Perhaps the only matter we can agree upon in this age of disagreement is that we’ve never been so unhappy and so angry.
We blame poverty and politics, culture war and social media. However, in the past our ancestors’ lives were evidently even more squalid and constrained than our own; they were at each others throats with the same vigour and venom as we are; and they endured just as much division caused by new communications technologies.
The printing press fuelled Europe’s medieval religious wars. Without radio Joseph Goebbels could never have turned his propaganda to such lethal advantage.
The difference today is that we’ve made ourselves redundant. We’re slowly but surely removing ‘the human’ from the everyday. By relinquishing responsibility to technology for everything – from mundanities, to matters which strike right at the very heart of our lives, wellbeing and identities – we kill what’s human.
An example of the mundane: the algorithm has more power over the choice of programme you watch than you do. An example of matters which go right to the heart of life, wellbeing and identity: the use of injections to curb our appetites so we lose weight.
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The TV algorithm removes our critical faculties, our need to discriminate and think. Technology does that for you. Fat-jabs mean you need never worry about willpower or struggling to achieve goals. Technology does that for you.
These are merely two ways that we’re de-limbing ourselves; excising our own souls.
Is AI threatening humanity? (Image: Anne Cordon) It’s maybe time to revisit an old song by Jamaica’s Jimmy Cliff called Synthetic World. It goes: “Your world is plastic, can you see through to the other side? … My patience is growing thin, with this synthetic world we’re living in.”
AI is the most monstrous shift. Little wonder our rage and despair has grown as AI took over our lives. Humans need purpose. AI removes purpose. Without purpose, humans are flowers headed to the dustbin.
AI eats our reality. The online world has become more real for many than the real world. The effects are profound, even twisting humanity’s understanding of our own history. AI is currently generating huge numbers of fake Holocaust images.
This AI slop purports to show prisoners in death camps playing violins or lovers meeting by barbed wire. Patel Sawicki, from the Auschwitz Memorial, says the Holocaust is being turned into a “game”, and it’s “real people that we want to and need to commemorate”.
Real people died, but computers ask us to grieve for their pixilated creations. This is how we forget.
Evidently, these fake images play into the hands of Holocaust deniers. But consider also the philosophical horror of computer-generated images of victims getting more attention than images of real victims who lived and died.
From such ghastly and grave issues, we can come all the way down to the quotidian. Film production companies are using algorithms to decide which movies to make and how to make them. Our culture, therefore, is being shaped by microchips, not artists or even money-men.
If you’ve wondered why cinema has become so bland and repetitive, so stripped of meaning, that’s your answer. The algorithm tells studios to make movies simple, with lots of exposition and little complexity. You may never see another Godfather – because ‘the computer says no’.
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Computer-generated images already infect many movies. Executives believe ChatGPT can now write a basic cookie-cutter Christmas movie.
So computers can write scripts, create images – including of actors – and package it all up for marketing. We’re approaching the stage where the the 20th century’s ultimate art form – cinema – is human-free.
Artificial intelligence (Image: PA)
On Spotify, digitised DJs pick your ‘daily mix’. Binary code now makes decisions for you that you once took yourself after reading the music press and hearing recommendations from friends.
Music can now be entirely computer-generated: no composer, no singer, no musicians, no producer. Will Smith was even accused of adding AI fans into promos. So nothing is real, not even the people allegedly listening.
Music is the most primal of the arts: sticks and logs make drums after all. Now, music is being strip-mined of humans. Novels are being written by ChatGPT.
Evidently, the music is no good, and the novels are no good. But this garbage is increasingly being churned out and called culture. Multiple news organisations were caught running articles by ‘journalists’ who turned out to be AIs.
In a delicious irony, YouTube bosses, who bear great responsibility for our cultural slide into mediocrity, are upset that their platform is now itself awash with AI slop. Nearly one-in-ten of YouTube’s fast-growing channels show AI-generated content only. This is where the algorithm meets AI in a deadening singularity.
Fashion has embraced AI models. Where once we could never match up to catwalk gods and goddesses, today you must judge yourself before flawless beauty as imagined by machines. The art of photography is rendered meaningless.
It’s possible to live an entire day without human interaction. You don’t even need to go shopping for food. An app will do that for you. And if you do go to the shops, there’s the mechanised self-service till, with its beep-beep-beep rather than the sound of another human voice.
If you go online now to buy goods an AI salesperson – designed to look and sound exactly like a human – gives the product demonstration. When you’ve a business complaint, who talks to you now? Is it a human or an AI?
On the train, the voice of the announcer is no longer real. When you die, pictures of you and voice recordings can be used to generate your ‘death-bot’.
If your family and friends – or enemies, for who knows what might be done to your death-bot – don’t wish to resurrect you, then they can always call on the services of AI therapists.
Therapy is the ultimate human occupation. It’s about one human empathising with another. If we outsource this to machines, then we truly are dead as a species.
Indeed, we’ve even gamified death. Whilst I long to see Ukraine victorious over Russia, I find something deeply unpleasant in the way Zelensky’s soldiers are now given ‘points’ for kills which are then used to buy rewards like new kit.
Students use computers to write essays. Teachers use computers to construct their lessons. All the while, data is gathered – even in the classroom – and the tech barons just get richer.
AI psychosis has taken hold, with users drifting into mental illness due to the ‘relationships’ they’ve built with these machines. Some fall in love and leave their human partners.
It reminds me of the meaning behind the title of Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange. To Burgess, humankind was like an orange – beautiful, vibrant, real, fleshy and wonderfully flawed. But throw enough technology at us and that sublime creation becomes clockwork: a dead simulacrum of what it means to be human.
We’re sad and angry because we’re humans in a world where our humanity is been increasingly cut away with every passing day. Humans need humans.
Clearly, the solution is in our own hands. As another writer once said: choose life. Choose the human over the machine every damn chance you get, otherwise one day the clockwork will have replaced the orange.
Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics