think he means “clear that a bot was involved.” It’s ambiguous language like Barry’s sentence that makes it seem like ChatGPT is an improvement over human public servants.

These AI bots continue to make stuff up, cite imaginary sources, and lie…you know, just like real politicians. For his part, Rosario sees nothing wrong with letting a bot do the work he was elected to do. “All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good,” he told the AP. “That’s why we have to show how it can be used for good.”

Secretly employing a machine to do your work and not disclosing that fact is called “cheating.” Somebody explain to the councilman that cheating is not “good.”

Ethics Dunce: The Chicago-Sun Times

Morons.

The Chicago Sun-Times published a list of 15 recommended books to read this summer as Memorial Day looms. Ten of the 15, two-thirds, were made up titles. Then the Philadelphia Inquirer published the same phony list, headlined “Summer reading list for 2025.” There was the well-reviewed tome “Tidewater Dreams” authored by Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende. Her “first climate fiction novel”! (She’s real, the book wasn’t.) Then there was “The Rainmakers,” set in a “near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity.” That artificially induced novel was supposedly written by 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett. (Nope!) The list also included “Deep Thoughts” by Joe Biden, a book of blank pages.

OK, I’m kidding about that one…

Of course, of course, the phony list was generated by an AI bot, because that’s what the bots do: make up stuff. Who doesn’t know that by now? Well, apparently journalists don’t, because they are lazy practitioners of a profession that no longer observes basic ethical standards of competence and responsibility. A while back I wrote the post “By Now, No Lawyer Should Be Excused For Making This Blunder” about the lazy lawyers who used Chat GPT to write legal memoranda and briefs that inevitably included fake case cites. Arguably, journalists and editors have even fewer excuses for falling into that trap.

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Integrity Test For Climate Change Hysterics

Well waddya know! The U.S. is on the verge of setting records for all-time low temperatures in May. That’s funny. I thought humanity was doomed because the world is burning up.

Of course, I don’t think one unseasonally cold month has any more significance than one unseasonably cold day, but that’s not how the climate change cabal has been playing their game. No, every time the temperature seems especially high anywhere in the USA, the activists, most of whom know as much about climate science as I know about fixing a carburetor, start screaming, pointing, and crying out, “See? SEE?” They do the same thing with seasonal wildfires, hurricanes, floods and, at least on The View, earthquakes and eclipses. They get away with it too, because the unscrupulous politicians they elect and the dim-bulb progressive pundits and reporters who work for those politicians always endorse and rationalize the climate change hysterics’ propaganda, even after every prediction, every projection, every deadline to save humanity proves to be hooey.

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BREAKING! Verizon Sucks!

For the nearly four days Verizon’s incompetence cost me, including two angry clients, one lost assignment that would have earned me at least $200, a missed bill payment that resulted in a penalty of 22 bucks, and over four hours wasted on phone calls and technicians, the company just texted me what its penance would be. Here’s the full text:

“Due to a service outage, we’ve issued a credit of $8.61 that will appear soon in your account.”

Anticipating this, yesterday I tried to get through to a human being in Customer Service to register my objections to both the Verizon service I received (and didn’t receive) over those four days, and my conclusion that the company owed me a lot more than just compensation for the time the internet and phone weren’t working. First I was trapped in a loop trying to sell me various products and services offered by Verizon’s “partners.” Next I reached an AI who mimicked a human being, even saying “um” here and there, who wouldn’t stop talking even when I did my best Michael Palin impression from the immortal “Travel Agent Sketch” (his screaming “SHUT UP!” begins at around the four minute mark)….

On my third try, I was told that a live representative would pick up after an estimated “13 minute” wait; the wait time was really 44 minutes. Then I was told that I had reached the repair department, but I was promised that I would be forwarded to a live person “who can help you” without dealing with recordings and AI liars. After a half hour of the most horrible elevator music since Montovani played “The Pina Colada Song,” I hung up.

I can’t even buy a good straight-edge razor to go on my planned “Sweeney Todd” rampage for $8.61.”

Unabomber Memorial Ethics Explosions, 5/15-18/25 (PS: I’m Not Dead, but Thanks Neil, Ryan, Jon et al. for Worrying About Me…)

Yes, it is I.

My internet went out right before midnight on the 14th, which means my office and home phones also haven’t worked since then until just a little while ago. Neither did my streaming services. Verizon, which I switched back to in November because Comcast was unreliable and cost too much, put me through the usual customer service Hell before I reached what I thought was a competent human being. It took me almost a half an hour of arguing with Verizon’s “automated assistant” to get to said CHB, who immediately contradicted hiscyber-colleague by confirming that yes, there had been an “incident” in my area (the bot had denied it) and a crew was working on the outage. That was the supposedly the good news; the bad news was that I might be trapped in the Stone Age (okay, I’m exaggerating: that statement would go into the Washington Post’s Trump Lie Database if the President said it) until as late as 4:45 pm on the 15th.

But you didn’t read this post on the 15th, did you? That would be because 4:45 pm. came and went, and still I couldn’t communicate with the outside world. Meanwhile, clients were screaming, Ethics Alarms was languishing, “fish is jumpin’” and I was reduced to singing “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess” for some reason. In a 52 minute phone call with Verizon in which I listened to a very polite, pleasant, customer service representative who spoke relatively clear pidgin English in a high-pitched voice (I couldn’t place the accent), I discovered that the company couldn’t send a technician to my house until Friday afternoon. Next, my phone stopped receiving signals too, so I couldn’t even keep up with comments.

A very nice technician showed up at 1:30 pm and was fooling around with things for an hour. He replaced “the box” and then told me that he had been informed that the problem couldn’t be resolved by him, and that his supervisor told him to tell me that the outage wouldn’t be corrected until 6:45 am yesterday, Saturday the 17th. It wasn’t. Verizon promised to have another technician come by between 11am and 3pm on Sunday. That actually came to pass, and it turned out the previous technician had inserted the wrong thingy in the wrong plug, or something.

Ol’ Crazy Ted, the Harvard grad terrorist, has again been proven right: it’s ridiculous what I (you, we) can’t do without key technology, and one of them is maintaining an ethics blog.

Well, I still could prepare a post on Word and have it ready to go up when civilization reappears, so that’s what I started to do Friday morning and am revising now, as I try to forget that I have God only knows (I switched to singing the Beach Boys because I can’t remember all the words to “Summertime” right now) how many emails to answer that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t have email on my cell phone, you see, because I tell my ethics classes that the less confidential, client-related stuff you have on your phone, the better.

Meanwhile,

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A Teacher Gives Up: Ethics Observations

This is a TikTok video that is now unavailable on that platform for some reason—maybe the Chinese don’t want the truth getting out there. The video is long, and the distraught teacher is obviously not a video pro, but her message is heartfelt as well as astute. Attention should be paid.

I stumbled on Hannah’s lament as I was preparing to write another post that it quickly subsumed. That one was a response to this [Gift link!] in which a Hollywood screenwriter blames the public for the fact that Hollywood movies stink now. “The true problem lies with you, the audience,” he writes. “[I]t’s hard to argue that Hollywood is doing anything other than giving you, the moviegoing public, what you want.” I was going to call my response, “It’s the Culture, Stupid!” and point out that Hollywood is as much responsible for the culture as it is now a victim of it.

Hollywood helped create the attention deficit-afflicted, literature starved, culturally illiterate generations that drive politics and commerce now. As Hannah’s video makes clear, there are a lot of factors that have created an American public that is unable to absorb complex issues or enjoy stories that will teach them something valuable about life and humanity. Hollywood and the entertainment industry are as culpable as any of them.

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If Only MSNBC Hosts Could Be Explained This Way…

Last year, Australian Radio Network’s CADA station, broadcasting from Sydney, introduced a perky young female host (above) who called herself “Thy.” Her popular show called “Workdays with Thy” featured music for four hours a day from Monday to Friday with the pleasant-sounding young woman chattering away between songs and ads.

It took about six months for inquiring minds to started asking questions about who Thy was and where she came from, since she never gave her last name and no biographical information seemed to exist on her anywhere. Some listeners also claimed on social media that certain phrases she liked to use sounded identical every time. CADA eventually had to admit that Thy didn’t exist: “she” was an “it,” a direct kin of Siri, a bot whose AI-generated software had been developed by the voice-cloning firm ElevenLabs. This was a six month “experiment.”

The network issued a statement, saying, “This is a space being explored by broadcasters globally, and while the trial has offered valuable insights, it’s also reinforced the unique value that personalities bring to creating truly compelling content.” Why would anyone believe that? Sirius-XM had Wolfman Jack hosting a Sixties radio show for years using his old tapes and remastered versions of the songs he played even though he died a decade before without the satellite network ever telling listeners that this Wolfman was just a recording. It has been doing the same thing recently on its Seventies channel with Casey Kasem’s old “Top 40” show, without bothering reveal that Casey died with dementia in 2014 after retiring in 2009.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find AI disc jockeys less creepy than dead ones, and a station using either without letting listeners know is unethical.

Not as unethical, however, as featuring live hosts like Simone Sanders and even arguably live ones like Chris Matthews.

Another Unethical (But Funny!) Use of AI in the Law

In March, the Arizona Supreme Court launched two AI-generated avatars named Victoria and Daniel: thats the pair above. These AI, non-existant personas deliver news of judicial rulings and opinions in the state via YouTube videos. Jerome Dewald, a 74-year-old plaintiff was inspired to say, “Hold my beer!”

Dewald created an AI-generated video avatar to deliver his argument via Zoom in court. Five New York State judges at the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department were anticipating his pro se presentation in an employment case on March 26, but instead of the elderly litigant they saw a young man in a button-down shirt and sweater.

“May it please the court,” said the un-named avatar. “I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices.” Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels, interrupted the presentation before the avatar (the avatar’s pronouns were “it” and “it”) could speak another word , saying “Okay, hold on. Is that counsel for the case?” After Dewald confirmed that he had generated the non-lawyer non-person using AI, Manzanet-Daniels ordered the video to be turned off.

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Ethics Dunces: The Breakthrough Prize Organizers

The lesson here: Even when speech is stupid and inconvenient it is unethical to censor it.

The 2025 Breakthrough Prize ceremony, sometimes called the “Oscars of Science,” was attended by many of Silicon Valley’s major players, including Jeff Bezos. The event had comic actor Seth Rogen as its host: that was ethics dunce move #1. Rogen is only slightly less Trump Deranged than Robert DeNiro, and, though a talented performer, is no more astute in political and governmental matters than the ladies of “The View,” and just as biased. What did organizers think Rogen was going to say while having an open mic all night during a full Trump-hate freakout?

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The Guardian’s Blue Origin Flight Critique: Into The Mind of America Haters, Where No One Rational Has Gone Before!

What a fascinating article from the British hard left tabloid “The Guardian!” Simultaneously taking aim at a legitimate target and exploding into a furious attack on the United States and Donald Trump, it is invaluable for plumbing the depths of how the extreme progressive Left takes in information, filtering it through a confirmation bias to reach false but—for them—comforting conclusions. Stephen Green nailed some of what’s wrong here, “writer Moira Donegan’s utter lack of self-awareness while decrying our lack of self-awareness.” She uses Blue Origin’s all-female passenger flight to as evidence of U.S. decline, but the too-obvious-to-mention reality is that the U.S. has more than one private company capable of putting humans into space, and the crumbling U.K. can’t come close to producing the same.

How can an essay be simultaneously astute and idiotic at the same time? Easy. Donegan accurately writes that for the most part, the high visibility female celebrities taking this expensive joy ride embarrassed themselves and their sex by acting like sorority girls exclaiming, “Like, omigawd! Stars!” Leaving out the gratuitous political shots, Donegan writes in part,

Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic….the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man….There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur…But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness. In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women…but mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said…“Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” “Who would not get glam before the flight?!” asked Sánchez, who evidently can’t imagine that women might prioritize anything else. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule.” Bowe, too, joined in, saying that she had gone to extreme lengths to make sure that she would be, of all things, well coiffed for the experience. “I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good,” she said. “I took it for a dry run.”

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