Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality comes to mind.
Hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality.
However, after thinking up some doom and gloom shit about the future, I reversed course: Why speculate about future kids when most of us grew up with a manipulative media diet? Saturday morning cartoons were wildly manipulative, the emergence of social media damaged a lot of people’s expectation of reality, and the last three election cycles in the US were heavily impacted by the ability of certain populists to generate memes.
AI will speed up the content generation process and introduce some absurd elements like six-fingered watch models, but I don’t think it will be more manipulative than media already is, just weirder and faster.
My ultimately positive forecast: the kids of the future will create their own networked spaces outside of the mainstream internet and just continue on with their lives ignoring what doesn’t interest them and seeking out what does. Regardless, we’ll never understand it anyway.
The same as what is happening now. Manipulation of the media has been a thing since before the internet.
It’s true that manipulation of information has been the practice of the powerful for a long time, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the degree or scale to which it’s been possible to do has remained the same. As an analogy, consider that both knives and nuclear bombs have the ability to kill people while having quite different implications, particularly with regard to the health and flourishing of our species.
Obviously AI isn’t all bad. It’s not even “bad”. It just is. But the blast radius of a Bad Decision by a Bad Actor is much wider if armed with these new tools.
This.
Media has always had an agenda, which even if meant in good faith is manipulativ.
Just speaking about newspapers:
- the topics are mostly chosen for the audience who can afford newspapers (= good/settled middle class)
- the journalists usually have a social background which allows for having unpaid internships and can afford to study journalism at university (e.g. rules out working class people)
- advertisement is a big (paid newspapers) or the only income source (‘free online news’)
- this implies to not fuck around with the companies/people paying the advertisement
- this implies also, to not fuck around with the world view of what your readers seem acceptable too much (less readers = less money for advertisement)
- newspapers are owned by rich people which also impacts what topics are covered or not
- newspapers have competition in search engines/internet etc. which they will fight / badmouth
- in Germany at least newspapers/their companies tried to fight adblockers and the peoples freedom to use adblockers in court - w/o making much noise about it. So, information damaging the newspapers reputation are willfully held back.
- every topic I have a little bit of knowledge about which is covered by so called specialists in newspapers is full of shit/wrong assumptions/lacks any kind of deeper understanding
Long story short: Everyone/everywhere has grown up consuming deeply manipulative content from media. Given the bullshit and propaganda we are getting each day by people with an agenda/on someones payroll, crazy hallucinations / generated content won’t make things worse than they are already.
Increasing my allowance to $20 would enhance my ability to practice financial management and develop responsibility. The additional funds would enable me to independently handle small expenses, reducing the need for repeated requests. This adjustment also demonstrates trust in my capabilities and reinforces positive behaviors.
Most media is manufactured to begin with. It’s always been our responsibility to teach how to discern bullshit from useful information. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t even care if what they consume is a lie.
Media aiming to influence isn’t a new phenomenon, so an easy answer is “look at generations in the past”.
Yeah, I think a lot of AI fear is typical generational doomerism.
Do people not remember the song Video Killed the Radio Star?
Or something closer to home for a lot of people my age…video games are so much worse for kids because you CONTROL the violence, not just watch it like on TV!
Or if you weren’t convinced because it’s all modern technology… hundreds of years ago, some people were convinced that the future generations are doomed because of all of the books and literature that was readily available.
Or if you want to go back thousands of years…well, they didn’t complain about new technology corrupting the kids – but they complained about society affecting young children nonetheless, and worried that children would be unequipped to grow up in the world.
I’m a fan of this xkcd that came well before generative AI was a thing. I think it gives accurate answers.
One need only to look at nations with exclusively state-controlled media is allowed.
Well let’s find out…
Let’s, uh, not, actually
I don’t think it’s a good thing! It just seems to be inevitable…
Take the social isolation, introversion, mental health, and suicidality of a generation raised on smart phones. Now multiply those maladies ten fold.
Exactly what I was thinking. Like even though you won’t realize it, having all your entertainment only manipulate you into spending money while being samey soulless slop probably will screw up your mind in several ways. Honestly I think AI shouldn’t be used in professional entertainment media at all, and especially not children’s media, nor should it be used in advertising.
You a word, there.
I think you answered your own question.
They will talk even more non sense and probably won’t talk to human beings anymore, just AI friends and partners
When AI consumes only AI generated content, model collapse happens. That’s why it’s a big mystery and intrigue to me what’s gonna happen to human beings.
Model collapse is only a theory at this point; will the model collapse or progress towards a singularity?
Not far off from what already happens from the race-to-the-bottom popular content found on YouTube, in f2p games, and on social media.
AI slop will get better at grabbing, holding, and harvesting attention. Kids will grow up on it and adults will get comfy with it, shortening attention spans. They’ll end up under-educated and under-ambitious, leading to a more gullible, more anti-intellectual population.
I don’t have any sources to cite, it’s all vibes. I’m already a product of manipulative media. 💀 That, and some of this is exaggerated inter-generational grumpiness.
(This is not even touching on the potential for propaganda that a lot of other answers are getting at.)
I think we can see the consequences pretty clearly. Look at the society in countries like the USA where people are deeply divided and can’t talk to each other. And where politics etc isn’t about facts anymore, but politicians just invent arbitrary things which are 99% wrong but get to the people. Where nothing is about doing some sane thing, but just becoming more and more extemist.
We’ve had bots, filter bubbles, algorithms etc for quite some time now. I’d say about 10 years. This isn’t something fundamentally new, just the next step that will accellerate things further.
The book 1984 showes what could be possible with highly controlled information. This was before the Internet became big but it’s incredible. As time goes on I get reminded of that book more and more.
They could be the first generation to grow up “GenAI Savvy” kind of like how early internet kids developed pretty decent online critical thinking compared to previous (and unfortunately, subsequent) generations.
