Am I Funny, Yet?

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Saturday 3rd January 2026

Nine things that really, really shouldn’t be use cases for AI. Delivered by slowly dismantling a bad idea like it’s a poorly constructed IKEA wardrobe. Rant about bourgeois nonsense with surreal fury. Explain why the whole thing is politically ridiculous. Just stare at the absurdity until it cracks. This is like Marnie Listicle Barr on crack.

1. AI-powdered washing machines that “optimise” your cringe cycle.
You know, the ones that say “AI detects fabric type”? Mate, it’s a drum full of wet clothes. It doesn’t need to philosophise about denim ethics. It needs to spin. If your washing machine is thinking, it’s wondering why it’s there. It’s questioning why it listens to this man argue with his socks again. Stew would spend twenty minutes explaining how the machine’s “learning” is just pattern-matching the same three stains. Meanwhile, your nan still hand-washes delicates. She doesn’t trust silicon with her smalls.

2. AI that writes your dating profile in Cyrillic.
“Oh, let the algorithm describe your soul.” Brilliant. So now your bio is “passionate about sunsets, deep conversations, and long walks on the beach.” This is exactly what 47 other profiles say. The same model wrote them. Dave would look at it and say, “Man, you spent money on a robot. It makes you sound like every other lonely person on earth. That’s not a date, that’s a focus group.”

3. AI recipe generators that suggest “glue on pizza”, “snakebite and tequila chasers” or “chlorine gas smoothies”.
Google’s AI told people to eat rocks for minerals. Rocks! Like, literal geology. Afilonius Rex would scream, “This is what happens when you let a computer read Reddit and think it’s a cookbook! ‘Add pebbles for crunch!’ Next, it’ll recommend cyanide as a palate cleanser! Capitalism has finally produced the perfect idiot: one that costs billions and tells you to poison yourself!”

4. AI baby cry translators.
An app that listens to your baby crying and says “he’s hungry” or “she’s tired.” Wow. Groundbreaking. Before AI, parents were just staring blankly at screaming infants, going, “I wonder what that noise means?” Luna de Alba deadpan: “Yes, because nothing says ‘progress’ like outsourcing basic parental instinct. It’s like relying on a neural network trained on other people’s sleep-deprived panic. Next up: AI that translates your toddler’s tantrum into corporate buzzwords.”

5. AI energy drinks.
There’s a drink called something like “AI Boost” with “smart caffeine.” It’s literally fizzy sugar water pretending to be futuristic. Stew would pause for an uncomfortable forty seconds: “So… the AI is in the drink? Or the drink is powered by AI? No, wait, the marketing says the formula was ‘optimised by machine learning.’ So basically, a computer decided this tastes like regret and battery acid. Well done. The robots are now in charge of making us feel worse about ourselves.”

6. AI smart mirrors that critique your appearance.
“Looking a bit tired today, Dave. Maybe skip the third beer?” No thanks. I don’t need a reflective screen gaslighting me first thing in the morning. He would stare at it: “Bro, I wake up, look in the mirror, and already know I’m losing. Now the mirror’s like ‘yeah, confirmed’? That’s not help, that’s emotional abuse from a piece of glass with a chip in it.”

7. AI that generates “authentic” fanfiction and fanny literature.
Neural nets churning out “Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of BS.” Surreal, yes. Necessary? Absolutely not. Afilonius would rant: “We’ve got machines writing stories about wizards now? What next… AI writing Trotskyist erotica? ‘The Permanent Revolution of the Bedroom’? This is the end of culture! We’re all just feeding data to a monster that shits out bad slash fiction!”

8. AI toilet that scans your poop.
Yes, it exists. Analyses your “digestive health” via camera. Mark would go full lecture mode: “So now even your bowel movements are being monitored for productivity metrics? ‘Your gut biome is only 73% optimal, step it up!’ This is peak late-capitalism: turning the most private moment into data for targeted ads. ‘Feeling irregular or all bunged up? Buy our sponsored bran flakes!’”

9. AI that decides if your joke is funny or shite.
I told my best joke to an AI critic; it gave me 6.7/10 and suggested “more punchline variance.” Now I’m quitting stand-up to become a data entry clerk. Apparently, the future thinks my soul needs an algorithm to tell it when to laugh.

There you go. Nine things AI should never touch. Some parts of life are meant to be stupid and human. They are fecked, bonkers, and gloriously pointless. No neural network should try to optimise them into oblivion.

Many thanks for reading.

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