How ChatGPT Blew Mithun Banerjee’s Brain

Every now and then, you encounter a moment so absurd you just have to stop and admire it. As a satire writer, I seek them out. This week's bizarre moment happened spontaneously and sets a new bar for gullible and ridiculous. 

Buckle up while I tell you how County Executive candidate Mithun Banerjee misinterpreted an AI-battle Facebook exchange between me and my friend Rudy as a full-fledged, covertly campaign-financed endorsement of Andrew Friedson.

Rudy is a smart guy, longtime friend and passionate about politics. He recently started using AI to write his Facebook posts, and I bust his chops about it. I've been a writer and editor for 30 years. Those unnecessary em-dashes and three-part rhetorical flourishes are maddening.

So for fun (and to rib Rudy), I copied one of Rudy’s AI-written posts into ChatGPT and said, “Write a rebuttal of equal length.” It spit out a few paragraphs and I pasted them into Facebook, unedited. It was a demonstration. A gag. A joke. I'm known for that kind of thing.

Enter Mithun Banerjee: Montgomery County’s most paranoid and easily confused candidate.

Banerjee found the thread, which was about Andrew Friedson's track record on African American ancestral land preservation. Rudy's ChatGPT said Friedson was lacking; my AI said he was a rockstar. Which led Banerjee to claim, with absolute certainty, that me and The Montgonion are secretly bankrolled by Friedson as part of a covert operation to support his campaign. He screenshotted the AI post and plastered it all across Facebook as evidence of my collision.

I understand that satire isn’t everyone's first language. But Mithun Banerjee doesn’t just lack subtlety. To quote someone I don’t often quote: He’s not a smart person.

Our reporting on Banerjee's housing code nightmares and disclosure disaster have rendered him an obsessed, pathetic man. Meanwhile his mounting legal problems have caught up. A new foreclosure suit appeared on the docket today. You can smell his fear and desperation in every post.

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