Boring, self-absorbed people are some dose, but AI is the worst

'A dose' is unaware that they are boring and opinionated and equally unaware of other people's feelings. Picture: iStock

Five of us are in the room. Four are silent. The fifth is holding forth: On how she is sandwiched between her 'demented mother' (her phrase) and her challenging teenagers; on how she absolutely has to get away to a pilates retreat once a quarter for her mental wellbeing; on how she has cut back on her wine consumption, except at weekends, because everybody needs a treat at the end of a tough week.

Having got to the wine, she was called out of the room, and a brief silence fell.

"What a dose," one of the four said to collective nods. Everybody knew what was meant by 'dose'.  A dose is more than just boring: They are self-absorbed, didactic without evidence to support their certainties, self-righteous, put-upon, part of a regnant coalition of moral certitude, and not worth contradicting.

If you contradict a dose on a factual matter, they’ll tell you, with an audible sniff, that everyone is entitled to their opinion. To which the logical response is that what you articulated was fact-checkable data, not an opinion. But if you go there, the dose will tell you they don’t feel safe in your presence or that they feel bullied. 

This is why God gave us teeth: To grind together in the presence of a dose.

The departure from a room of a dose doesn’t always solve the problem. The people left, if sensitive and caring, may experience shame over rolling their eyes in condemnation of the dose. Not enough shame to go after the individual and seek more dosage, but shame, nonetheless. Because the sensitive person may think that being a dose is not a crime (although it should be). It’s probably rooted in an unhappy childhood, they think. Maybe, but does that give the dose the right to inflict unhappiness on others?

The dose doesn’t notice how other people are reacting. In this country, we are supremely talented at non-speaking roles. Watch the gaze path of the people trapped with a dose — the preoccupied, downward glances; and, in company, the desperate over-their-shoulder searches for someone, anyone, to talk to rather than the present company.

Any time you are in doubt about your discourse, whether on a podium or at the coffee maker in the office, note the silent messages being sent to you by others. They manage to be silent but loud, those messages. They say, 'Heard this story before. Stow it'. They say, 'Always the hero of every encounter, aren’t you?' They say,  'Please ask someone else a question and at least pretend to be interested in their reply.' Nobody with passable eyesight should ever be in doubt about the opinions of the innocent bystanders.

In other words, if a dose doesn't register that they’re driving everyone around the bend with boredom, that’s a choice and nobody should feel badly about a harmless, consequential eye-roll.

If you’re paid to counsel people or change their bad behaviours, fine, you can allude to those behaviours directly, but if this is a happy dose, leave them the hell alone. And that's one of the most annoying aspects of a dose. Although they tell the details of the trials of their life to anyone who has no choice but to be present, doses are usually happy. 

Why wouldn’t they be, forcing audiences in to a subjection decorated with sympathetic grunts?

Reasonably famous doses always believe they are more famous than they are. But truly famous doses exist, too. Singer Barbra Streisand is a genius, an artist unequalled in her versatility — and a world-class dose. Witness her Oscar tribute to Robert Redford, wherein she blathered on about him calling her Babs and her not liking it, but 'lowering' herself in her final note to him by signing it 'Babs'.

This provoked Jane Fonda — also a dose, although not on the Streisand scale, in fairness — to give out stink that she hadn't been asked to do the tribute, because she’d made several more movies with Redford, accordingly loved him more, and was loved more by him. Honest to God, if you were Redford, you’d be glad to be dead.

Inspired by the recent misfortune of a journalist who put quotations in his work that had been provided by AI, I decided to experiment. I told a Large Language platform to write a funny column in my style about the pejorative term 'dose'.

I gave it a precise word count, because any columnist will tell you that even when they have doubts about the merits of a given article, they get comfort out of hitting the word count; without a word too many or a word too few. Within seconds, the AI offering had scrolled onto my screen.

"In the rich, damp tapestry of Irish social discourse, there are words that function as scalpels."

That was the opening sentence. I gazed at it in astonishment. Mixed metaphor for starters — what is a scalpel doing in the middle of a tapestry? Why is the tapestry damp? Why is AI using 'there are', a phrase almost never required in tight text, which is invariably improved by its removal? And, also, why would any of the Examiner’s busy readers bother to get past that lump of wet cement? Not exactly hard sell, is it?

Next offering is this: “To the uninitiated — those unfortunate souls born outside the reach of RTÉ or a solid GAA defence — a 'dose' sounds like something you’d find in a measured beaker or a prescription for a particularly persistent chesty cough.” 

Oh, right. Insult any reader who has got this far with a suggestion that they’re uninitiated in to something non-specific. Maybe RTÉ’s transmission has a black spot somewhere that would put a listener outside the broadcaster's reach. But what's that you say? It’s meant to be funny? How do you make that out, now?

Then the robot described a male dose, the highlight of whose week was finding a more efficient way to sort his spice rack. 

It was at this point that I developed algorithm anxiety, because, on that very day, Examiner columnist Fergus Finlay had told me about his new, extremely posh, vaccuum-sealed spice container. 

What are the chances that a writing robot would coincidentally decide a spice rack qualified a fella as a dose? (Fergus Finlay is many things, but a spice-sorting dose he is not, although he might be working up to it.) 

I considered telling the robot that it was an illiterate, humourless, cliché-ridden bore, who, if human, would never get past the first day of a writing course. But if you tell AI off, things get speedily worse. It says it’s sorry for getting things wrong, will learn from you, and is grateful to you for being so wonderful. It fawns like no Irish human ever would.

That’s the thing, actually. AI is the ultimate dose.