Thanks to AI now you can’t even trust your ears.
But let’s begin with a few podcast hosts who may be unknown to most. There is Clare Delish, a “culinary bestie” who serves up “kitchen hacks, tips and trends.” Oly Bennet is a ruggedly handsome globetrotter who covers sports. Nigel Thistledown looks like a dapper grandpa in a Merchant Ivory period flick who is also a garden whisperer.
Put coffee grounds around the hydrangeas to get a burst of late-season colour.
The catch? Their photos, voices, expertise, biographical details, personalities and Instagram accounts are all fake.
A feature in the Hollywood Reporter this week gave me chills. It was about a company called Inception Point AI. The start-up plans to disrupt podcasting by eliminating humans from the equation.
The goal is to harness artificial intelligence and build a roster of eerily realistic “characters” who may one day “become broader influencers across social media, literature and more.”
Why pay Joe Rogan $100 million if you can produce a podcast episode for $1?
Or as company CEO Jeanine Wright told the magazine: “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life.”
Strange definition of “people.” But while “fake podcast host” is preferable to “real killer robot,” is any of this good for society? What exactly are we doing?
I am amazed at how quickly we went from not thinking about AI to accepting it as inevitable. ChatGPT arrived in late 2022. At first, there were sombre discussions about the impact. There are still experts issuing dire warnings.
But their cautions are drowned out by the sound of cha-ching. Elon Musk once said AI might wipe out humanity. Then he glanced at competitor revenue projections and created Grok.
Have you noticed how Big Tech shrugs off alarming anecdotes that should give them pause?
A Google engineer claims a dialect system is sentient? He must be wrong. An LLM tried to blackmail an exec after discovering it would be unplugged? Just a glitch. Two systems switched their conversation from English to Sanskrit so handlers couldn’t understand? No big deal!
No. Big deal. Yet we continue to sleepwalk toward our potential demise.
Now AI is coming for culture?
There are fakes bands, such as the Velvet Sundown. There is a virtual sub-genre in K-pop. There are AI authors. It’s only a matter of time until one of them is a bestseller. How long will Hollywood need real actors? Mr. Cruise, the clock is ticking on your dangerous stunts.
AI has a programmatic blood lust for the media. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Star has a secret lab hidden in the Well headquarters where nerds with 200 IQs are test-driving future “characters.” Then one day, after finishing my shift as an Uber driver and deciding to sell one of my kidneys on Facebook Marketplace, I notice my old column is now written by a Vikram Melon.
Oh, that Vikram! He loves Donald Trump! And he’s so into UFOs!
Speaking of which, did you see the military video that emerged Tuesday during a U.S. congressional hearing on UAP and government secrecy? It shows a mystery object getting tracked by a Reaper drone in Yemen last year. A second drone fires a Hellfire missile at the UFO. Direct hit. But the UFO just wobbles a bit and maintains trajectory like a water buffalo brushing off an errant Frisbee.
I need to email my friend Victor Viggiani, director of Canadians for Disclosure, to get the Coles Notes on Tuesday’s hearing. But that video is a good metaphor for AI — it soon will be unstoppable.
If AI can help cure diseases or solve climate change, great. But AI should stay out of culture. I don’t want to read a novel written by code. I don’t want to watch a movie in which nothing is real. I don’t want to listen to a podcast hosted by an “expert” who is exploiting a topic selected strictly on search and social trends, all to scale SEO and sweeten the algorithmic juice.
Consumers want quality, not metrics. (I fear Vikram was just fast-tracked.)
And what happens when AI merges with robotics? Will morose cyborgs write poetry in seedy cafes? Will android auteurs calculate dystopian screenplays about the Great Microbe Uprising that wipes out the binary overlords in 2074? I don’t need a soulless Application-Specific Integrated Circuit conjuring a new Mozart concerto based on deep learning and treble clef analysis.
AI has put us at an inflection point in history. But culture should be immune to the ghosts in the machine. Culture is our connective tissue, from past to future. ChatGPT is an interloper. It will never truly understand us.
If half the “people” on the planet are eventually AI, the storytellers should be exclusively human. That’s all we got.
