Season of anomie here as ChatGPT ushers anarchy in Govt communications

There has been lots of misinformation in recent days, the most dominant being that Prezzo Bill Ruto has been grounded by the anti-tax protests fronted by Gen-Z.

The correct position is that he has not travelled abroad as part of self-imposed austerity measures. As he would say, he leads from the front.

We can also report authoritatively that following enormous pressure from the youthful protesters, Prezzo Ruto has instigated drastic staff cuts in his communications office so he’s now relying on ChatGPT to his write speeches.

This explains the dissonance between Chat-GPT scripts and what Prezzo Ruto intended to convey to the nation this week. For instance, Prezzo Ruto’s Tuesday night speech did not contain a message of condolences to the families of the young Kenyans who died under a hail of police bullets. A robot, after all, can’t think of humans.

The same application is to blame for the substitution of “young protesters” with the nefarious tag of “organised criminals,” which Prezzo Ruto revised in a subsequent speech on Wednesday, referring to the young protesters as “our children.”

I am not sure if and how ChatGPT was deployed to communicate with folks at Mazingira House who run the nation’s spy network, but a similar dissonance was reported. When Prezzo Ruto said he was keen on engaging with Gen-Z, dozens of youngsters were abducted from their homes at wee hours and driven around the city and its environs until they felt kizunguzungu. Then they were dumped in the middle of nowhere, entranced.

A similar miscommunication was reported in the deployment of Kenyan police officers to Haiti. I understand Prezzo Ruto had intended to send them to the streets of Nairobi to quell the riots. Instead, they were delivered to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and dispatched to Haiti.

By the time Prezzo Ruto realised the mix-up, Nairobi was under such a severe strain, he had to call in the military to quell the protests. So egregious was the error, the matter was before the court. It was to determine if we are a police or military state.

The impact of ChatGPT has gone beyond the courts. Some chaps filmed feeding greedily at the Parliament canteen at the height of the protests denied that their behaviour was “unparliamentary’’.

Our waheshimiwa eat till they vomit on our shoes, they said. In any case, they were there to “benchmark” how the MPs eat and adopt that menu for the entire nation.

Even a man who was caught carting away a TV set on Tuesday denied that he had stolen the item; he said he had borrowed it from a city store to watch if the street unrests would be televised. Once the protests were over, he’d return it.

When the man told this to a cop who had stopped him, the cop was so incensed that he aimed at the set and opened fire, blasting it into smithereens. The crook wept he’d miss that action on television.

I understand local telcos were challenged why Internet connectivity slowed down on Tuesday. They denied any wrongdoing and attributed the slow down to a new phenomenon called “disturbances,” like the one that routinely affects the Kenya Power.

As for Kenya Kwanza MPs who giggled when a local journo asked Prezzo Ruto how development would be delivered to Kenyans, the government has clarified that the MPs, led by Kikuyu MP Kimani Ichun’gwa were laughing because they thought the journo’s voice sounded like that of ChatGPT.

There was a similar miscommunication among protesters; while they had spent the day plotting how to scale the walls to the State House, there was a last-minute change of address.

Instead, they said they would head to Parliament because Parliament was now an extension of the presidency.