AmusIng Ourselves to Death

I don’t spend a lot of time of LinkedIn. If social media platforms are metaphors for their content, LinkedIn is absolute perfection because using it is hard work. But I do use it regularly. Today, I happened to scroll through for just a couple of minutes (a literal couple of minutes, not like the “couple of minutes” you use to answer the question How far away are you? when you’re running late), and I noticed something:

In the span of about 6 or 7 posts, three of them were comprised largely of obviously AI-generated content. None of them were about artificial intelligence. It’s not that they had some AI content. These posts were AI-generated pretty much in their entirety. They weren’t good, but they were in my feed and they did catch my attention; they obviously served some portion of their purpose.

AI-generated copy and images don’t particularly offend me (I’ve used AI images a few times here because it’s built into the Substack publishing interface and I feel compelled to put an image into every post for shareability and ease of viewing, but it does make me feel icky). It is a little scary because it’s moving so fast, and AI-generated content’s place in our media and in our lives is inevitable.

It makes me think of . . . well, a ton of different things, but the question that arose in my mind this morning was, AI knows how we express ourselves online, but the zeitgeist is in constant flux—how will AI ever know what will resonate with an audience at any given moment? Won’t it always be a few steps behind? I almost wish I hadn’t thought this, because it opened my mental floodgates, which, let’s be honest, have never done a very good job of containing the flow of my thoughts.

What happens when AI knows not only how we think and feel but also how we are manipulated? And if/when AI does begin figuring out how to control the way we think and feel, will we simply shrug our shoulders and submit to it if it’s enjoyable enough? In the fight for maintaining contact with what’s real and genuine, won’t society in its penchant for ease and pleasure and conformity eventually prefer and willingly choose an AI-generated existence to this mess of our own we’ve got going? (This is the abbreviated version, I promise you.)

If you’ve never read Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman, you’ve got to read it. It’s a work of prophecy. The truth embedded in its pages will make you wonder how it could possibly been written in the early 1980s (its cultural references will remind you again and again it most definitely was written in the 1980s). Here’s the gist: we got so worried about preventing the authoritarian iron-fisted dystopia Orwell predicted in 1984 that we missed the cultural, opiate-induced surrender Huxley warned us about in Brave New World.

In the realm of AI, I fear we’re seeing the firstfruits of the same mistake. Our sci-fi fears centered around a robot takeover by force, but a physical battle will hardly be necessary when the robots learn to make us laugh and cry and fear . . . and love every second of it.

Will we ever mistake AI-generated content for genuine human emotion? Or is the more important question, will Artificial Intelligence that learns from our own social media content master the art of being fake as hell?

Seriously, though, the reason I’m writing about this on this forum is because as people who have considered, begun, or been through the deconstruction of our faith, we know as well as anyone how it feels to be manipulated on a comprehensive level. We all know the comfort, security, and community that emerges from all buying into the same thing. And we’ve all grown dissatisfied with anything less than what we know to be true and genuine.

There is one major limitation—at the moment, anyway—of the AI community (yeah, I’m already welcoming the robots into our society . . . July’s gonna be robot-awareness month . . . you guys, they can read this, be cool): they’re restricted to the electronic world, which includes anything physical produced through electronically controlled means (I’m looking at you, books).

Don’t forget to redistribute this message to help your friends and colleagues share in our collective joy!

I believe the segment of society that shuns or shies away from screens and smartdevices and robot helpers will gain a lot of new members in the near future. I predict parks and beaches and trails and porches will find themselves less and less desolate. I think a lot more coffee is going to be ordered for here and in person and at tables for two or three or four. It’s not going to be everybody who breaks free completely, but everybody will feel the impulse to deconstruct their electronic lives. Everyone will feel the urge to break the bonds of their AI overlords or their current capitalistic ones.

We’re going to need to touch the ground, to breathe the air, and to notice we’re doing it. We’ll have to look each other in the eye or hear the airborne vibrations directly from each other’s lips. We must be aware of the strain in our brows, the knots in our necks, and the lost, absent stares overtaking our gazes. If we want to be real, we’re going to need a break from the virtual treadmill we’re on.

We’re really going to need each other.