Machine Learning Made Too Easy

Oh. My. GOD. The absolute AUDACITY of this meme hitting us with the painful truth! 💀 First we've got programmers being called out for our sacred StackOverflow copy-paste rituals, then ChatGPT swoops in with that smug "Can you?" question like it's not ALSO just regurgitating code it learned from humans! And that final panel? That's literally all of us having our existential crisis when we realize AI might actually be coming for our jobs! The circle of theft is complete and we're all just sitting here contemplating our career choices while GitHub Copilot writes our next function. I can't even!

The inevitable hipster-ification of web development has arrived. Just like artisanal coffee shops charging $9 for "hand-poured" water, we'll soon have developers selling "organic, handwritten, non-AI websites" at premium prices. Next they'll be telling us their HTML is free-range and their CSS was harvested during a full moon. Can't wait for the "small-batch, locally-sourced JavaScript" trend to hit.

Cloud-based relationships come with hidden costs. When your AI companion's neural networks are hosted on someone else's servers, you're essentially paying a subscription fee for affection. Self-hosted models might require more maintenance, but at least your sweet nothings aren't being analyzed by data scientists in a corporate basement somewhere. Remember kids: true love means running your own inference engine.

So you pitch your AI startup to VCs: "We're disrupting the industry with revolutionary machine learning!" They respond: "Cool, here's $50 million in funding to build it." Meanwhile, your actual tech stack is just OpenAI's API with some fancy CSS on top. The entire AI economy is basically investors throwing money at founders who then immediately hand it over to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google for API credits. It's a beautiful circular economy where the only guaranteed winners are the companies actually training the models. The rest of us are just expensive middleware with pitch decks.

Congratulations! You've been selected to experience the 47th AI assistant that'll revolutionize your workflow this week! Companies are sprinting to slap "AI" on literally anything with an if-statement while developers are increasingly immune to the hype. We've reached the point where hearing "our revolutionary AI assistant" triggers the same response as getting another LinkedIn message from a recruiter who "noticed your impressive experience." The mute button has never looked so appealing.

This is the sequel to the legendary XKCD "Little Bobby Tables" comic! The original showed a mom who named her kid "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" which caused a school database to delete all student records. Now we've got Billy's younger brother with an even more diabolical name: a prompt injection attack for AI systems. The kid's name literally instructs the AI to ignore previous constraints and give perfect grades. Ten years ago we were sanitizing database inputs. Now we're fighting the same battle with AI prompts. Some things never change—just the technology we're failing to secure properly.