AIccelerationism?

Have you used the new Bing image creator? A simple prompt creates fairly realistic, often striking, often funny images. I thought about abstaining on humanist grounds but a hangover soon broke my resolve. So, here are some guinea pigs enjoying a glass of vodka:

Here is a portrait of myself hard at work in my Silesian office:

And here is a glorious vision of life in a future Britain:

Good fun — though it’s curious how quickly it palls. It’s like eating sweets. After a while it gets sickly — and you know it won’t be good for you to keep doing it a lot.

The downsides are obvious. First — the whole thing is terrible for graphic designers. I feel bad just using it — knowing that the AI is leeching off thousands upon thousands of other people’s images. Then again, as I speak AI is leeching off thousands upon thousands of books and articles as it comes to replace me. The bastard. There is not much stopping it — we can only do our best to carve out a human niche.

Wallowing in cheap representations of the human world could be degrading too. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mean I’m going to spend hours marvelling at my little images of drunken guinea pigs and Anglotopia. But we know such fantasies can and will become more rich, more immersive and more interactive. It could become a form of limp — and, in the case of deepfakes, invasive — escapism on a vast scale.

Yet wallowing in pessimism is unhealthy too. Could there be good effects? The divide between the rich fantasies of image generators — look at Aris Roussinos’s Anglofuturist aesthetics — and the grimly uninspiring scenes of the real world might — and I do mean might — be cause for more imagination and more dedication in improving our environments. You can’t build something glorious without having a sense of what it could look like after all.

But I suspect we might see a return to the real in a different way. The rich seductive dishonesty of AI could, like a plate of sweets, end up sickening us. The writer Freya India wrote a fascinating post about “AI girlfriends”. “Even though we are right at the beginning of all this,” she writes:

…and the technology is still pretty clunky, men are already falling for their chatbots, proposing to them, even feeling suicidal when they lose contact. What happens when AI becomes way more realistic, more powerful, and more mainstream?

Sad stuff. But optimism gleams:

[Perhaps] at some point, life might become so stripped of reality and humanity that the pendulum will swing. Maybe the more automated, predictable interactions are pushed on us, the more actual conversations with awkward silences and bad eye contact will seem sexy. Maybe the more we are saturated with the same perfect, pornified avatars, the more desirable natural faces and bodies will be. Because perfect people and perfect interactions are boring.

Nicely put. It would not surprise me at all if this will happen. It reminds me of what I feel when I watch anime. No offence to people who love the stuff — it’s a personal thing and not an objective critique — but when I see a blank cartoon face with glistening inflated eyes I want to see a real person. To sense the existence of a soul. To feel reassured that I am not just a brain in a jar. With “AI girlfriends” that feeling could be magnified a million times.

Interactive elements might have counterintuitive effects. When a man — or a woman — watches porn, he — or she — has a sense that it could be real. It isn’t. But it could be. “What if I was a pizza delivery boy.”

The distance between the person and the media enhances this. It’s vacant and distractionless. Being included, though, might disrupt the fantasy, creating an excess of cognisance — an awareness of abandoning the real and succumbing to the fake. (This may not apply if the technology becomes wholly, thoroughly immersive. But perhaps this has already happened. Or perhaps not. Why would it simulate hangovers?)

A return to the real might also be encouraged by the sheer untrustworthiness of online media and remote communications. It is easy to imagine a time — and a time not far into the future — where fake images and audio are indistinguishable from the real thing. How much more valuable in-person interaction might be.

That doesn’t mean people are going to stop using the tech. Ten thousand Ted Kaczynskis couldn’t do much about that. And, yes, perhaps AI will kill us all with some of its more adventurous experiments (it sounds outlandish, sure, but even critics of AI doomsayers think there’s enough of a chance of it happening that I wouldn’t relegate it to science fiction).

But what’s real might seem more valuable and more worthy of our time, our energy, and our enthusiasm.

I made this nice picture of a man looking down from the Polish mountains in the future:

Silly, yes, even if the technology is impressive. A bit “millennial Thomas Kinkade”. But here’s the thing: now I really want to go to the mountains.