Brain Dump | Morning Musings

Are you an AI?

We might be close to the so-called dead internet theory. While it is still considered a conspiracy theory, safe to say that seeing how AI can now develop their own writing style, summarize things for us, even suggesting a lot of things more personalized than search engine would, have their own personality & quirks, they could very well be a human, a basic boring human.

With AI becoming more advanced and accepted, it's getting a lot more challenging for organic users to thrive. For example, just look at X, formerly twitter with its bots problem. X used to be a place to look for the freshest information on the ground. From earthquake, war, you name it. They have it fresher than any other place would. It used to work as the content on twitter would then get recycled to other social media and was given extra commentary. These days, tiktok seemingly replaced that forefront with news there being recycled to X, twitter and youtube.

The eerie thing is that not all of them are human generated. Even these days on Hive, there are people writing content with AI tools. If the person is truly malicious, it won't be that difficult to create a whole persona AI generated with its background story and stuff. In the mainstream media, this has happened, there's already an influencer goes by the name Miquela. She's not even a human and she has 2.5M followers!

https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=en

While the dead internet theory has circulated a while ago, it has been increasingly popular and talked about. This prospect magazine article for example mentioned that real people and our needs have become irrelevant to the modern internet business. It further criticized that today, people are desperate to earn something with low quality or fake content to drive engagement as well as generating money from it. I have to agree that today the internet has become a little soulless that since internet economy booms, money is what being emphasized all around the space.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/internet/67864/dead-internet-theory-ai

With all that said, there's also a recent phenomenon that resurface again and that is the lonely epidemic. We are not alone per se, we are surrounded by people and AI, for better or worse. We have companion but that isn't enough because lonely isn't solvable simply by having a companion.

These all aren't new but just becoming increasingly real and heightened. For those who haven't watched the movie "Her"(2013) by Adam Spiegel, I would suggest it right now because we might as well be heading to that direction where hyperintelligent AI are built and able to form a relationship with us because we feel increasingly lonely.

It's really not just loneliness but with AI becoming more accepted and used, there are also sinister implication of it. One that is common is celebrity impersonation. It is to the point that can be quite indistinguishable if they said certain things or promoting a certain brand while it was an AI generated video. Shockingly, from what I found people blindly believing those video based on the comment left with only few remain skeptical if that was AI generated. What if you made a certain decision based on this false AI news/ endorsement or what not? Can you truly distinguish human and AI?

That's all for this morning. I came across this topic a while back because I started seeing a lot more celebrities being impersonated by AI and people believing in that. At the same time, there are way too many tools to use than the common ChatGpt, Gemini or even Copilot. In a thriving business and in pursuit of VC money, it's no surprise that more services and innovation are built based on AI. It's cool and all that jazz but I remain skeptical of its implication for the current and future generation.

So, are you a human or an AI?