Recently, 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.
But aside from these very important critiques, it’s also just downright irritating. Who wants to use so much energy playing synthetic media Sherlock Holmes?
I consider myself to be relatively tech-savvy, which probably lured me into a false sense of security that AI content would always be obvious to me. This is becoming less true, thanks to many video-generation models becoming more sophisticated and producing content with fewer immediately obvious red flags. Combine this with the sheer volume of AI-generated material and the context we see it in – on platforms where the whole point is to move from one video to the next very quickly. You barely have time to do a reality check before moving on. Consuming an algorithmically curated social media feed feels like drowning in a soup of slop. Whatever croutons of reality you might come by are only there to keep you drowning, sorry, scrolling, for longer.
And here’s the sick joke of it all: the more you linger on a video to discern if it’s AI-generated, the more of its kind you’ll see. Perhaps you watch it a few times, trying to spot the classic AI body horror. Maybe you’re annoyed enough to leave a comment. Perhaps you share it with a friend like: “Thanks, I hate it!!” All of these are signals that scream more! more! more! to the algorithm. And so we’re trapped in a nightmare in which even the act of hating AI-generated content only serves to fuel it.
All of this makes me feel like an unwilling traveller through a hellish hyperreality – a concept theorised by Jean Baudrillard decades before generative AI took off. Would Baudrillard feel vindicated or repulsed by Sora 2? (You…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
