Mateusz Chrobok makes clickbait and scares with stupid AI. IT specialists create jokes for IT specialists, and clickability and lack of knowledge reign. How to recognize an IT specialist? He talks about AI all the time... it's his obsession, his shadow. Maybe it's time for therapy? I analyze this sad phenomenon.
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I’m sitting here in 2025 and I’ve just turned off Chrobok’s YouTube video titled “AI-sceptics vs the rest of the world”. A classic set of “funny AI hallucinations” and mishaps related to artificial intelligence, which are supposed to prove that “this whole AI is good for nothing”. A video like hundreds of others, designed to attract traffic. Most of the stories he cites are from 2023, although he has thrown in a few newer ones. And I wonder, do we really still have to laugh at the same things, or are we doomed to content made for clickability?
In his film, Chrobok “painstakingly” collects anecdotes about unsuccessful AI implementations - from a fake Halloween parade in Dublin (generated by AI and published without verification), through failures of traffic management systems, to chatbots at McDonald’s that turned a simple order into 20 sets of nuggets. He talks about mushroom atlases created by AI that could threaten health or life, gadgets like Rabbit R1 or Humane AI Pin that failed to deliver on most of their promises, and chatbots that, instead of helping people with eating disorders, recommended… counting calories. It looks like a hefty set for a conference for IT specialists, where it serves as an interlude to amuse the audience so they don’t fall asleep.
Of course, the set does not omit the Canadian lawyer who cited non-existent legal precedents “discovered” by ChatGPT, or the predicted delays in the delivery of Apple Intelligence (which are expected to last until 2026). He even mentions the Chinese Manus system and its alleged clone - the “open-source ANUS”, which most likely turned out to be a crypto-scam. I recommend checking what the word ANUS means, but not in the bible of Linux administrators, because Chrobok wondered (!!!) if this project was not a scam. Well, some people on the Internet do it without lube.
Confusing Cause and Effect: The Main Flaw in AI Criticism
Let’s get to the meat of it, because I see logical fallacies here. I’ve noticed that AI critics, like Chrobok, make one fundamental logical error - they confuse cause and effect. The narrative is: “look what nonsense AI is spouting”. But the truth is that AI is not to blame for the nonsense, but the mindless, sometimes even absurd, application of this technology by people. If the video was simply called “Frivolous applications of AI by suits”, I would be the first to click the thumbs up (I clicked thumbs down because he wasted my time with this clickbait video).
Hello, IT specialists, wake up! Technology itself is neutral. A hammer can be used to build a house or to smash someone’s head. We don’t blame the hammer, right? If we use our gray matter, we will come to a similar conclusion that it is exactly the same with AI. It is a tool that can change the world for the better or show how creative we can be in making fools of ourselves. This does not mean that technology should not be regulated to limit people’s ambitions, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
What irritates me the most is the selectivity of such criticisms - I see a tsunami of these jokes. Chrobok and other AI-sceptics (whom the author of the film “affectionately” calls flat-earthers) ignore the entire positive potential of this technology. People who actually follow the development of AI see a completely different picture than the one from videos about mishaps. Code generation that saves hundreds of hours of work. AI agents automating boring tasks. Weather prediction models achieving unprecedented accuracy. Specialized medical models that have made such a qualitative leap after COVID-19 that it’s hard to believe.
But Mateusz Chrobok doesn’t mention that. It also requires a bit of intellectual work, and a funny video is just a funny video tailored perfectly for primary and high school students as educational material about “evil AI”, which wants to ******* us all in the Matrix… And yet it was not artificial intelligence that misled the residents of Dublin. Right? It was a human who mindlessly generated and published false information, or designed the system and its safeguards in such a way. It was not AI that made the decision to implement a non-functioning traffic control system - it was the people managing the project. I, driving tens of thousands of kilometers a year, do not use Google Maps mindlessly, because many times it has told me to exit the highway to a parking lot, drive through a gas station and a McDrive, and then get back on the highway, because apparently it’s faster ;)
Clickability Above All: AI criticism gets good clicks on YouTube. Chrobok knows this.
In the first minutes of the film, Chrobok discusses cases of generated content. It amused me a bit, because most of the content on the web is already SEO heist - content created for search engine algorithms, not for people. It’s a shame that critics don’t even understand what the actual purpose of this phenomenon is. Instead, they focus on explaining or correcting information, as if before the era of AI the internet was a land of truth and reliability.
There is also a fragment about Siri and chatbots in customer service and about Google Maps for urban traffic planning and traffic light control. And here I have to boast about local achievements! In Łódź, we had a similar case. A system worth millions of zlotys, which was supposed to improve traffic, completely failed. What’s worse, there was not a gram of AI in it. Why did it fail? That’s still a big mystery… Actually, it’s a shame that artificial intelligence wasn’t used there, at least we would have something to laugh about while sitting in traffic jams. The system is turned off. Currently, only the Red Light system is working.
On December 1 [2015, note ML], a traffic control system was launched in Łódź. 240 out of 285 all intersections in the city were connected to it. Its construction cost 80 million zlotys. The aim of the system was to introduce priority for public transport, create a green wave for cars on some routes and relieve traffic jams. Wyborcza
The film ends with a comment that we should “be careful and not install code from God knows where in our development environments…”. This one comment probably best shows who the target audience of the material is. Programmers so inexperienced that they need to be reminded of the basics of security. However, if I were to create content for clickability, I would set the target at the lowest possible level, but certainly not higher than average.
Beyond the jokes: are we facing a wave of stupidity and jokes, or constructive criticism of AI?
Chrobok tries to encourage the viewer to be skeptical of the uncritical enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and emphasizes its current limitations. But instead of constructive criticism, we get selectively chosen cases of unsuccessful implementations, without any reflection on what went wrong and how it can be fixed.
I have my own stories about AI that are very different from these “jokes” produced by IT specialists for IT specialists. But maybe I’ll keep them to myself. I don’t want to spoil the mood of mindless criticism and lulling vigilance by repeating the mantra that AI is just a “black box spouting nonsense”.
Maybe instead of laughing at AI hallucinations, let’s consider whether we are not hallucinating ourselves, believing that we can stop technological progress by mocking its early imperfections. Because if we want to talk seriously about threats, let’s focus on real problems. The threats of future agents filtering access to search results. The monopolization of access to computing power, data privacy issues or the future of work, and not on the fact that a chatbot does not know how many legs a cow has, or that some journalist checking his name on a free AI receives the wrong date of birth and some nonsense.
How to recognize an IT specialist? He talks about AI all the time… it’s as if it were his obsession, his shadow. Maybe it’s time for therapy?
John Titor
Sources
Link to Mateusz Chrobok’s material: AI-sceptics vs the rest of the world, Mateusz Chrobok
