AI: The floodgates are open
A deluge of AI-generated garbage “is polluting our culture,” said Erik Hoel in The New York Times, and it’s transforming our lives in ways that we’re only beginning to understand. “Increasingly, mounds of synthetic AI-generated outputs drift across our feeds and our searches”—and are making “an insidious creep into our most important institutions.” A new study examining scientists’ peer reviews of AI research found, ironically enough, that many heavily relied on AI to write their work. Spotify is filling up with AI-generated songs, and YouTube with creepy, AI-created children’s videos featuring weird, two-beaked birds blathering incoherent narratives. Media outlets such as Sports Illustrated publish AI-generated articles credited to fake authors, and Google searches pull up AI-generated images and articles. Meanwhile, AI programs that crunch the internet for vast troves of information are feeding on AI-written content, pointing to “a future of copies of copies of copies” that become “ever more stereotyped and predictable.” The tech industry calls this “model collapse.”
As AI-generated content spreads online, “the internet is becoming stranger by the day,” said Dani Di Placido in Forbes. Viral posts on X are flooded with comments by AI bots, and deepfake video and imagery abounds, such as the pornographic images of Taylor Swift that spread in January. AI is “destabilizing the concept of truth,” said Tatum Hunter in The Washington Post. Consider the recent furor over Catherine, the Princess of Wales. First, she released a Mother’s Day photo that proved to have been doctored. Then, when she revealed her cancer diagnosis in a video, some claimed it was a synthetic creation. In the age of AI, it’s hard to tell “what’s real and what’s not.”
The implications for democracy are dire, said Alfred Lubrano in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
As November’s election approaches, we might see fabricated videos showing election workers destroying ballots, or candidates doing something scandalous. A few months back, an ad for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis showed fake images of Donald Trump embracing conservative bête noire Anthony Fauci. By Election Day, countless counterfeit images will leave “reality wrecked and the truth nearly unknowable.” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, says AI is moving so fast that efforts to detect and control it are failing. In our brave new world, she said, “we should be suspicious of everything we see.”