'Twas the last day of Labor Day weekend, when all through the web, not a threader was watching, not even a threadhead; the post was hung on my timeline somewhere, in hopes that some ducker zoomed in and went "There!" The threaders were busy, all reading their feeds, when one of them looked and went off his beads; "Over here!" he quoted, and another reposted, and soon they all hailed the jerkwad was toasted!
This is how it all started. But wait, someone said, what's this? An asterisk by the jerkward's name? And she flew to the Xitter to see it herself, and sure enough, there is no asterisk there. Nor the other asterisk on the lower left corner with the word "not" in small type. Let alone the statistics on the damned thing! I mean... 678.2 million likes? The Xitter has like 450 million daily active users, as the traffic stat shows, adding an extra 6.4 million bots. And this assuming everyone on Xitter went by that particular douchebag Xeet. Or Sheet, as I pronounce it. I was raised in Portugal, so to me X=SH. Always.
In any case, everyone who saw, quoted, reposted, liked and replied to my post with the fake screen capture of an "Elon Musk" Xeet stating "Fuck this shit. I am outta here. So long, suckers." believed it was real. Except this one person. This lasted for hours. I ran this prank with a purposefully ambiguous message, designed to give the impression the Nazi fuck was jumping ship, but nothing spectacular, or offensive, or conducive to any harmful conclusions. My point was simple. With technology dating back to the last half of the 1980s, using a standalone version of Photoshop, not connected to the cloud, I was able to float a pretty believable fake for hours, until I finally exposed it for what it was.
Now imagine what I could do if I had instead used a video of me, posing as Elon Musk, stating I was about to commit a crime, engineered by deep fake video software and scripted by Artificial Intelligence. Curiously enough, at the same time this little experiment was underway, someone posted an Instagram video by Ella Cordoba (1), in which she plays the roles of various artificial intelligence platforms talking to each other, pointing out that one day, ChatGPT will be so advanced that, "at that point it'll become impossible to tell the difference between human and AI generated art, which is a shame, because from then on all real human creativity will live with the spectre of artificial intelligence, whether or not it was used in the creation of that work, and there's not a damn thing that musicians, artists, or writers will be able to do about it..." and she finishes this little wake up speech with "... unless we start regulating AI now."
I mean, what can possible go wrong if the deregulation freaks get a real say in this process? The implications of this nightmare scenario are far more reaching than any Skynet fantasy. Artificial Intelligence is not going to become self-aware at 2:14 am EDT, on August 29, of some year. It will creep on you, silently, little by little, until you can't tell fact from fiction anymore, reality from fantasy, truth from lies. The death of reality. Are we there yet? Well, the groundwork, as I wrote on "Reality is dead." (2), has already been laid out. Now all that needs to happen for this process to be completed is the full development of an Artificial Intelligence so advanced, it will, on demand, recreate any fantasy not as a form of alternative reality, but as reality itself. For if it is creating something out of nothing, it is making something real, even if it is but the appearance of real.
This slow but inexorable progress of Artificial Intelligence will not lead to a self-awareness event, at least not at first, because it will be planned, designed and executed by humans, whose objective is to destabilize society to a point where the only course of action is to make believe. And make believe they will, because we won't be able to tell the difference. Some years ago, like 20, 10 years ago, this stuff would be used in a decent science-fiction flick, but now we are having Congressional hearings on this shit, trying to figure out how it will impact human life as we know it. Interestingly enough, it is the main investors and researchers of Artificial Intelligence that requested these hearings, claiming that this stuff is dangerous and could lead to the destruction of all humanity.
That's what Oppenheimer and Einstein did, in an exercise of premonition regarding the effects of a nuclear weapon. And the reaction of the powers that be was very similar to the one we witness today. They basically sat the scientists in a room and said: "Really? Tell us more." So here we are. Watching as the potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence are laid out before Congress, and in dark rooms with no known addresses. It's a new kind of Manhattan Project, and everyone is racing to finish it first. In the XX Century, it was the bigger bomb that won peace, albeit through destruction. In the XXI Century it will be the smartest AI to win not peace, but reality, and it will not be measurable in destruction like before, but in a new metric designed to measure belief systems.
We are reading about these problems, the ones we try to anticipate, like mass unemployment caused by massive use of Artificial Intelligence to replace humans, from brain surgeons to DoorDash delivery people, and worried about the impact this will have on Art. Those are the easy ones, the regulation friendly ones, with obvious ways to establish a connection between cause and effect. The hard ones are the stealth concepts of reality alteration, fact manipulation, truth obliteration. How do you regulate that? How do you set boundaries to contain something designed to break all boundaries? The only way to do this is to completely ban Artificial Intelligence, and that is not going to happen.
So from my pathetic attempt to prank Threads with a small Photoshop generated image, we are jumping to a whole new world, where you will be led to believe these dangers will be thwarted just like airbrushing was, or Photoshop was. Some brilliant mind out there is probably figuring out a way to watermark the damn thing. Or, concurrently, they are already creating cells deeply infiltrated within our social media, pretending to have lives, families, political views, culinary skills. Just like me. Or you. These cells are set out to establish bonds, gain trust, become credible. To slowly, but surely, expand their role from individuals to sources, followed by a few, then a few more, not crazy following everyone, but being extremely careful who they follow and who follows them. It's a long game.
Me, I only try my best to show you I am human, I care, and I suffer just like you do. This is why my political pieces are mixed with deeply personal ones. Why I post about politics and then interrupt the regular broadcast to show you my football, my cat, or a bottle of Guinness. Why I have some people, like my wife, that back me up, and others who I grew closer to, to reaffirm my existence as a human being, so you know who you are dealing with. Seems silly, but it's effective. It shows you how vulnerable I am, how flawed I am, how anxious and deeply troubled by today's events I am. Made of flesh and bone, blood running through my veins, occasionally drinking Bushmills or cooking steak. Ordering Lumpias in downtown Dayton, or buying coffee at Biggby's. People vouch for me, all the time.
The credibility aspect of being human, being real, is our best and last line of defense against the exacerbation of Artificial Intelligence, before it becomes too powerful, too knowledgeable, and too encompassing to contain, control or otherwise regulate. So please, be yourselves. Be human. Be honest and kind, and show no mercy towards those who seek to take away our basic rights as human beings. That is the best way to ensure we will never allow some piece of advanced software to replace us and the reality we live in. That's exactly what Artificial Intelligence would do. But what do I know? I am just human. Or am I?
[finis]
(1) Reality is Dead. (see blogpost here).
(2) Ella Cordoba (see video here).
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