Oh no! AI curiosity elicits the return of the Turtle-Necked Tw*t
They’re scammers, not innovators – and I've been here before
“We’re moving everything to XML!”
I stare blankly at my boss. If he was expecting a reply, he would be disappointed. I’d heard of XML, of course – we’d just clicked over into a new century after all and even survived that pesky Y2K business! – but I had not expected those particular three letters, spoken in that order, coming from the mouth of our publishing director. This was someone whose technical skills barely extended to operating a retractable ballpoint pen with one hand.
Sitting next to him is a man wearing a turtle-neck shirt and a shit-eating grin. The fellow seems vaguely familiar so I acknowledge him with a polite nod, yet I am internally and irrationally hating him already while trying to remind myself never to judge people on first(?) appearances.
Let’s put this in context. I was returning from a boozy lunch to celebrate the passing of another issue of our magazine to press when the aforementioned director pulled me into his glass-walled office just as I was tottering between the open-plan desks to regain my own.
The year is 2005.
“We’re moving everything to XML!” says the boss again, perhaps hoping I might say something in return this time. If so, his disappointment was doomed to persist. “Steve” he grins, practically hugging the Turtle-Necked Twat next to him around the shoulders, “has it all sorted!”
I look at Steve and only now notice the damning evidence – a flipchart pen – still in his hand. Damn. The boss has always been a sucker for slick patter and a flipchart. I suspect it’s something to do with the loud tearing sound as the pages get turned with a flourish. Possibly an S&M trigger.
And now I recognise TNT Steve, having held the front door of our building open to him as I left for lunch. I remember observing his turtle-neck shirt and fully shaven pate – his scalp stubble however giving the game away that, razorless, he would otherwise still have a full head of hair – and thinking “Hey ho, another Brian Eno cosplayer to meet the art editor.” I had failed to notice that he was carrying a Blueberry instead of a portfolio case.
Suddenly very sober indeed, I accept defeat without argument. The battle has already been fought, and lost, while the rest of us were at lunch. Every single person who will be directly affected by whatever batshit decision has just been made in this room were not in it when it was taken. As usual.
OK, I say, let’s employ an XML workflow. It seems a bit overblown for our little magazine, though. What are we hoping to achieve?
“Steve says we’ll be more efficient!”
This magazine employs only five people, I remind my publisher: four if you don’t include me because I’m a freelancer. You think an unflinchingly strict workflow of bland-looking templates, verbose manual tagging and constant pruning of the validation, one in which getting a single text character out of place spells instant collapse of the entire publishing system, and which will require a new server, new software, specialist IT support and lots of training, is going to save you money?
“Don’t worry, Steve will take charge of all that.”
Taking charge evidently means “getting in everyone’s way, interrogating the staff with a syrupy voice and drawing diagrams with lots of criss-cross arrows on the boss’s flipchart.” Two weeks later, he convenes a systems analysis results meeting and tells everyone what they do – which is odd because they already know this.
The following week is worse, as each of us get cajoled into TNT Steve’s so-called training courses that turn out not to be training at all but one-way conceptual think-piece lectures on the benefits of XML. We stay late every night to catch up with work.
When it comes to implementing “the system”, TNT Steve’s time in the office becomes less frequent. After a further month of sporadic appearances, during which his behaviour is highly evasive, the TNT is never seen again.
“He had to move on to another cutting-edge project,” explains my publisher. “In Los Angeles, apparently. Or it might have been Qasigiannguit. Anyway, could you finish off what he was doing? Just tidy up a few loose ends?”
TNT Steve, who I later discover has just earned more from my publisher in two months of disruptive twattery than I do in two years, has left behind a solitary page template set up at the wrong size and in the wrong application, a couple of sample XML files that he copied from a PCW cover disc, and a half-written DTD whose schema is so obsolete that it might have been copied from a Paleolithic cave wall.
Suffice to say, after TNT Steve virtually nuked our working practices, we spent the next year and a half shovelling the radioactive graphite remains of our production process back into the smouldering crater he left behind.
Jump forward to 2023 and it’s happening all over again – as history tends to. Sure, today, XML is now integral to all digital content publishing; but that’s not the issue. Back in the early noughties, few SMBs were implementing full XML workflows. That did not stop armies of TNT Steves from laying waste to modest editorial floors across the western world, earning megabucks to talk megabollocks about emerging tech they had absolutely no idea how to implement and consulting on disruptive digital transformations they had no intention of seeing through.
Twenty years ago it was XML. Today, it’s AI.
Frequently I get asked if I know someone who can talk to their teams about AI. Sure I can! TNT Steves are in plentiful supply, just waiting for your call! Everywhere I turn, organisations are inviting customers and partners to panel discussions where up to four TNTs at a time talk utter wank about the potential of AI to revolutionise our content publishing businesses.
Make no mistake, these are not AI experts. If they are expert in anything, it’s in talking utter wank. Whether their specialist subject is AI or XML or NFT or the Life and Times of Basil Fucking Brush is irrelevant. They’ll wax lyrical on the emerging tech of your choice and it’ll sound wholly convincing to those who are not directly affected by it.
Take, for example, the following piece of sparkling prose. I promise you, it’s genuine.
We offer performance-style learning events with world-class actors. Our events are short, thought-provoking live shows that use humour and empathy to open people’s minds in a controlled environment. The aim is a shift in the collective consciousness of a group, and small but high-impact changes in behaviour being implemented ‘in public’ as a result. Our style is purposefully disruptive.
Over to you. Have a guess…
Don’t get me started on “purposefully disruptive”… but at least we’ve all grown up a bit and are automatically on our guard these days when you hear someone use the word “disruption”. It simply means “change”. And the most wonderful thing about the English language is that there is a pre-existing word for “change”. It’s “change”. I know, amazing isn’t it?
I’m told “disruption” actually means more than that. Indeed, it means “change+bullshit”.
If you really can’t pick out the right answer from the quiz above, ask me in the comments below (or try the ‘Note’ feature in Substack that nobody understands, or uses). Polling stops and the results will be shown after this weekend so get in quick! Obviously if you do know the answer, pick one of the others instead as that will be funnier.
In the meantime, I trust you will meet the challenge of today’s AI-spouting TNTs with more resistance than I showed our XML-spouting Steve in 2005. AI is here, it’s going to change things, it’s massive. Just don’t let anyone bamboozle your boss into “implementing AI”. Trust me, very few people in this sector know what they’re talking about, but this does not stop them from doing exactly that. There’s money in them there fools!
On the other hand, if you reckon my warning is just a sign of sour grapes from someone who missed the latest IT bandwagon – yet again, grr! – can I interest you in some NFTs? They’ll make a fortune, defo! ***
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He secretly wishes he would be paid to talk utter wank about AI on a panel discussion. If this ever comes about, he will make sure you get on the guest list. See you in the green room bar!
*** For me selling them, obviously; not you buying them.
I have my own definition of AI which I use if I get annoyed. AI Programming is work one of my sons does. Just finished his degree and out in the real world. Had him do his year placement at work.
He is not artificial but grown in my wife. His brother does fron line IT support, perhaps that should be called JI then?
Gotta love a bit of AC/DC ! Very polite audience though.