This piece was featured first on Dec 4 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
Over the Thanksgiving break, I saw an article about how recipe sites have been overrun by AI slop. Slop, the perfect term, is the description for the crap that generative systems can crank out. And as I was reading the article and the reactions to it, a new realization about the coming years crystallized for me.
It’s simple. The baseline reliability of things you see on a screen is going to decline over the coming years. The ability of anyone to detect whether an image, a video, or a conversation partner is actually real is declining, and will continue to. That’s not to say these AI creations will not be engaging or popular, but they are going to drive down trust in all online interactions, not just the ones involving AI slop.
Importantly, improving AI will actually make these trust dynamics worse, not better. So, I am almost sure that this will be our near-term future. While it’s scary to imagine, today’s good thing is the silver lining: the solidity of the real world.
While online life fractures under the pressures introduced by a flood of hyperrealistic AI creations, the real world will not change. All those weird dynamics go away the second you step outside. It will be as it has always been, the place we evolved to live in and love.
The real world is alive, the phone world is not. Other living beings have their own goals who you meet on terms you cannot entirely dictate. Bodies are real. Bodies are alive. Trees are real. Trees are alive. Mosquitoes are real. Mosquitoes are alive. Perhaps the right term is not IRL (“in real life”) but WRL (“with real life”).
Real life is built over time, place built over place. Place matters, and I would argue place matters because of the inescapable history of every spot on earth.
You cannot turn it off and turn it back on again. The apple rots, once a bite has been taken. Not everything has a just-so place on a rectangle of glass or in an economic system. In the real world, so much escapes our attempts at enclosure. So much diffuses into the place, whether we know it or not, and we breathe in these histories, for good or for ill.
Recently, there has been a bank of tule fog covering the Central Valley, and the result has been a misty, gauzy East Bay sky. The moon has been rising as the sun sets, so it has come in translucent in the pale pink sky. It’s been so gorgeous that you want to capture it with the device in your hand. But no matter how hard you fiddle with the settings, the scene cannot be slurped into your phone’s memory.
It is a sight for human eyes alone, human memories. If AI does destabilize social media and send more people offline in search of trusted reality, maybe more of us will look up together, not down alone.
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
My Tipline
- So many holiday markets! You can visit the Department of Invisible Labor at the Peralta Makers Market. And the Chez Panisse Holiday Market. And the Hella Positive one in West Oakland.
- Don’t forget East Bay Open Studios!
- You don’t have to shop, though. You can go to a Queer Surf SF party instead at El Rio.
My Picks
FORUM
Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power and the Downfall of a Bay Area Wellness Cult
Whew, boy, this is a Bay Area story for the ages.
CLIMATE
A Queer Climate Movement Takes Root Along the Russian River
Love Shelterwood Collective and Solar Punk Farms