My social media feed is now a hellish stream of puerile AI slop. Am I stubborn to want to hang on to reality?
R
ecently, a friend sent me a video of a man dressed as a pickle. Following a high-octane car chase, the pickle flung himself out of the car and flailed down the highway. It was stupid and we laughed. But it also wasn’t real. When I pointed out to my friend that the video was AI-generated, she was taken by surprise, noting she’s usually pretty good at spotting them. She was also frustrated: “I hate having to be on the constant lookout for AI trash,” she lamented in the chat.
And I feel that. Becoming an AI detective is a job I never wanted and wish I could quit.
By now, the problems with generative AI are well documented: it’s built upon theft of people’s creative labour; it’s accelerating environmental degradation; it’s claiming productivity gains but actually producing the opposite; it relies upon exploited workers; its biggest champions are socially reprehensible losers; and so on. In my online circles, it’s also deeply uncool – using generative AI to make silly little videos signals you either don’t understand its consequences or you’re too much of an arsehole to care. Every AI-generated video that crosses my feed is a stand-in for the horrors associated with the technology and its politics.
