GenAI, GenAI, GenAI. It’s the talk of the town, a strong and sustained interest of mine, and what keeps us all up at night—even if we don’t realize it. The S&P500 is propped up by AI. Consumer electronics are being sunset because of AI hardware demands. AI rules hiring, AI threatens creative expression, AI AI AI.
In this age of GenAI, people are looking for humanity. Some are disconnecting from the internet, others are swimming through an ocean of simulacrums in the hope that they find one real comment, post—some sign they aren’t alone on a dead internet. As an aside, I always hated that theory because it seemed straight out of conspiracy.biz. I’m now 0-2 on that one. Don’t trust me for determining if a conspiracy has merit or not.
Moving on. Technology is here to stay unless we all bomb ourselves back into caves. Practically speaking, it’s here to stay. Social media too, as much as it pains me to admit. Big Tech—to put a descriptor to the term just for clarity’s sake, the large companies that run the majority of the modern internet such as Amazon, Meta, and Google—won’t let us all disengage without a fight. They won’t force us to use it, no they’ll do what they’ve been doing: make it more attractive. Cheaper premiums, or new free services. Whatever they have to do to keep their users, they’ll do.
However, that doesn’t mean we have to stay. We have to make a conscious choice to quit. To take an option not as good, maybe even leave our followers behind. I’m tempted to mock that last point, but for better or worse people have formed bonds with the concept of being seen. A smaller audience is scary, it might even feel like your measure of existence is tied to your followers. It’s not worth what social media’s done to us, and it’s certainly not worth what GenAI-driven social media is doing and will do to us.
Language is shrinking, and this isn’t some complaint about ‘them kids sayin’ 6-7 and dang ol’ slang.’ -maxxing is one suffix to rule them all, replacing every other superlative. You aren’t working on your appearance, you’re looksmaxxing. You aren’t cleaning up your diet and working on an exercise plan, you’re healthmaxxing. What happens when you want to express a new thought? Will you use language to articulate it, or just slap -maxxing on some related term and just gesture to what you’re talking about? This isn’t just a rant about -maxxing either. ‘Let’s go,’ while it started as simple fun and arguably is a safe way for dudebro guys to express emotion has taken the place of most any other celebratory comment. ‘Unalive’, ‘Grape’, ‘pdf file’, I genuinely saw someone say double good the other day. Double (plus un)good. Maybe it was satire, but satire and post-truth civilization are too dangerously close to do without a wink and a nudge these days.
How does this connect to GenAI social media? GenAI is composed of what we say, it’s taught what we express. The more language of a certain type we use, the more that language is thrown back at us. It confirms what we want to see. It’s ‘the algorithm’ run amok. Forget hugboxes, we’ll get what we put out whether we like it or not. These aren’t the days of the early 00s where it’s a chatbox with no filtering, sorting or text-only output. It’s just like voting: one vote is pointless, but ten thousand votes are the margin of victory. One comment is nothing. Thousands of comments all saying the same thing? That dictates culture, and GenAI social media bots number far beyond the thousands.
This is ignoring the possibility of malicious usage of GenAI bots too. Not even ‘MechaHitler’ slur-slinging, but more insidious and subtle manipulation. New fashion trends? Not even pretending to be organic. Company X develops a new shoe. They want it to sell gangbusters. Enter a real human influencer showing them off, followed by a gradual build of seemingly organic comments expressing interests. Not too quick, that’d be suspicious. But quick enough. Suddenly the new hottest shoe trend has taken us by storm, and it’s entirely artificial. Now replace shoes with electoral candidates. Who needs to rig an election when you can just rig the voters?
The only solution is to abstain. Leave open social media, make a new garden and wall it up. Forget age verification, we need human verification—only proven humans can post there, or at the very least anyone who isn’t a verified human is marked with as much warning as a NSFW post.
How to verify we’re human? We can’t do it by video or photo evidence, GenAI is good enough to fool that even if it’s itself checked by humans. The same goes for audio. What about a personal Turing test done live? Effective perhaps (but again, not foolproof) although terribly slow. My personal favorite social media, Tildes.net is invite-only. You either need to be invited by an existing user or request an invite from the administrator. Again, slow. This is by design at Tildes, but some people don’t want the Sunday drive of internet communication. I get that.
We might need more extreme measures. I’ve entertained the idea of a human-only social media website where you have to provide a blood sample to verify your humanity. Yes, I’m serious. I also understand that it’s wildly infeasible for a number of reasons, one major one being that we can’t even trust companies with our email addresses half the time. Personally, I wouldn’t join the Blood Media.
Maybe the answer is to quit social media, or drastically reduce your time spent on it. Maybe you join niche social media on purpose, to reduce your reliance on it because it’s just not as fun. Maybe we’ll figure out a way to preserve the human experience online. Hell, maybe we’ll accidentally invent sentient AI which can actually experience the scope of personhood. I don’t think that’s in the near future, but I also didn’t think we’d ever end up here. Fuck do I know, right?
I’ve been doing this bad habit of getting an idea for a blog post and just jotting it down to write later. This one comes from an idea I had written down 8 months ago. Bad, bad habit. Fuck you brain, I won’t do what you tell me (but I will do this other thing.)
