"Dad, It Looks Like AI"
Technology shapes our view of the world
During a recent lunchbreak at the office, a colleague said something that really surprised me. Someone had made an offhand comment that you have to take everything you see online these days with a grain of salt because of AI-generated content. One has to be skeptical because it is not always clear what is real or not. Put simply, AI is influencing how we evaluate the things we see online.
The colleague said he whole-heartedly agreed and added that AI is also influencing how we perceive things in the physical world. He shared an anecdote to illustrate. His family recently took a trip to the Grand Canyon and upon seeing the view, his 11-year-old daughter said, “Dad, it looks like AI.”
For this young girl, saying something looks like it was made by AI is another way of saying it looks “too good to be true” or “perfect”.
For thousands of years, human beings have marveled at the natural wonders of the world and seen them as a sign of a transcendent creator. Are we moving into a world in which beauty and seeming perfection remind us of something only a computer can produce?
Digital technology is not neutral. What I mean is that we don’t simply use it as a tool, manipulating it and shaping it to our liking. Rather, it imposes itself upon us and can shape our behavior and conception of things.
It affects our language - “I’m processing,” “I need to recharge.” It affects our view of ourselves - we increasingly conceive of ourselves as simply higher-order machines that operate by input / output functions. For example, technologists talk about the person in computer terms, referring to the brain as akin to hardware and the mind as software. So, when you have an experience that changes your opinion or mindset about something, it is seen as a type of “software update”.
It affects our behavior and expectations - we have become more impatient and expect things to happen immediately and efficiently (notice the phenomenon of loading - if a website or app does not load within two seconds, we assume something is wrong and hit refresh).
Back to AI. What I’ve seen so far with generative AI is that it produces things (images) in a way that tries to make them perfect. Perfection, however, is a participation in something that transcends our human experience in reality, in something “of another world.” Because of technology’s power to impact how we conceive of things, it’s important that we get the directionality right - the beauty of the natural world or of human language is not a sign / reflection of AI systems; rather, the amazing capabilities of AI systems are a sign of the intelligence and creativity of human beings, who are in turn a sign of something beyond.
David
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