Wednesday ORT: AI Beats Reddit, Pimping China, Exploiting Davey, Therapy Bird, Timing Chains

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tanks for the memories

Good morning all. Today will be a very retro-feeling Open Thread, as I return to my time-honored practice of roasting my fellow “journalists” in the automotive-PR-by-other-means businss. I remind you, however, that as an Open Thread, you’re encouraged to bring up other, less confrontational topics, and I will pin them for discussion. Alright. Forward march.

Giving furries a bad name

drinking grey goose inevitably leads to dressing like a bird

Your humble author has never counted himself among those who look with suspicion at men who teach primary or secondary school. I credit an exceptional high school teacher, Scott Weber, with giving me the foundation I needed to become a semi-professional writer, and feel lucky that I ran into him before he left teaching to become a gun-store owner in Cody, Wyoming. (I’m not making that up.)

I still recognize, however, that many male high school teachers are profoundly weird dudes and therefore I wasn’t all that surprised when “Mr. Regular”, ahem, transitioned from “self-consciously witty dude who force-fits Foucault into the discussion of four-cylinder minivans” to “semi-insane aggressively queer bird fursona”. I even have a little bit of sympathy for the fellow. All of you at ACF know what I look like, to wit: a hugely ugly dude with a misshapen skull and no two limbs the same length. I despise my appearance and I think it would be neat to hide inside a squid costume or whatever for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, my duties as a father and, ah, conventional-ish man in the American culture prevent me from doing so.

I say all of this to indicate that I don’t have contempt for Mr. Regular because he is a gay furry who taught high school English classes for a living. Rather, I have contempt for him because of this rant in which he suggests that people only buy Harley-Davidsons because they are too stupid, hickish, or toxic to go to therapy. “The more men become comfortable with being vulnerable, weak… the less they need a $40,000 projection of masculinity… Instead of working on yourself… let’s sell you a mid motorcycle and a membership into a community of equally boring people…”

Mr. Regular then makes the assertion that most gay riders are into metric cruisers. To be fair, I have often heard that assertion made by owners of Harley-Davidsons, so if everyone agrees maybe it is in fact accurate. I’m more annoyed by his assertion that every man needs therapy. In my experience, very few men need therapy. What they need is an authentic relationship with the living Christ, or a more perfect adherence to the will of Allah, or closer and more frequent readings of Dawkins, or — as they say in the rental car business — similar. We need a moral compass, however imperfect, to which we can refer in times of crisis.

Men also need a job. We need a purpose. It doesn’t have to be saving the world. One of the things I like most about Japan is how purpose-driven their men are, regardless of what that purpose is. The dude who drove me around Tokyo all day in a brand-new Alphard for something like $47 an hour, total, wore a freshly pressed suit and spoke with clipped precision. In the train station I saw a man precisely cleaning the bicycle-brake-cable-sized spaces where the rolled edge of a towel dispenser met a tile wall. If you can care that much about something, you probably don’t need therapy.

I don’t think Mr. Regular needs therapy, either. I think it would do him some good to get out of the bird suit, get on a Road Glide, and sail across the Western deserts in search of the book, or man, or whatever, of his dreams. It’s not that deep, you know? Sometimes, as the famous therapist didn’t quite say, a motorcycle is just a motorcycle.

Giving fiancees a bad name

It would be unfair, uncharitable, and probably even untrue of me to suggest that Davey Johnson’s death was Jaclyn Trop’s fault. Nor do I know with any certainty what transpired between them in their extremely short and largely auto-manufacturer-funded relationship. I suspect it was the kind of “showmance” that I had a couple of time during my early times in autowriting, and about which I’ve written in past years. They can be very exciting. You’re face to face with someone on a majestic bed in a five-star hotel room, planning your mutual itinerary like George and Vera in “Up In The Air”, drinking all night on someone else’s dime. Good times, but never meant to last. I never spoke to Davey about Trop, but I sincerely doubt that he really meant to marry this person, or that he even formally asked her to marry him after a courtship of, what, six weeks and a couple of press trips? Nor can I see him restricting himself to one woman for any length of time, or even to women as a genre, period.

That being said, Trop’s latest milking of Davey’s death would be a disgrace no matter what the true nature of their relationship was. The synopsis is: Five weeks after Davey drowns, she takes what amounts to a press trip, drives a tank over a car, and, in her own words. is “Good… never better” afterwards. The naked cohabitation of therapy-speak and mindless, Robb Report style promotional-partner language defecated across the electronic pages of Women’s Health makes it a horrifying article to read. Indeed, a less decent man than your humble author might be tempted to quip that “Trop proves as adept at crushing a car as she’d previously shown herself to be at crushing Davey Johnson’s spirit.”

I cannot adequately emphasize how much I dislike reading this woman’s workmanlike hitting of every PR-friendly beat in this entirely typical advertorial-by-other-means, knowing that she is basically settling her promo debt to DriveATank.org.uk or whatever it’s called by wrapping it in the death of a man whose work actually meant something to a few of us for a while.

As an all-too-experienced autowriter, I can also read the oily subtext of free shit that meanders through the narrative like the blue acrylic in some new-to-Nashville product manager’s “river table”. The tank trip was almost certainly paid for, soup to nuts, by the tank people. The visit to “the Arctic Circle” mentioned in the story was another press trip, apparently the one where she and Davey hooked up for the first time. The “friend” who just happens to be on “the girls trip” is, I believe, Gina Samarotto, the editor-in-chief of the awful-sounding Private Air Luxury Homes Magazine, a copy of which I believe is probably holding the toilet-tank top down at my son’s general-aviation airport.

It was bad enough when Fat Brad Brownell went on and on about Davey’s death despite not knowing him and despite the fact that Davey’s entire life as an author amounted to the proverbial barbaric yawp in protest of Brad and people like him. It’s worse to see this tragedy used as a way to sell a PR article to Women’s Health. Davey was a human being, however imperfect. He doesn’t deserve this. Nobody does.

Still, I’m not naive enough to let a good opportunity go unexploited, so I hereby grant my son explicit permission to capitalize on my death by writing the following article:

“After My Father Choked To Death On His Second 9-Ounce Filet Of The Evening, I Found The Solace I Desperately Needed To Continue Living Via A Twenty-Four-Month Long-Term Loan Of The New Piper M700 ‘Fury’ With All Factory Options And Custom Lime Green Over Charcoal Livery.”

Giving foreign agents a bad name

somehow, this doesn’t sound like a recommendation

Perhaps the saddest thing about the autojourno industry’s near-total collapse has been the pathetic eagerness of its few remaining pushermen (and pusherwomen, and pushertheythems) to embrace China’s remarkably impressive PR budget new products. Even the most recreationally critical thinker should be quick to recognize that the Chinese method of “develop in a hurry, focus on the superficial, sell the sizzle, abandon the buyer after the fact” works much better for mechanical keyboards or Bluetooth speakers than it will ever work for the second largest purchase most people make. My former colleague Patrick George is an intelligent and thoughtful person. I don’t think he’s blind to the fundamental incompatibility between how China builds cars and how America uses them. And yet… advocacy for Chinese EVs is likely to be the only meal ticket available in autowriting for some time to come.

So that’s how you get his most recent LinkedIn post, which has a strong whiff of “I’ve seen the future, and it works!” about it.

I'm finally headed home after 12 days in China. To say the trip was insightful would be a gross understatement. I actually think it was the single most eye-opening experience I've had in my writing career.

Together with Kevin Williams, who sounded the siren earlier and louder than most, I got an up-close look at a fast-growing automotive industry with electrified vehicles that feel light years ahead of what we can buy in the West. I know that's almost cliché to say at this point. But hearing about something from experts and trusted sources is very different than seeing it for yourself.

It’s especially embarrassing that he’s hailing Kevin “GaytonaUSA” Williams as some sort of Chinese-EV-John-The-Baptist figure. He walked over to China and got on his knees in front of the junior EV scammers… so we could run there! In reality, Williams is the worst sort of useful idiot, a Potemkin peddler whose understanding of the automotive-ownership experience could easily be encompassed in both time and complexity by the brain of a fruit fly. He is a cheerleader, not a consumer advocate.

No sane person thinks our country needs to be flooded with the products of a hundred fly-by-night Chinese EVentures all competing to sell the flashiest, most laden-with-twelve-dollar-OLED-screen crapwagons to families who will be left in the lurch by the spectacular implosion, departure, and failure-to-support of said EVentures. The average American can barely handle the ownership and maintenance of a new Honda Civic, because their lives are just that close to the bone. Getting them to drop thirty grand on something with the longevity of an Alibaba Rolex clone amounts to criminal mischief at the very least and treason at worst.

I have no doubt that these EVs look pretty spectacular at first glance. They’ve been ruthlessly optimized for near-term consumer appeal. If you compared them to a new Corolla LE, and you were an utter idiot, you couldn’t help but prefer the screen-intensive “rizz” of the ZEEKR or MMMBOP or whatever they’re calling it to the Lefotovo-spec interior of the Toyota. Unfortunately for everyone who isn’t being treated to five-star travel in service of the Narrative, however, a fancy interior doesn’t get you through a winter driving to the airport or to your job at Dollar General.

While I am the first person to admit that I am an utter fool for putting $6,000 of parts and labor into a 2001 Lexus ES300, and there is likely yet more trouble ahead in that regard, you’d have to be a bigger fool not to think that my fancy Toyota will still be clocking miles when every single vehicle previewed at “Auto Shanghai” is back-broken like a sand-stranded whale and leaching a full ton of fantastically toxic chemicals into some elementary school’s water supply somewhere.

The saddest part is that there’s a genuine chance to do true consumer advocacy here. Autowriters could be warning people about the dangers of these vehicles and helping to build a public consensus that in turn would lead to making smart choices for working families and everyday Americans. But that kind of thinking will never pay the bills, nor will it ever put you in a position to fall in love with the town bicycle at a press trip in an exotic locale, so…

Giving ffff-ffff-ookin’ idiots a bad name

Alright, I’m pretty sure we’ve seen engines with two timing chains before. In fact, we’ve seen engines with four timing chains. I owned one — the original V-8 Audi S5.

Not to be outdone in needless complexity in the pursuit of middling power output, the Porsche M96 engine uses five ( 5) chains in some variants. Pity, too, the poor fools who thought they were getting a simple engine in their Impala, only to find this:

Now, if you actually read the Motor1 article, which I won’t share here for the same reason Arthur Dent doesn’t share the Nutrimatic drink with his friends, you’ll see that the core assertion is a little different from what’s in the social media, namely: that the Bugatti uses an odd combination of timing chains and timing gears. The aforementioned GM High Feature uses an intermediate timing chain to power the two main chains from the central sprocket, but the Bugatti has a Honda-VFR-esque gear drive to the twin timing chains. I can’t think offhand of an engine that does that, but I would be infinitely reluctant to say “it’s never been seen before.”

Oh, well. It’s perpetually Year Zero in the spotless minds of Motor1’s writers.

Giving… up

you know it’s a machine because no 15 year old boy has ever complained about having sex with a 22 year old woman, unless she was really hefty or something

Here at ACF, we are profoundly skeptical of “artificial intelligence”. However, it is rapidly becoming more powerful than old-fashioned “human stupidity”. Earlier this week, it was revealed that the University of Zurich conducted a large-scale Turing Test on the Redditors of r/changemyview:

Over the past few months, we used multiple accounts to posts published on CMV. Our experiment assessed LLM's persuasiveness in an ethical scenario, where people ask for arguments against views they hold. In commenting, we did not disclose that an AI was used to write comments, as this would have rendered the study unfeasible. While we did not write any comments ourselves, we manually reviewed each comment posted to ensure they were not harmful. We recognize that our experiment broke the community rules against AI-generated comments and apologize. We believe, however, that given the high societal importance of this topic, it was crucial to conduct a study of this kind, even if it meant disobeying the rules.

The bots left 1,783 comments and amassed over 10,000 comment karma. Along the way, they proved to be… wait for it… between three and six times better than actual humans at “changing the views” of other Redditors.

The University of Zurich has indicated that it will not publish the results, perhaps because everyone involved looks bad as a result. What a shame. I personally think it’s hilarious. Of course Redditors are easily swayed by machines pretending to be people. Most of them have little to no idea what actual human interaction looks like. Moreover, can you imagine a bunch of Swiss researchers cackling as they develop the bot that pretends to be a Black man who hates BLM, or as someone who “received substandard care in a foreign land”? I say, cry havoc and release the bots of Reddit! Let them change my views, or at least try to do it!