These kids are using AI to communicate for them, to generate words that explain complex emotions or situations.
It's not a dead internet; it's an internet that still bustles with human activity, but it's done so through the puppet of AI. No longer are we presenting ourselves to one another, with our quirks, personalities, vulnerabilities, and even weirdness. Our communication with each other is sanitized and predictable. We lose our cultural idiosyncrasies in the face of responses generated by a program that has been trained on all the same data. Human interaction becomes scripted, not genuine.
People often express fear of AI becoming sentient and destroying humanity, a Hollywood outcome that is highly unlikely, but what should scare people more is that the ghost in the machine isn't some algorithm that evolves out of our control... it's us. We're the ghost in the machine.
I predicted a while back that humanity would merge with AI in a way, but my hope is that it wouldn't involve us effectively wearing an AI suit that turns humanity into a synthetic being when it comes to how we face the world. I think it's absolutely terrifying that we could become so homogenous in how we present ourselves to the outside world that you can't really tell one person from the next when at a virtual distance.
This is effectively us handing our humanity over to a machine and telling it to act for us while we withdraw into ourselves and forget how to speak to each other in a raw, unfiltered manner. //
Still, our relationship with AI was always going to be one of assistance, which is fine. I just don't think it's good when we become the machine. We strip ourselves of humanity for convenience, and not having to handle our own emotions in emotional moments. We just become robots, and we become robots to each other.
