You may have noticed that AI – I call it artificial ignorance – has popped up nearly everywhere on the internet. Social media, chat bots and other clever little diversions. They are aimed at drawing your attention away from anything important. Stories are fake, photos are fake and “people” are fake.
It’s as though reality has been replaced not by individuals’ imaginations but by computers that string together prompts in an effort to create piffle.
Actually, piffle is too kind a word. Something with four letters might be more appropriate.
In other words, AI is the purest form of garbage. No one checks it, no one questions it and no one seems to care. Yet social media companies sell gullible advertisers billions of dollars worth of ads that are targeted at the public.
Last year alone, Meta, which brings you Facebook and Instagram among other social media platforms, made a little over $62 billion, mainly from advertising. Google, which owns YouTube, raked in a net income of about $100 billion last year.
Just imagine if Meta and YouTube did something worthwhile!
Let’s take a look at YouTube, which appears to publish more AI garbage than anyone. There’s one video in which an orca jumps in the back of a boat. A sure giveaway is there is no information about it. No time, place, date – nothing. Just fake stuff. Also, if that had actually happened, legitimate news sources would likely have covered it, using real reporters and photographers.
Other “things” on YouTube are photos of movie stars grabbed off the internet accompanied by an AI voice reading poorly written AI narratives. Again, there is no attribution for the photos or the writing. I suppose no one would admit to being involved in it.
YouTubers and denizens of other websites have always relied on lowest common denominators to get clicks, but now they don’t even bother to copy video from other websites. They plug in some prompts like “tornado,” “trailer park” and “flying cow” and viola – there’s the perfect clip that will attract thousands of clicks from the artificially ignorant audience.
Then there are fake movie trailers. Several for “Top Gun III” promise a reprise of Tom Cruise’s blockbusters. It might be interesting if it weren’t fake.
So what does this all add up to?
Nothing. You see nothing real, and you learn nothing.
Which, I suppose, is the point of social media.
It’s meant to occupy the terminally bored with photos and videos that aren’t real.
We are told that AI will help scientists find new solutions for the world’s problems. Diseases will be cured. And AI will be used to make people smarter with a minimum of effort.
So far, though, AI is just a crutch for lazy students who resist the thought of doing their own work and prefer to try to cheat their way through school. It’s also used by members of the public who are too lazy to read a book.
Communist rabble-rouser Karl Marx once said that religion is the “opium of the masses.” If he only knew.
AI has taken over that role.
Carl Sampson is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in Stayton.
