To the editor:
Artificial intelligence has come a long way in the past few years, and especially the past few months, to the point where not only your grandparents are handily fooled by the AI generated likenesses, but also your parents, and maybe (gasp), even you. It’s true, even the Zoomers and Gen Alpha can fall prey to the most recent wave of artificially generated images and videos, and from here, does our current zenith of unreality deliver us anywhere actually worth being?
It’s so obviously empty now, I cannot even attempt to find it interesting. It’s the digital equivalent of subsisting off of Sour Patch Kids for breakfast, lunch, brunch, dinner, and dessert and expecting to feel satiated. Maybe my grandmother was onto something when she told me I was rotting my brain with all the television and video games I was accosting my nervous system with as a youngster. If only she survived long enough to see the social media “revolution” we’ve all been privileged enough to witness, she might really lay into me with her wooden spoon.
Today, social media is absolutely hell bent on capturing our attention with an increasing disregard for any sense of creativity or artistic value, instead it locks us in with rage bait, fake news, and an endless feed of discontent. Now, It’s content for content’s sake, engagement at all costs, which increasingly seems to be the last remnants of our threadbare social fabric.
To feign an interest in it any longer is to turn our backs on humanity. Social media, and increasingly the internet in general (I know, I must sound unhinged to some readers), has broke something in me, like a once burning romance snuffed out by one too many instances of disregard. Give me a book, a movie, a conversation with a novel human, something that doesn’t take my attention, put it through a shredder and expect me to weave a coherent experience from the detritus.
For me, it’s simply become untenable, a pastime with no utility outside of providing a vehicle to mind numbingly wile away life. We doom-scroll in the hope that next up will be a glimmer in the bottomless cesspit of information, something that will shine and remind us of our halcyon days playing 16-bit video games, thumbing the wheel on our first iPod, or whatever electronic baubles had first caught our innocent attention, but which nevertheless leaves us feeling ever flatter, like any addiction.
Like that damn frog slowly coming to a boil, we’ve traded in an ever increasing amount of our attention for updates on the dietary habits of former acquaintances, endless opinions from non-expert influencers, lifestyle hacks selling drop shipping trash, and health gurus-charlatans who want to share with you the one trick to removing belly fat that they don’t want you to know about. And now that AI is in the ring to gobble up all our content and regurgitate its mutant fetus back to us for our feasting, the internet has really begun to feel like one endless, bad acid trip.
We are in the midst of the ultimate grift, or maybe we’re already near the ass-end of the conveyor which will deliver us to the Soylent Green factory, or to where our our neck jacks will be installed so we can live that pod life, a la “The Matrix.” Whatever the case, I’m in favor of “turning off, tuning out, and dropping into reality,” to misquote Timothy Leary.
I’d rather be an aging man shaking my first at the sky about the plight of the humanities under modern technology, than drooling on my meme-shirt as I doom-scroll my last hit of dopamine into oblivion so I can catch just one more AI generated taco cat Tik-Tok.
Brian Bors
Athens, Ohio
