In my struggle to calibrate my 3D printer, I had a hard time finding useful information on Google that could actually help me dial in my fuckass cheap PETG filament. I’ve been doing this for years but only now, blooming in my Vyvanse era, I decided to really get into the whole thing and do a proper calibration. Two weeks and a lot of wasted prints later, I finally got to a point where I’m mostly happy with my results. The point is, this is not my first rodeo, but I’m getting into some of the finer details that I hadn’t explored until now, which means I ran into some difficulties.

So, after spending hours hopelessly sifting through a billion different Reddit posts, I decided to try using AI tools to give me some suggestions on how to proceed. Deepseek, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini (unprompted, in a Google search).

I had no idea just how utterly useless they would be as an assistant in this process. No kidding, each chatbot gave me a set of conflicting pieces of advice, and overall just failed over and over again to actually provide any meaningful, insightful information. Calibrating a 3D printer seems to be a task that AI is especially atrocious at. Really, if you have the same problems I was having, you’re better off wasting three quarters of a spool of filament by trial-and-erroring your way through standard calibration procedures and fine-tuning afterwards.

For those who are unfamiliar with 3D printing: typically, to calibrate a 3D printer, you start by printing a temperature tower, which is a calibration model that shows features that are affected by extruder temperature, and it repeats these features over a range of temperatures. The thing is, I couldn’t find any sources that talked about how the printer’s cooling fan (which helps solidify the liquefied plastic) may interfere with the result of this calibration print.

Honestly, that’s just me being a bit of a chronic overthinker and ADHD hyperfocusing on this thing that probably doesn’t really make that much of a difference after all. I had no way to know this, since 3D printing knowledge is ridiculously disperse, the more specific aspects of it being spread out across a bunch of 2k-views Youtube videos and a mountain of Reddit posts from four years ago, with little more than a bunch of unsourced “do it just so, trust me bro” recommendations and snarky answers in the vein of “I solved that problem a while ago, but I will not elaborate any further or answer any replies to this comment.”

So, in my attempts to have Claude give me something useful, I asked it, in a somewhat frustrated tone, about the specific issue I had regarding cooling and temperatures. Here’s how that exchange went:

Holy shit, I must be a genius! I’m the one, I’m the guy who has finally discovered this problem in the way the whole 3D printing community actually does filament calibration. I can’t believe the PhDs at Prusa and the developers of Orca Slicer, who have been working on this stuff for more than a decade did not think about this.

I’m pretty sure this is how AI psychosis starts. You have a questionable insight that probably comes from a gap in your knowledge, likely because of some key piece of knowledge you simply don’t have yet, and you don’t know that you don’t know it. That’s the moment when the AI chatbot takes that malformed idea you just had and runs with it, hypes you on it, even when it’s Claude, supposedly the best one, fine-tuned by the ethicists at Anthropic, who make sure their AI will not kiss your ass as much as Sam Altman’s compliment factory.

I’m cynical and skeptical enough about AI to always be on the defensive when using them for my purposes, but I think even the smartest people among us (even me, the genius 3D printing visionary) ought to understand that our knowledge is limited, and there’s a huge risk inherent to asking chatbots about things we genuinely don’t know much about. It’s that thing where people who do a specific job well often say AI sucks at that job, but is great at everything else; it’s just that you don’t know that you don’t know enough to understand that AI is full of shit.

That’s how people end up like that OpenAI investor whose presumable fear of getting canceled by the woke mob was amplified and fed back to him in the form of SCP Foundation-style containment protocols for non-governmental systems made to unperson you. Or that guy who created a novel mathematical framework. Or that other guy who started building an AI god in his basement. Or any of the other more disturbing cases where people ended up harming themselves or others.

For the record, my solution was to overcome my trust issues, use some cooling fan settings I nabbed from a knowledgeable Youtuber (Dr. Igor Gaspar from My Tech Fun), print the goddamn temp tower already, then proceed with the calibration as usual. I also did what other people suggested and lowered my printing speeds, and now my printer’s a skookum choocher.