first written 01.30.25 2144est
The first version of Dall-E came out in January of 2021. It predated Midjourney by a year and some change. In its' infancy it captured the imagination of many dim wit gawkers on Twitter creating crude images of people with melty faces and impossible ligaments, it really was funny. Which maybe we lost sight of in the on going cynicism towards AI that dominates those same spaces now (not that I'm unsympathetic to the despair either). It was a novelty; a fun toy that frankly at the time had no real repercussions. But from its' humble beginnings spun out a massive empire that makes a massive part of the U.S. economy. Where each major tech conglomerate is racing to build a model that they can sell to people as being the most sophisticated.
This toy that was spitting out eldritch horrors when ever you simply asked for a "Sinful Obama" is now behind a blinding amount of internet content. People who have been exposed to AI for a long time have developed a set of discriminatory tools to spot images molested by the computers paint brush. I believe I have a pretty keen eye I think. But something kind of scary, is that the images have blended in with the rest of the content on the internet. People don't disclose their use of AI so a lot of the times you don't actually have feedback on if your evaluation is correct. This loss of feedback I think is a significant turning point in the existence of this technology for us.
Sometime when I first came home from Japan last November my mom like she does, showed me a video of what some Republican said that ticked her off. This time it was a video of infamous do nothing Elon Musk saying some unprovoked racist remarks. Not that he was ever of an even and fair mind, but now I think those kind of remarks are much less jarring than when I heard them in November. She held her phone to my face and let the Facebook Tik-Tok style vertical video play thrice. Something I immediately noticed that the lips did not remotely match the bile that he was spewing. I pretty quickly clocked it as a fabrication, but my mom was hesitant to believe me (pretty reasonably). Parents falling for internet farces is probably one of the America's pass times we're best at, so I wasn't particularly shocked. I was also conditioned by both anonymous online anecdotes and accounts by my peers of their elderly family sharing obviously fake videos with them.
## so your mom fell for ai.
It had finally penetrated into the contentious mainstream. Appearing on that uncle's IPad and finding itself in your text messages with some frankly inappropriate caption. They have had no prior conditioning; they don't know how to spot, why someone would make it, or what ways they should adjust their scrutiny. They should be pointing it at Joe Blow on Facebook but instead their reticle of doubt will probably remain on how you dress and eat. But all the same these videos will continue to pile up either in your messages or worse: when you get home they're gonna wanna show you whats' his face said about Whoopi Goldberg (its' that she can get it).
There is a lot of discussion about finally emerging on the other side of post truth. Just the writing the word is enough for me to vomit. I seriously hate begging the question like that, like the practice is already bad but when you use stupid buzzwords as your vehicle I just want those fools' to drive their metaphorical rhetorical device car off a symbolic bridge (Doom shotgun noise). To be post truth implies that objects are oriented around it, like its' the center piece of our living room. But that requires that their be times when truth is and isn't and simply I would raise you that there has never been a point in time where humans have dwelled on this rock where truth has been more or less existent. Truth is a tricky thing you see, some people say it hides; cruel people say that humans run from the truth. But the truth about the truth is that its' fickle. Less that it falls between your fingers and more so that its' air.
I am not mocking the pursuit of truth, I just want to us to have a more fair frame. AI's biggest power is that it just spews garbage at a rate that cannot be accounted for. Since man crawled out of their caves they have been spewing garbage from womb to grave. Like the adoption of the Loom before it AI has given man the tools to simply amplify beyond any good reason the ability to just make trash. In this ocean of trash we lose cohesion. Data is not destroyed, it is lost.
Growing up we were told that the internet was written in ink. It was recited to us by nit wits who didn't quite understand what they were saying, but they tormented us all the same. Despite our scrutiny to those who didn't understand the internet, we grew discontent with the state of it all. Our videos of dancing to "Crank that" by Soulja Boy have finally been lost, but not to time to scope.
There is one more insidious quality to the exponential growth of shit that occupies the internet. In some cruel joke we have selected for only the most malicious actors and the most sophisticated tools to find those lost pieces of time. So when someone does find your stupid Soundcloud account there's a ~13% chance that it is literally Satan and you're already fucking dead you moron.
