Truth Decay

Generative A.I is perhaps the greatest insult to humanity’s legacy that has ever existed. It is empowered by a system that so ruthlessly casts aside the people it should be set up to support. It disenfranchises, it discourages, it deceives, and it takes no accountability for any of these things. Even the billionaires holding these digital ‘beasts’ on a leash are seemingly unaware or simply unconcerned with the damage caused by the slack they give their fancy pets.

It represents the sheer scale of the wealth disparity between the mega-rich and the rest of us. It represents the carelessness with which these individuals use their capital and power to completely detach humanity’s future from what is good for us, or what we want. With every prompt, the value of the input, be it energy, water, or even human-made work, is trivialised more and more.

And for what? So that maybe, someday, if we can keep this charade going long enough, this technology will change the world in such a beneficial way that it will somehow undo this great devastation? There is no undoing it. There is no going back. The internet, the world, and the people on this earth are forever changed by this shift. But it is not ‘inevitable’ in the ways many would argue it is.

It is inevitable, but only because of how we have allowed those in power to set this system up in such a way that they can so easily manipulate the global tides to suit their own intentions. It is only inevitable because of how quickly its development and accessibility are making it impossible for legislators to keep up. It is inevitable only because so many of us have fallen for their performative agenda; to show us new tricks, new gimmicks, new ways this technology will change everything, all to keep us distracted from exactly how those changes are impacting the world and the people in it.

It’s quite the show. It’s hard to look away. But that’s in part because the same actors getting involved in A.I (Google, Meta, Microsoft, X…) are already data Goliaths that know exactly how to market these services according to the information they’ve gathered about you over decades. They have every tool they could possibly need at their disposal to keep this con going far longer than it should. But remember this; most, if not all of these companies, are completely failing to make these services profitable.

And frame it however you want, but that means that money is essentially being set alight and tossed in a deep, dark pit in the middle of Death Valley. If tomorrow, for whatever reason, these companies were thwarted, their models would collapse. Just as a diary on a bookshelf can only keep record for as long as the building it’s in isn’t set on fire, these models necessitate a ridiculous amount of infrastructure to run.

It is not that some clever scientists put together an artificial mind, one that can grow, think, and feel individually of any system or network beyond its internal computing. That is not where we are in human history. Instead, generative AI is simply a very expensive magic trick. A circus act. An illusion, consisting of the promise that those who have been empowered by obscene amounts of wealth seek to create and maintain things that will in turn empower everyone else.

It is the opposite. This performance will not empower us, not as individuals, nor as a whole. Generative A.I will instead continue to do what it is designed to do. To disenfranchise, discourage, and deceive. The elite have no need to hide their intentions. Their approach is clear. Move fast. Break things. And whatever you do, don’t ever apologise.