Glorified Scribbler

That initial accidental google I did of a mutual returned an AI summary that was absolutely correct, and featured information about them that would not have been obvious from a quick perusal of their blog. The first few times I googled myself the AI overview was 100% correct. The version of that post that is circulating is not the one where I shared that the AI gave me someone's real name. I had hoped that it had screwed up and it wasn't their real name after all, but no, I checked with them, and just by googling someone's Tumblr URL, I got their honest to goodness legal name. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? Like yeah I get that it's fun to go, "Haha, AI bad at collecting information," but that's not the problem. The problem is that sometimes AI good at collecting information, and it can collect a lot more a lot faster than a normal human can, by running multiple searches simultaneously and cross-referencing a lot of different documents all in a few seconds, for a level of snooping that would take a real person hours or even days, if they could do it at all.

^ it should look like this ^

I was well resigned to Richard Ayoade appearing on Taskmaster at some point. We live in a world where many people genuinely don’t know J. K. Rowling is a virulent transphobe, let alone that Richard Ayoade went out of his way in 2023 to praise Graham Linehan as a “man of great principle” for writing a memoir about how his descent into transphobia got him cancelled. It’s just kind of one step removed from actually doing something you could reasonably point to as disqualifying, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Greg and Alex are both completely unaware of the whole thing. Greg joked at the BAFTAs about auditioning to play Hagrid, and it gave me the ick for a moment, but I do get that he’s just not in the trenches with us. These are Gen X men who are supportive of trans people but not close to any, and so quite out of touch with the fight for trans rights.

Matt Lucas, though? I know both Greg and Alex have worked with him before and he was probably nice to them personally. But he just absolutely fucking sucks. He is known to suck. He sucks on the record. He’s done nothing to distance himself from either his own shitty past behaviour or his close association with David Walliams. All he’s done is sign up for family-orientated gigs to rehabilitate his image, which is of course part of the point of having Taskmaster on his CV.

So now as a queer TM fan I’m in the position of choosing between boycotting a series of my favourite show which stars an up-and-coming nonbinary transgender lesbian comedian in Chloe Petts, or watching her on a stage with a transphobe complaining about how he doesn’t want to be there while a racist sex pest accuses Greg of being homophobic. These are my choices.