What I really don’t like about the current AI craze is the fact that by its nature, AI in its current state is best used for confusing reality and make-believe.
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The predatory chatbots on employment search and dating sites, the glorious images of fruit platters and rustic cottages on social media, the customer “service” pop-ups that open on all service sites: all of these are just fake idealized versions of things we used to assume were real, or at least real-ish, maybe with a little embellishment and scripting and dodge/burn/enhancement, but still real objects/jobs/people actually out there somewhere.
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Now, we can assume none of that. It’s hard to tell real from fake, and in ten years, or even five, it will be impossible for anyone without specialized equipment and/or software to tell.
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That’s bad enough, but even worse is what it is doing to our society. Nothing can be believed anymore. Wise people, always a small minority, know that news images are cropped to support the narrative of the newspaper and speeches are carefully edited to show the speaker in a particular light. But we used to believe that the images and words actually happened, even if they were distorted.
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Now we don’t even have that. The person does not exist despite the fact that you are talking to them, the event never happened despite the video showing it in detail, there is no job available despite the enthusiasm of the recruiter, you can’t actually carve a kiwi fruit like that despite the beautiful photo.
It is the destruction of the very concept of a reality beyond one’s own eyes and ears. It is the destruction of object permanence.
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The people who benefit from this (aside from the ones selling it) are those whose behaviors and plans benefit from not being examined too critically. If there is literally no way to tell whether someone or something is going to save or destroy you, you might as well just go out for a drink and shrug. Behind all the people who want to watch Hermione porn and empty their call centers of anything but ChatGPT, there is a small group of creaky old Fascists who know the truth, that:
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“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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