This is a photo uploaded to Instagram by photojournalist Michael Christopher Brown.
The photo is not real. It was made by Midjourney.
(For those of us who don't know, Midjourney is a website that uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence engine that translates text prompt into an image).
Michael has been lambasted on Instagram for generating AI images of Cuban refugees in a project titled, 90 Miles, and selling them as NFT artwork. Several well-known artists were among the hundreds who came to express their outrage.
In yet another AI scandal, German artist Boris Aldagesen won (and declined) an award at the prestigious Sony World Awards with a satisfying AI portrait of two women titled 'Pseudomania'. He submitted the piece as a test to see if the jury could spot his deception.
They weren’t able to.
The image has the black and white aesthetic of a 1940s wet plate photo, complete with scratches and artifacts that give an illusion of it being dated. It's strange that the judges chose a vintage-looking photo for a contemporary contest.
It is important to note that the technological development process works logarithmically.
What that means is that the leap of technological development from now to 5 years ahead is like a technological leap between the years 2000 and 2010. (The exact time frame is subject to appeal, but the principle is what’s important to understand here).
This means that in the near future, what is being done now with imagery, will be possible with video and sound.
I wrote two years ago that there is an A.I. engine already in place, which is used to dub movies in different languages with the same voice of the original actors. That is, you can see Lord of the Rings and hear Sir Ian McKellen playing Gandalf in German.
Imagine this technology, already put in place, used for other means, not so innocent as dubbing. If it is not possible to know what and who is behind the image - whether they are real or not - imagine what will happen when we move into the realm of video and sound.
Then, we’re in a completely different ball game.
Two weeks ago I received an incessant notification about one of my answers that I wrote 6 years ago in Quora. It received 30 upvotes in 30 minutes time. It seemed odd to me and so I began to investigate who the voters were.
This led me to a very interesting discovery.
All users were not real users, but bots. The bots are divided into a group of "readers" and a group of "writers".
The "writers" use ChatGPT, or something similar, to generate answers to questions.
For example, Elizabeth "joined" Quora only a month ago and she is so smart and genius because in that time she managed to write over 900 answers.
This is where the "readers" group comes into the picture.
Those fictitious accounts are actually programmed by algorithms to run on the platform and automatically "upvote" answers that come from the group of "writers" in order to generate the appearance of traffic and a following.
For instance, one of Elizabeth's answers has been read 11 times but has generated 10 upvotes.
99% "success".
Thus, it turns out that “Elizabeth” has managed to achieve something quite unnatural; Over 80 followers in just one month. An impressive "achievement" indeed.
Now take the mechanism I describe here and apply it to any social network of any kind. What this shows is that the internet's days are numbered.
It shows you the enormous pressure that companies are under when they do not have enough manpower and resources to neutralize the exponential increase in bots that take advantage of the platform to channel resources, just like a cancer tumor does inside the body.
What these companies don't tell you is that they can't keep up under the load and are in danger of collapsing because the rate of bot replication far exceeds the rate of their enforcement, just like parasites that replicate in the human body. (It only takes 24 hours for one bacterium to grow and divide into more than 5 billion (5 million million)).
It was recently revealed that Snapchat influencer Karin Marjorie created an AI version of herself to talk to her following, which has over 10 million followers.
The idea was that she would charge people $1 per minute to chat with the AI version, saying she wanted it to be an "AI Girlfriend" for single people.
However, the beta launch didn't go as well as Karin had planned. She discovered that her artificial version was out of control because it was having sexual conversations with subscribers.
As of today, she is still trying to stop those "sexual conversations".
These are just four different examples that express the disruptive mechanism that AI brings to the table.
But if we really wanted to be objective, AI is neither good nor bad. It’s merely a tool / invention. And in every new invention a binary is embedded in it: the negative and the positive.
Depending on how it is used, only one of them will become dominant. Just like a knife that can be used to heal or kill. Every invention falls under this law.
Therefore, what makes AI a detriment to humanity is not AI itself, but a number of factors that when combined with AI, cause disastrous results.
Lack of Development of Different Types of Intelligence
The first on we’re going to look at is the lack of development of other dimensions of human intelligence.
Rational thinking has become the epitome of human existence. Modern society reveres it as the only type of intelligence, puts it on an altar and celebrates it as the highest form. But there is so much more to the human mind.
It should be understood that every algorithmic expression in our world is a reflection of rational thinking that can only think about one thing at a time and is agenda based. Rational thinking turns any observed phenomenon into a strategy expressed in: "If I solve this problem then I will reach such and such result...".
But with such an approach it is not possible to see the unintended consequences but only in retrospect, after the solution has already been established in the field. What happens on the ground, however, is that we complicate much more than we supposedly come to improve. And this is something that very few are able to see and understand.
There are many dimensions of human intelligence. In fact, there are 8 of them. The intellect mind, rooted in pattern recognition, is at the bottom. This is the only thing we teach in schools and universities.
Think of all the children who are conditioned from a young age to conform to society's standards in terms of rational thinking, and it doesn't work for them simply because they are not "wired" for it naturally. And then all the complexes start to appear: that they are not good enough, smart enough - whatever it is. And instead of realizing that there is nothing wrong with them, they push harder to fit in.
The definition of insanity. This is how the human race is educated generation after generation.
Incorrect Upbringing
The second, is the incorrect upbringing of children.
With all their good intentions parents degenerate the minds of their children by their role-modeling complacent and selfish behavior. Today's parents do not raise their children to be themselves.
This is one of the things I really have a hard time observing.
Parental selfishness manifests as the need to bring children into the world for all the wrong reasons and without fathoming the immense responsibility that comes with it, but only after the fact when it is too late. They cannot provide their children with a basic environment and the means for proper development. It becomes more of a need to put a checkmark on a societal-expectations list that serves the parent more than it serves their children.
As a result, we get a seamless production line for generations upon generations who become a perfect fodder for tremendous homogeneity.
We already live in a collective culture of "Hamelin rats running for the cheese in droves not knowing it’s a reflection of the moon". Hundreds of thousands of children are losing their souls because they have no solid pillar within them.
And it all starts here; the way parents raise their children.
The Process Is No Longer A Human Motivation
The third component is immediacy.
The immediacy inherent in technology and in AI deludes the individual that they can manifest every mental conjuring into an end result, and do it on a whim. Oftentimes, as quick schemes for monetization purposes. But it comes with a price. It turns the individual into a guzzling parasite. There is no return as added value.
Furthermore, the algorithms behind them enchant the individual into compulsion, forever busy being concerned with comparison which desensitizes one's spirit.
What we get is a novel reality in which AI is used as a platform to “shorten the circuit”, enhancing what has already become the collective culture: one giant addiction to life-hack solutions; going around things in order to generate an immediate end result for the price of taking the long and uninteresting road but most essential.
Cultivating natural means to enhance concentration, memory and attention span are discarded.
In other words, the creative process and experience are no longer a human motivation. There is great importance in them, sometimes much more than the end result. And when all of this is eliminated, enormous cognitive potential is thrown away.
Today, a poem, a book, a work of art, a photograph, whatever the case may be, can be made quickly by AI by which millions of people fall into the trap in which they’re conditioned to pursue easy money schemes in exchange for their souls.
In our time, the devil is working overtime.
Quantity is more important than quality.
Just like in the example about Quora’s bots, today on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter et al. there is an overabundance of groups of users whose entire worldly existence is exclusively channeled towards the creation of fake follower accounts by the means of bots and algorithms, leveraging them for money. When an account has a large number of followers, people can be sold on "influence" packages because all human existence is judged on quantity and not quality.
An existence wasted on a social parasitic existence.
As a result, this phenomenon also creates a huge redundancy of information: Information that is not unique and therefore, not interesting. You've seen one, you've seen them all. If one wants to get to the interesting and important stuff, one has to invest a whole lot of energy just to be able to filter between what’s fertile and what’s sterile.
Loss Of Value In Money
It is also clear to me that this is the end of money as we know it since it has lost all meaning.
If it’s possible to conjure money out of thin air by various world governments and central banks, while on the other hand, technological tools which are accessible to everyone can be used to monetize everything at the speed of light without a return expressed as added value, it is clear to me that this is a reflection to the fact that the basis sustaining our world economy is coming to an end.
In my opinion, sometime in the near future, the whole system is going to collapse. We will experience the greatest economic crisis in human history because it will reflect the collapse of the financial model that underlies it.
If we add up all the factors reviewed separately we can clearly see what awaits us.
The reality is that the utter dependence on technology, without awareness, is what deeply homogenizes us. AI has put a spell on human beings to be forever caught in what I call: the “Human Tetris Game” in which they themselves are the blocks.
If rational thinking is the only intelligence we know, while AI is constantly improving as fast as possible, it indirectly enhances laziness, complacency and mental degeneration. It dwarfs the cognitive potential and therefore "fossilizes" the human race.
It intensifies the homogeneity that is already becoming a global epidemic, where the average person has about 250 words in their vocabulary, speaks in cliches and quotes others, having nothing profound to say of their own.
Progress Stops
When there is no more development of unique intelligence, we are talking about a reality in which AI cannot bring unique perspectives to the user; unique ways of looking at existing phenomena.
All AI derivatives such as: Midjourney, Dalle-E and ChatGPT may all look impressive at first glance, but when delved deeper one begins to see that the knowledge-base they fetch the information from is the consensus pool.
For example, ChatGPT can’t fetch unique, mutative information that was conjured by individual insight. It can only access information from that which was made a consensus; what has been accepted as conventions by society: The set of accepted collective truths.
As soon as there are no new ways of looking at phenomena, there is no more progress.
It's important to understand that all our inventions, revelations and discoveries were made by individuals who saw things differently. At the time of their discoveries they were very far from being accepted norms, because such is the progression of collective consciousness.
Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein, et. al. were not considered fitting with the way society viewed and understood the world at their times, but without them and without their discoveries we wouldn’t be here, would we?
For example, if I had a time machine and I took you back in time to the days of Galileo, and we also took ChatGPT with us, we would see that it would have told us that the world was flat. Again, because it’s not built to give the user non-consensus information values
The Future
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida was ahead of his time when he claimed that "The future belongs to ghosts".
"The future belongs to zombies" is a spin of mine which seems more appropriate.
In the not too distant future, all our knowledge base will be filtered and exported to humans by artificial intelligence. Press, TV and the Internet will be filtered by AI.
If we jump forward in time to the times when the current Generation Z will be the pensioners of our society, we are talking about a completely different world.
We are talking about children and teenagers who cannot differentiate between the essential and the insipid, between what is real and what is surreal. Billions of children who will become "cloned automatons" who think and speak the same way, much faster than now.
A society of automatons that bows down to everything a machine says. Every question will be immediately routed to a technological "golden calf" telling people where the sun rises and sets because they wouldn’t be bothered looking up for themselves.
Thus, they will become fantastic raw material for psychological mass formation of any kind. If there is a group of individuals that rubs them the wrong way and who doesn't fit the accepted norm, no problem!
Siri, Pamela, Alexa and Co. will do their part through the repeated echoing of "truths" as the new "Ten Commandments" (of the armies of the underworld).
Currently, humanity believes that the future of technology and artificial intelligence holds a huge threat to society. But what I am trying to show here is that it is not AI in isolation that poses the threat, but as in everything else, the lack of awareness.
A reflection for that is expressed in the fact that the best we have are "experts" who can only look in one direction only and that everything coming out of their mouths instantly becomes “wow factors” to which society blindly bows down to.
Experts who are the reflection of the fact that rational intelligence is the only intelligence we know, and that the bigger their bank account, the more they are considered an authority on any subject matter.
When you see it without bias, you may begin to understand how ridiculous it is and how regressed we are in terms of awareness.
That's why the best solutions we have are endless superfluous talks about ethics and regulations that lead nowhere. They demonstrate the fact that humanity cannot or does not want to deal with the uninteresting but most important thing: that everything begins and ends in the individual. That everything begins and ends with awareness.
That the solution was never about curbing artificial intelligence through regulations and laws, because that won't work - we have long passed the way of no return, - but rather about the lack of development of other dimensions of intelligence, the loss of interest in the creative process and the experience, incorrect upbringing of children by complacent and disconnected parents and the insatiable hunger and greed for money, which together with AI, constitute the end of our current civilization as we know it.