Virtual Reality.

In the last month or three, I've noticed a proliferation of artificial intelligence bots generating skateboard content on the slowly burning trashcan fire that is Facebook. The first one that seemed suspicious was the Shredder News. Their content walked a bleary line of regurgitating press releases with just enough writing to make it seem possible a human could have cut and pasted together an article. Cole Nowicki of Simple Magic had been wondering the same thing about the site. I eventually concluded they are fake based upon this collection of words about the return of Steve Rocco to skateboarding.

No human could write something that poorly.

The next one I noticed was the Dern Brothers. There are some real Dern brothers out in the skateboard world, but this isn't them. The address for the Facebook page is a park in Dallas, Texas, that may or may not have a skatepark in it. Dern Brothers would post somewhat obscure and well captioned skateboard photos, mostly from 2016. Strange, but reasonable. Then they dropped this gem. Either they willfully ignored Mike's sordid sponsorship history out of politeness or they were a clueless machine. They're probably the later.

Then yesterday this post came up. As Clyde Singleton commented, "AI bot crashed out."

This stuff is somewhat harmless and entertaining for now, but there are serious drawbacks to this type of content. The second worst part of all this is that people are treating these entities as real. The worst part is that people are going to be learning an approximation of skateboarding history from a machine that doesn't pick up important details.

As the endless quest to churn out content goes on, the artificial creatures are even starting to duplicate themselves.

I'm so stoked to be living in the dumbest timeline imaginable that is only going to get dumber as time moves forward.

We're getting rec'd on Monday. For real, no computer generated content here.