Meltdown May #4: May the Fourth* be With You
Dear chatGPT:
please write me a sonnet in iambic pentameter about Elon Musk befriending Nazis by trying to sell them Tesla cars
Oh Elon Musk, thou tech-savvy entrepreneur,
Whose visions oft extend beyond our time,
What madness grips thy heart? What sordid desire
Could lead thee down such dark and heinous climes?
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To befriend the Nazis, sworn enemies of all
That's good and true and just in this world,
And offer them thy sleek and shining cars,
As if they were but any other clientele.
-
What madness grips thy heart? What selfish goal
Could drive thee to such depths of vile deceit?
Is profit all that matters in thy soul?
Or dost thou secretly embrace their creed?
-
Oh Elon Musk, repent and turn thy ways,
Lest history condemn thee to eternal shame
Shit. The hook of this piece was intended to be a post about how crummy the future of television is going to be if the studios, in their fight against the WGA union, end up using AI to write scripts.
But this output was pretty good. I had a chuckle. It would’ve taken me a long time to come up with something as clever as this that mostly met the internal structure and rhyming scheme of the notoriously complex Sonnet.
I’ll throw that argument in the trash. It’s fine.
Elon Musk loves fascists. He keeps promoting their content on Twitter. He’s a reply guy to a lot of really dubious characters on the reactionary right. Recently people keep calling him, Elon Musk, a fascist. I don’t think that’s right. Musk has no durable or concrete ideology. He just wants a friend.
He also doesn’t want to go bankrupt. His journey to where he is today isn’t some sort of political awakening. The limo liberal set who used to buy all his cars turned on him. The cars aren’t that good and they're getting stale, Musk is a jerk, and he’s like…. overall kinda lame and cringe now. Instead of realizing the problem (e.g. make new models of cars to appeal to snobs and stop screaming at elected officials), he’s gonna instead make nice with his new friends:
Look no further than his annual appearance at The Met Gala. This exclusive show, perhaps the biggest “who’s who” among the champagne liberal set, has been a big part of promoting Musk’s celebrity; he always makes headlines with his weird costumes, eye-popping dates, and weird quotes.
Things were a little off this year:
That’s quite enough for now. Let’s try again tomorrow. - Buck
*Reich