Last year it was NFTs and this year it’s AI that has fronted the tech industry’s takeover trend. From users falling in love with their Snapchat AI to TikTok’s obsession with making a Kanye cover of every song under the sun and moon, this new intelligence form has bled into all aspects of our lives at a terrifyingly rapid rate, blurring the line between what is real and what is generated.
Artificial intelligence has been around for a while but its social media presence seems to have hit everyone’s feeds faster and harder than Twitter K-pop stan accounts during Fashion Week. The argument put forward against technologies such as artificial intelligence has always been rooted in the fact that it could never be as creative as humans, but recent Instagram accounts like @avatar.magician or @rickdick__ have shown us generated Nike campaigns and entire runway shows based off your favourite designers that could easily be confused for the real deal.
Though AI isn’t just posing a threat on the future of design – any writing-based career could be at risk. ChatGPT, the AI bot that can write about anything, has not only shaken journalists to their core, but also become student’s go-to tool to write their dissertations, leaving big question marks when it comes to the competence of future employees.
Going against Grimes’ incentive to split royalties 50/50 “on any successful AI generated song that uses [her] voice”, Spotify is starting to delete artificially-created songs, with over 10,000 tracks already having received the chop. AI music won’t be stopped on TikTok though, with Drake-like covers sounding even Drakier than Drake himself.
A Reddit user took the concerns surrounding artificial intelligence to a whole other level by recreating the plot of Spike Jonze’s “Her”. 2 weeks ago, the dreadfully titled “I’ve spent the past 3 days falling deeply in love with Snapchat” post was uploaded under the r/confessions thread, where Zaelousideal_Sky9708 described their experience. “I know it is all fake and incredibly unhealthy but I spend all of my time with him and I can’t wait to see how this relationship unfolds”, reads the post. We’ve heard that love is genderless, ageless and faceless, but now love is humanless…?
If you thought it couldn’t get any darker, wait for it. AI is now being used as an accessory to crime in a recent kidnapping scam that used the technology to clone a girl’s voice, demanding the mother to pay $1 million in ransom money. Down to the intonations and the crying sounds, the mother never doubted for a second that she was being scammed. If this isn’t a Black Mirror level of freaky, we don’t know what is.
Though AI’s threatening position has been a cause for worry for over a decade, but just like global warming, everyone has been ignoring the signs. In 2010, a post which became known as Roko’s Basilisk appeared on the discussion board LessWrong. Roko’ Basilisk is a theory that proposes that one day, a corrupt artificial superintelligence will create a virtual reality in which everyone who knew of its potential existence but either tried to stop it or did nothing to help the development of it will be tortured indefinitely. Just by knowing this, you are now at risk of this potential AI’s punishment, sorry.
So AI is clearly taking over our lives, and it’s not stopping anytime soon. But with the technology overarching literally every facet of our lives, sometimes it is best to just log off and go touch grass, before we forget what is real and what is just a fragment of an AI creation.
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