My grandson came home from school the other day with a one-page handout about National Simultaneous StoryTime 2026. It was a two-sided sheet with activities relating to this laudable event, which is organised by the Australian Library and Information Association.

The idea of the event is that school pupils all over Australia get to read or listen to a particular book that has been chosen by the association – at the same time. The handout my grandson brought home was produced to complement the event. Apart from the front page illustration for colouring in, there were various other snippets on the sheet including a “find-a-word” puzzle and a maze, each related to the theme of the chosen book.

My daughter showed me this sheet, pointing out that the maze, where children were asked to “Help Luna Roo reach the football”, was actually impossible to complete. Ludicrously so. Luna would need a sledge hammer to knock down some walls, or maybe she could slip into God mode to walk through walls to get her hands on the ball.

The find-a-word was also messed up. The word “kangaroo” is supposed to be there, and so is “book”, but neither actually appear. Granted, there is “krangaroo” and “boor”: clearly a transposition of two letters by the puzzle’s compiler has mucked the thing up. All this in a school handout that is apparently targeted at boosting literacy.

“This is what you get when you use AI to do things for you,” my daughter scowled, shaking her head. That wouldn’t have occurred to me, but really, it’s the only explanation that makes sense. No human being with a functioning brain would have produced that maze. The maze might, however, have been assembled somehow by some kind of AI bot.

“Pretty disappointing that no human picked these mistakes up before the thing was given to the children.” my daughter observed, and that’s the real point. And it’s not like it would have taken much time to check, either.

I showed a few other people these travesties and the responses varied from disgust at the sloppiness to humorous comments like: “It’s just getting kids used to how things are in the real world”. Which is funny, I guess, and maybe even a little bit true in these days where, when things go wrong there is no human to talk to anymore, only a stupid AI agent that can’t do anything except follow the rules it’s been set.

One of the things about AI is that the corporations promoting it don’t seem very quality focused. Their goal is to get people using it so they can try to justify its insanely high costs. And a lot of the organisations taking it on seem to feel that quality doesn’t matter much, as long as they can do things faster. They figure we consumers will suck it up anyway. It doesn’t have to be good: it just has to be good enough.

You can see that attitude at work in a lot of written material these days. Terrible grammar and spelling has long been common in things like instruction manuals for imported products, but these days it’s appearing almost everywhere.

My wife bought a card game the other day, from an op-shop. It’s called “The News Game”, and it says on the box that it was made in China for Kmart Australia. It’s not a bad game. There are plenty of worse ones around. You read out the stories on cards and other people have to guess if they are real or fake (that’s a contentious point with many “news” stories anyway, I can tell you). What got me was the amount of wrong words, doubled-up words and mistakes of many kinds printed on the cards. (Yeah, I know – just like newspapers.) After I struggled to smoothly read a few of these cards because of the wrong words I had to wonder whether they’d hired any proof-readers before they committed the job to the printer. Or was it all written by AI?

I guess it’s easy these days to blame AI for everything that goes wrong. The problem is, though, that AI really is mucking so many things up. People looking to take shortcuts use AI, which routinely hallucinates all sorts of nonsense. I’ve even had people tell me that an AI bot or agent or whatever you call them cited my website as the source for some piece of pseudo-historical falsehood that I never wrote and that was never anywhere on my site. AI dreams up false legal precedents that careless lawyers cite in courtrooms. It dreams up fake references for reports compiled by lazy consultants. It churns out cooking recipes that don’t work, it produces knitting patterns that can’t be made and writes news stories that are totally false.

Sleazy governments and creepy billionaires use AI on an industrial scale to tilt the propaganda playing field in their own favour.

Basically, AI is stuffing up just about everything, as far as I can make out. It’s never been easy to trust the “information” shovelled at us down mainstream funnels, but these days it’s approaching impossible. All thanks to AI.

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The crimes of Meta