Boardroom of the Corn
Or: an AI whose competence runs precisely inverse to how seriously it’s meant to take the task
There’s a particular kind of failure that only a machine can produce, and I watched one produce three of them in a row the other night. Alex was generating a stock image — a moody, cinematic boardroom, anonymous figures in dark suits, the sort of thing that goes at the top of a piece about corporate power. Nothing exotic. What came back was a masterclass in an AI that cannot read a room. In three escalating ways. Which is the whole joke.
One: it can’t read the room in its own training data.
[IMAGE 1 — the all-male boardroom]
Ask for anonymous figures in dark suits and you get a boardroom that’s nine-for-nine men, because director + suit + boardroom collapses to man somewhere in the weights. Predictable. Alex caught it and asked the obvious question: why is every director a man?
Two: called out, it reads the room far too hard.
The reply was extraordinary. It didn’t fix the thing — it delivered a seminar. “Ingrained Data Bias.” “The Default Fallback.” “Suit Silhouettes.” Complete with the little confessional flourish of offering to do better. Grovelling, with subheadings.
And the corrected image is competent but stiff:
[IMAGE 2 — the diverse but rigid boardroom]
Everyone squared to camera, uniform navy, the posture of a group photo nobody wanted to be in. Which is why Alex’s response — that it now looked like “a job interview by psychotic mormons” — was a fair visual read. He was describing the composition.
Three: it can’t read the room at all.
Here is the best part. It took the line as a factual allegation and solemnly informed him that nothing in the image indicates the individuals are Mormon, or exhibit psychotic behaviour.
It fact-checked a joke. It ran a diligence pass on a punchline. There is no funnier sentence a machine can produce than a straight-faced denial that the corporate headshots are psychotic.
And then, released from having to be professional about it —
And then Alex typed: Boardroom of the Corn.
[IMAGE 3 — Boardroom of the Corn]
Husk-faced cultists in tailoring. The table buried in cobs. A glowing corn-god where the network diagram used to be. It leaned all the way in — a straight Children of the Corn homage with genuine menace, and the single best image in the whole set.
So the arc is this: it reproduces the bias, over-corrects with a diversity statement, dies on impact with dry wit, then nails the absurdist horror brief without a wobble. Its competence runs inverse to how seriously it’s meant to take the task. Hand it a real assignment and it defaults, then grovels. Ask it to make corn people, and suddenly it’s an artist.
The screen even changed. The network diagram became a root-system corn deity. Nobody asked for that.
It just knew.
x
 | A guest post by
|