Two years ago, as the artificial humanity of the tech bros led them inexorably towards developing the blight we now call AI, Amazon realised that it needed to do something drastic to slow the tide of AI-generated slop that was being passed off as literature and sold on its publishing platform.
Its solution was bold: henceforth, it ruled, a single author would only be allowed to self-publish three books a day. This is not a joke, although I suppose there are dark little jokes imbedded in it, like the fact that reputable newspapers referred to these people as “authors” and to their digital diarrhoea as “books”.
For the rest though, this really happened, and nobody laughed, perhaps because we were still so disoriented by the speed and audacity of these broken men stealing all human endeavour and then leasing its shattered fragments back to us that the Amazon story passed by as one briefly nauseating blip among many.
Needless to say, as someone who makes a living writing words, I was fairly glum about all of this, and I remain fairly gloomy about some of it. But I’ve begun to see a glimmer of hope, made brighter by a remarkable bit of news from earlier this month.
According to the sorts of people who measure these things, we have reached the point where slightly more than half of what you read online has been written — well, hallucinated or simulated — by AI.
But perhaps this final collapse of the internet is how the rest of us are set free.
Combine this with the growing suspicion that much or perhaps even most of the commentary on this verbiage is also being contributed by bots — that, in short, the internet is rapidly becoming a place where bits of computer code pretend to have ideas or film things, and other bits pretend to have reactions to those simulated thoughts and images, all so that corporations can charge advertisers for clicks despite nobody involved having fingers to click anything — and you arrive at a place that, paradoxically, offers some real hope.
I felt it most clearly this week as I sat scrolling through Instagram videos, quietly and finally accepting that I can no longer tell real videos from AI-generated ones. It should have made me anxious, being cast totally adrift from verifiable reality, but instead I felt an enormous relief as I realised that the iron grip of the camera, which has made such powerful claims to our attention for over a century, was slipping off me.
If much or even most of what I was seeing was fake, I realised, it was best to assume all of it was fake, the way I assume all snakes are dangerous while knowing that some are benign. Instead of the dying internet being a final onslaught on reality, I felt it was a peculiar spectacle running parallel to it, little more than a sort of television channel endlessly broadcasting fragments of photo-realistic cartoons.
Of course, things might get worse before they get better: some of the biggest fans of the cartoons are now in charge of nuclear arsenals. But perhaps this final collapse of the internet is how the rest of us are set free. Perhaps, as it completes its transformation into a crèche in which adult babies watch cartoons, we can return to books and films for grownups and journalism written by people who have paper trails and receipts.
Perhaps we can return to each other and remember that liking or loving or laughing are things we do with our bodies and minds, not emojis we tap with a finger as we drift on, alone and fractured.
Perhaps…
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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