I’ve had this idea on my mind for a while, and finally got around to bashing out a first go at the lyrics the other day, along with a demo. When an idea won’t go away, that’s usually a sign that it is worth pursuing.

It’s been ages since I so much as picked up the guitar, as you can probably tell. I’m still vaguely pleased with it, to the extent that I am ever pleased with anything.

The lyrics could perhaps be stronger still. I wanted to get something in there about the blatant theft part, but what with all the low hanging fruit of stuff like not actually working or being fit for purpose, and destroying the planet, I left that out.

Also, the original lyrics are… difficult to filk, because there aren’t many. The usual filk trick of retaining as many lines as possible from the original while shifting the context completely was difficult to achieve with this one. I had a go, at least.

That said, the central conceit here is essentially the title, just as it is in the original song. “But Mr Ashcroft,” a person could say, “sometimes drugs do work, what are you on about?” To which I imagine Mr Ashcroft would very reasonably reply with a sentence including the words ‘off’ and ‘fuck’.

And so here.

Quite obviously, AI, or “AI”, to spell it properly, clearly has some uses. But shovelling half-baked chatbots which will cheerfully and confidently lie to you some reasonably large percentage of the time - into everything in sight - is not it.

Anyway, here are the lyrics, FWIW:

All this talk of Gemini
It’s getting me down my love
I asked Chat GPT, and it said to me
Error generating a response

It keeps trying to assist me
As it pops up on my screen
But the AI don’t work, it just makes things worse
I just want to read this document

The AI don’t work, it just makes things worse
I just want to search the web again…

But I know I’m on a losing streak
Cos I tried out Midjourney
If you look too close, it’s all kind of gross
With six fingers in your ear again

The AI don’t work, it gets worse and worse
And you’re putting it in everything

We don’t neeeeeed
Spicy autocomplete
That can’t draw feet
Just make it sto…op
It’s just a lie, it’s better off dead

All this talk of data centers
It’s getting me down my love
Costs a fucking bomb, then it gets shit wrong
It’s a waste of electricity

The AI don’t work, it just makes things worse
While destroying the environment

We don’t neeeeeed
Spicy autocomplete
That can’t draw feet
Just make it sto…op
It’s just a lie, it’s better off dead

The AI don’t work, it just makes things worse
I just want to read this document

The AI don’t work, it just makes things worse
I just want to search the web again

The AI don’t work, it just makes things worse
While destroying the enviroment

The AI don’t work it gets worse and worse
And you’re putting it in everything

Thanks, Demis