Our New God
Part Two: The Horsemen
AI wouldn’t have been integrated into society so quickly if it weren’t for the rapid use of smartphones and social media before it. AI has been in development for a long time but you can’t tell an algorithm to paint on a canvas if there isn’t a canvas. The society wide take over of smartphones with social media capabilities created a landscape that AI could really take advantage of. The early 2000’s saw the creation of facebook and the iphone within two years of each other. This has given people nearly twenty years to get used to the rapid growth of technology and has given AI a ridiculous amount of information to play with.
When discussing AI and its dark capabilities like exponentially removing humans from workspaces, replacing artists, and reshaping society into a place where human connection or expression just isn’t valued anymore; I’d like to shine light on the technologies that may have begun influencing this. NPR’s article “The truth about teens, social media, and the mental health crisis”, states that since 1976 the amount teens would go out with friends was basically the same until the 2010s, where it completely plummeted. 2009 was the last year that teenagers would view social media as an occasional habit with 50% using it daily, 10 years later that skyrocketed to 95%. This is the only reason AI was able to be integrated so quickly, the last twenty years has completely reshaped how we (and especially the younger generation) think. It took no time at all for social media to begin replacing human interaction, even in the earliest days of the smartphone era.
Social media has obvious negative side effects that have been contributing to social isolation and addictive behavior. Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s article “Just how harmful is social media?” states that “social media can provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health.” Sounds like a nightmare to me, but I can’t blame people that are being harmed by social media when a lot of them have had to grow up with it. That’s what happens when a new technology we know very little about is integrated into our society, schools, and homes without any foresight of where it could lead.
Even if the companies developing AI saw a possible threat to the user, I don’t think we could trust them to reveal that to us. The Guardian’s article “Facebook aware of Instagram’s harmful effect on teenage girls,”dives into a Facebook employee’s admission that their site’s algorithm is harmful to the mental health of their users, especially young girls who find themselves more concerned with their body image from constant exposure to unrealistic beauty standards. If there’s money to be made, who’s to say what developers would be open about with AI. Social media apps like Instagram and Facebook clearly have the screen time of the user as a priority, not their well being. Developers of AI may very well be aware of the drastic effects it could have on our society long term, and do it anyway.
All this to say that AI in its current form is only here because large corporations have found profit in reshaping the human experience. It’s not so far fetched to believe AI could begin replacing functions of ourselves and our society when previous technology has already shown its ability to do that. It’s hard to come by parking meters in modern cities now, many of them opt for green signs with QR codes linking to instructions, that then require someone to create an account, and link their debit card to pay for parking. Imagine a 70 year old trying to do that. Many old people can’t keep up with this constant technological evolution, and many others find it unnecessary. Unfortunately we don’t get a vote for this kind of thing, once someone in silicon valley realizes they can do something, they do it regardless of how it might affect us.
AI art and other AI generated media is the next evolution for the social media age. It’s easier and faster to produce social media content with AI. This cheapens the user’s experience and further isolates them from the world. Social media was never perfectly healthy but at the very least it consisted of real people with real thoughts and real voices. AI generated social media content consists of AI narrated text to speech, AI generated faces, and AI generated scripts. On many videos, there will be comments left by entirely AI run profiles. Social media editor was another creative job, now anyone can make social media videos in a matter of seconds. AI art isn’t really being looked at like art but it’s image generation is already taking over spaces where some amount of human creativity was required. Again, the human element slowly but steadily bleeds out of the equation.
Before social media, I don’t think as many people would be impressed by AI, but in a world where you are predisposed to looking at your phone and seeing whatever it has to offer, suddenly AI can be very attractive to a lot of people. The pipeline from the release of the iphone to wherever the hell we are going, is tragic. Before any of this, people went out with friends, talked face to face, gathered the courage to ask for someone’s number, they could even go to sleep without consuming a hundred tik tok videos beforehand. That world is no longer here, we had too much autonomy and that’s just not profitable enough anymore. Apparently we didn’t give enough attention to what people were doing when we weren’t there, what our favorite celebrities were up to, what it means if our ex is on vacation, we didn’t watch enough ads, or pay enough subscriptions. We didn’t give so much of ourselves to something that keeps taking. We could stop for a while, think for a while, and be okay for a while.
I was born in 2004, my mother was smart enough to raise me without the internet until 2017, when my school required it. My memories of that life are fading away, but i remember how quiet it was back then, I miss how quiet it was.
References
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
Honestly?
You’re still not going to put a title on this?
Lobsterman, you received Feedback from me on your Definition Rewrite more than a month ago, and you haven’t made any revisions since.
In the interest of fair play, you shouldn’t be occupying my time with further feedback until you put what you’ve already received to good use.
I’m taking this post OUT of Feedback Please. You can ask for my help here again when you’ve made improvements to your Definition argument.
This is so radically improved from the first draft I’m going to take full credit for deciding NOT to provide you feedback, Lobsterman. Apparently, you do a much better job of revising your work without my interference.
🙂
Regraded.