Yes, I got my Columbia County property assessment this week and I am, like virtually everyone else, thinking perhaps it is time to put my house on the market and use the proceeds to buy a little place in The Hamptons.
I might even have enough left over to take an all-inclusive Caribbean cruise for a month or buy out Michael Jackson’s estate for his SONY/AV Beatles publishing rights catalogue.
Somehow my little hovel has practically leaped off the charts in value.
Did they find an oil vein under my yard using ground penetrating radar?
Now Columbia County officials say that in the future they may be using artificial intelligence or AI to help come up with a more accurate figure. I am wondering if this is the same AI, that when you ask it to paint a portrait of George Washington, it draws an image of a Black guy in a funny cap?
Or could it be the same AI that tricked the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer into adding several fictitious titles, attributed to authors who never wrote them, onto their summer reading lists?
County Administrator Scott Johnson says that property owners will be pleased as punch with the accuracy with the tax bills of the future.
“This is running constant calculations and computations in the background,” Johnson said. “What we’re trying to do here, while this is an expensive piece of software, it is one that I feel like will be in the best interest of the taxpayer. It’s the fairest way to make sure we’re accurate when we’re providing these assessments and I think that’s always been our intent.”
Try telling that to the folks who AI told that a study by UC Berkeley suggested that they “eat at least one small rock a day.” The AI program wasn’t that far off in its citation, the quote originated from the satirical site The Onion.
Or tell that to the person in California who was minding their own business just walking down the side of the street when a car driven by AI struck him and dragged him off the sidewalk as he was trapped underneath it and kept on going as if nothing had ever happened.
On second thought, the AI system can’t possibly be any worse than what we already have.
The other issue in Columbia County that won’t seem to go away is the continued brouhaha over what gets stocked on library shelves and who makes the final decision of where certain books are housed.
Our reporter Erin Weeks has a story coming out soon, and I don’t want to steal any of her thunder, but I will offer a little preface to her story since I helped her gather some research.
Everyone saw the pictures of the “offending” material that were held up in one of the meetings, but pretty much every shot was far enough away that no one really saw what exactly was on the page. It would not be appropriate to show on television or be printed in the newspaper without a significant portion being blurred out.
So, in the course of helping out with research, I saw the Full Monty.
Let’s just say that if I were looking for a book with that kind of imagery in the library, I wouldn’t expect to find it in the kid’s section.
In fact, if you try to buy such imagery at a convenience store, it is behind the counter under brown paper wrapping. To quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it.”
Look out for Erin’s story soon. It is a real doozy!
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter, Editorial Page Editor and weekly columnist for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
