Reflecting Day: Tormented Robo-Shirts for Charity! 🌭

You’ve seen those Artificial Intelligence artbots, right? You feed them a prompt and they crawl all the artwork in human history to remix it and spit out what you want. Or more often, what you hilariously don’t want and have no possible use for. It’s fun, but the legality of the whole process is questionable, and the morality is answerable. It’s “no.” 

The AI is just savvy enough to cost good artists work on bad projects, but not savvy enough to authentically replace human joy, so it’s a lose-lose scenario built only to reinvigorate jaded lawyers looking for a new challenge. Still, it’s damn good fun to fuck with a robot. The first guy to kick one of those Boston Dynamics dogs could tell you that, before they started putting guns on them and he had to google how long robots hold grudges. So how do we automate art and still survive with our human souls intact? It’s an impossible philosophical question that we completely solved. No problem.

We torment the robots with bizarre prompts, laugh at their flailing confusion, then sell T-shirts as monuments to their anguish and give the proceeds to charity!

It’s the perfect scheme, and it helps so many: It helps the charities, it helps you put sweet nonsense on your body, and it helps our precious human artists by poisoning the minds of the AIs forever. Every robot you teach to understand Hulkamania can never again understand the Baroque Movement. That’s art fact!

We wish we could take full credit for this scam, but the whole thing started and continues to live on our Discord, where Mo first tried to teach a robot to Hot Dog.  

It’s wonderful. It’s the best attempt by thousands of years of technological progress to understand tubed meat. And it’s not even close. It’s a 1986 Food Engineer’s cocaine nightmare that inspired a terrible new kind of microwave sausage technology. “Is this a hoge?” The robot asked. “Does it hange?” And the only answer it got was our derisive laughter. 

There will be plenty of crypto-scum to shamelessly profit off of this kind of thing in the future, but Mama Hot Dog raised us right. We put this sucker on a T-shirt, and let Mo choose the charity that all profits would go to. He picked the Chattanooga Trans Liberation Collective, and we left them a deeply confusing memo with our donation.

It was only available to the Discord, and only for a limited time – but if you want to Hange Hoge baby, all you gotta do is click here. In fact, we’re making all of our anguished AI shirts available for one week only. And again, all profits go to the robo-inquisitor’s charity of choice.

Like when Adrienne tried to teach the text robots about Popsicle Pete:

And my god, they understood. They understood so well. They spat out horrific poetry and it was a marvel, a feat of understanding. We taught a robot to fear. 

And then Mo fed its terror to the artbot again so we could mock its revelation. 

The AI could only understand those haunting words as some kind of Hungarian arthouse horror flick where a vampire ice cream man banishes nosferatu with his ghostpop. “Vatetie, Pepe!” He cries, either summoning or perhaps banishing the albino cat-mimes. 

Of course we needed that on a shirt, this time benefitting Adrienne’s charity of choice, Neighborhood Legal Services.

Juho skipped the middleman (which is me, I think? Jesus, am I already obsolete?) and asked the robot for a pre-made Hot Dog shirt.

Seanbaby joked that this is swag from his Kazakh taco shop, but we figured out what the robot was really trying to say.

We’ve long said that the goal of any good comedy site is to attack and dethrone god. We needed our mission statement on a shirt, and Juho chose to benefit the Transgender Law Center.

We like to court hubris, so we figured we’d organize this pure relentless chaos. We let the community start officially submitting and voting on confusing hot-dog related AI shirts. The first round was simple: Let’s keep trying to teach a robot to Hot Dog until they get it.

They did not.

But we can all learn a life lesson from that robot, which fucking completely does not have it but never stops swinging for the fences. The vote was close but Mo’s Hatter Doghouse won out, with these profits going to Heifer International.

I finally gave in and wandered into the robot den myself. I knew the AI struggled with people, so asking for any specific celebrity could only result in a nightmare-faced double goblin. And yet I thought of a cheat code. “Robots,” I called out to the echoing steel cavern, “Do you know… Andre the Giant?”

They!

Fucking!

Do!

They fucked up a little on the last one, interpreting Andre the Giant as a Davy Crockett-like character adventuring through the wilds challenging polar bears to guitar solo competitions, but wait did they fuck up? Because that’s actually the most correct thing I’ve ever heard.

The Discord agreed, voting that the right and only choice was “In the Lair of the Shred Bears,” with proceeds going to Make Way for Books.

You’ve got until 8AM ET on Friday, October 21st to buy one or all of these shirts, with 100% of profits going to their respective charities, and then they’re going away. You will have officially missed your chance to torment a robot in the name of human generosity. Your torso will be naked and explicable. Nobody will look at you for a long time across a crowded bar before finally, reluctantly approaching to ask “what the fuck is that shirt?” And that was it, that was how you met. That’s the moment you fell in love and started the rest of your lives together, and you missed it.

OR DID YOU?

If you want in on the ground floor of this movement, you must join our absolutely hoppin’ Discord to submit and vote in future AI shirt-mess competitions. This is how we fight back against the robot scourge! With weaponized absurdity!