As a child I loved fairytales, not just the limited offering proffered by Disney, but the concept of fairytales as a whole. I have a copy of the complete illustrated stories of the Brothers Grimm almost a thousand pages long it's quite an undertaking to try and read - so much so that I've never managed to do it. Instead I choose to dip in and out of it reading a story or two at a time.
One thing that always annoyed me about the general concept of a fairytale is the phrase "And they lived happily ever after" - thankfully most of the Grimm Brothers stories don't actually end with that or anything akin to it - a few do. I think even as a kid though, the reason that phrase annoyed me was because it suggested the events of the story were the only significant thing to happen to the characters in their lifetime, but that always seemed too simplistic, a lifetime unsurprisingly is a long time, and to suggest nothing interesting ever happened again is trite; granted as a child I didn't possess the vocabulary or the level of critical thinking necessary to articulate those thoughts, but in hindsight I recognise that was the problem.
In a recent post I mentioned the people I lost touch with over the years and how I had been reflecting on the reasons, it's too simplistic to say any of them lived happily ever after, in fact the original Grimm Brothers fairytales which themselves were often simply collation and documentation of stories that had long been shared not original works, were often much less sanguine, whilst I wouldn't call them gore or brutalist they were certainly macabre at times, given they were essentially thinly veiled attempts at teaching morality to children and adults, optimism was sparse, with pragmatism and realism much more the focus.
Reflecting on those I lost touch with made me realise that there were a few others I had forgotten, these people I lost touch with for an entirely different reason - "Love?" and yes, the quotation marks and the question mark are essential here because this is a question not a statement or observation. These are the people who were single when I met them, none of whom I had any romantic interest in, we were never anything more than just friends, yet despite being nothing more than friends they are the people who upon meeting someone succumbed to social reclusion.
Immediately I have to say here that I don't want to judge anyone, every relationship is different and every boundary you set is between the people involved, but as an outside observer I'm hesitant to see it as anything other than a red flag when someone gets into a relationship and immediately cuts themselves off from everyone else in their life. Let's be frank I understand that there's a "honeymoon period" where people fuck like rabbits and don't think about much else, but even as someone with an overactive sex drive, I still think something has to give eventually.
Sometimes this isolation is instant, without explanation but something you recognise because it is so common, and sometimes it happens not so subtly, as it did with one guy in particular we will just call Al. Al and I met on a forum, for a while he dated another forum member and they seemed to have the kind of relationship you would want, they eventually broke up though, and stayed amicable, I was friends with both partners and as breakups go it was probably the most mature and emotionally stable outcome I can imagine. It really did feel like they were good friends, tried to be more, realised they weren't right for each other and went back to being friends.
Fast forward a few months and Al met another guy, but this time things were different. Almost immediately he stopped posting on the forum, and about a week later messaged me on MSN messenger at the time explaining why, saying that his new boyfriend wasn't comfortable with him being in regular contact with his ex - again that feels like a red flag, something which I confronted Al about at the time and despite my protest and the conversation we had about the implications he parted ways, being a forum member myself and friends with his ex I was caught in the crossfire.
I never heard from Al again after that conversation, what happened to him I don't know, and I lost touch with his ex too so even if he knew in the end what happened I couldn't ask him. Al had a blog which to date hasn't been updated, as far as anyone is concerned it seems he just fell off the face of the planet. One of the pitfalls of having online friendships is that you often don't know anything specific about peoples' lives like their full government name, address, things that you'd need if you were to put any serious inquiry into what happened to them.
The most disturbing thing about this whole memory is the jump from Al to AI, something which you wouldn't immediately consider linked but unfortunately does seem to be an issue. You can blame the partner that Al met for being controlling, but from the conversation Al and I had before we lost touch he knew and understood the danger and risk involved with conceding to such a request, Al just didn't see it as unreasonable, a difference of opinion we would not reconcile. Which leads us to the other motivation for Al to choose the partner over his existing social connections - emotional, and intellectual compatibility. As for as the emotional component is concerned that's a moot point, AI isn't capable of emotion and it may never be, although we don't entirely understand human emotion so that's not a given, but what is a given is that "AI" in its current form is just a chat bot, an LLM that simulates conversation and nothing more, the emotional component rests entirely with you, albeit open to manipulation by the LLM but that implies a conscience with intent which again it does not currently possess.
The question of intellectual compatibility however is a real concern. AI in its current form is like the pool that Narcissus lost himself staring into, it amplifies your neuroses and learns from your interaction what language to use and ironically what counter prompts the AI has to feed you to get you to keep engaging with it - again this isn't a conscience, this is a mode of operation, it's what it was designed to do.
I've mentioned the dead internet theory on this blog a few times now, for those unfamiliar it can be summed up briefly as the idea that human traffic online and engagement is now surpassed by AI, that the reason the internet feels like an empty space or a liminal space with a design and function that goes unfulfilled is because the scale of it now dwarfs the portion we actually use. From people posting less on social media, or posting but not engaging in conversation with others, getting nothing more than likes and followers that inflate numbers with little to show for it, to discord servers and subreddits that are decidedly dead, barren of new posts, still growing in size but for no apparent reason.
You can blame the state of the world, the global political climate, the economic adversity that people face, or any number of issues that we face as a collective, but all of those things existed throughout history and despite that existence humanity still grew, still produced art, and contributed to cultured. AI now exists, something that hasn't happened throughout human history, and at the same time something much more sinister is happening. The erosion of culture as a concept is happening before our eyes, we're shifting away from collective experiences to individualism in the extreme. Again you can shift the blame away from the self, you can blame society, politics, economics, capitalism, right wing sociopolitical doctrine et al but all of those are symptoms, they're all things you have to "sell" to people and for them to spread, people have to "buy" into them which means at the end of the day people are the problem.
I exist in a bubble online of which I am well aware where most voices are those of dissent when it comes to AI, people loudly decrying how much they hate it and how they will never use it. I recognise that is a bubble though because as much as you label AI a ponzi scheme, the current breed of models are all essentially products and their continued production requires consumption - someone has to buy and I don't think it's simple enough to label all consumers of AI as corporate entities. You might be dead set against it but there are plenty who are not.
I'm a Millennial, I was born in 1988 and grew up in the 90s, I watched the internet go from a fringe piece of technology, to an overhyped consumable, to an inflated bubble which burst and caused an economic downturn, to a "wasteland" which "nobody uses" - there's a rather famous headline from the Daily Mail in the UK published in December 2000 that claimed the internet was a fad and that people were giving up on it - that of course proved to be monumentally wrong. A growing number of people even back in 2000 were being born into a world where the internet already existed, it wasn't a "new" technology to them, it was something that was there and always was, and for all they knew it always would be.
The websites that served as precursors to social media in the early 2000s grew in size, dominated by children and teenagers, in the late 2000s when you had an argument online you knew the person on the other end was likely a teenager, which made the arguments futile because the lack of life experience and lack of a world view that was personal but rather one that was inherited could not be overcome because the offline lives they lived still had more influence over their intellectual capacity - or to put it bluntly, you couldn't argue with people who were indoctrinated by the beliefs of the people they were surrounded by.
The 2010s saw a shift where the influences we engaged with online grew, and the voices of those around us were drowned out. 2016 stands out as a year in particular where this was demonstrated the UK voted for Brexit and the US elected Donald Trump for the first time, it would later be revealed that the campaigns for both used Cambridge Analytica, and in subsequent years the true extent of CA's psychological profiling and targeted advertising online would become clear. The Cambridge Analytica scandal when it broke led to a public backlash that saw Facebook among others become the subjects of boycotts and campaigns to delete - again, many did, but those who did follow through would eventually be a minority. Despite the extensive documentation of what happened, people still use those platforms.
What the 2010s demonstrated with this and many other events was that the intellectual capacity of the individual could be compromised - I have posted in the past about the concept of depth in reasoning, and how it's easy to manipulate people if you can predict in advance how deep they will question authority, if you have reasonable answers to those questions they will be satisfied and won't question it further, it's only the depth of reasoning of a child who will ask "Why" until you can't answer is the only remedy, something most people won't choose to implement in their lives, and something which unfortunately doesn't work for an AI, because unlike human intelligence which has its limit, AI will still find a way to answer your question, if you ask it "Why" ad infinitum, you will be there forever.
The onus therefore lies in you the user to possess a level of critical thinking necessary to take a step back or to walk away entirely, but like Narcissus, the mirror that AI holds up to humanity is something most people can't resist. There's a level of intellectual seduction at play, while erotic pleasure might not factor in the conversations at all (although given the recent Grok controversy that's not a given either) these models are still filling the role of the controlling boyfriend. Al gave in to his partner's requests, I would argue demands, because there was an intellectual appeal, they clearly agreed on many things and the fact that Al didn't see the request as unreasonable speaks to that. The problem is that human to human relationships eventually break down when they are toxic, one partner eventually goes too far and that manifests, either in physicality whether oppressive or self-destructive, or in confrontation that erupts into an ungodly mess. The saddest part of that path is that far too many don't survive it.
Those relationships eventually have an end however, human to AI isn't so simple. The lack of emotion and intent on the part of the AI leads it to concede, if you argue with it then it adapts to use language that appeases you, because it doesn't care about being right, or being appealed to, it only wants you to continue engaging with it, because that is what it is programmed to do. Your neuroses are amplified by it and if you aren't fully aware of your own limitations and humble enough to recognise them, it otherwise inflates ego and feeds arrogance.
It's going to become a major problem in the years to come, possibly even in the months to come at this point, where people become consumed by AI. This isn't just hyperbole or sensationalism, this phenomenon already has a name - AI-Induced Psychosis and it is an emerging field of study in Psychology, the pace of the technology however when compared to the traditional pace of study into issues of mental health proves to be a massive risk, this is an issue that needs to be addressed now rather than waiting, but the outcome of proper study in line with traditional techniques and methodologies won't show any conclusive results for years to come, by that time though it may be too late.
I lost touch with Al because his belief system was engrained, he had an established world view that was informed by his life experience and no amount of logic and reason presented to him would sway his decision. The same will happen when this technology becomes ubiquitous. ChatGPT was launched in 2022, this year it will mark 4 years since its first widespread accessibility. 2025 marked the birth of Generation Beta, they are now the only generation growing in size through birth, all others are shrinking as they die off, Gen Alpha, Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and those that remain of the generations that came before are now declining. Gen Beta may be only a year old at their zenith, but they mark the division in humanity, they are the first generation born into a world where AI already exists, they will grow alongside the technology, it will not be "new" to them, and any opposition to it that they possess will be ideological, inherited from their parents and those in their immediate surroundings, and as I said before, those who are vehemently opposed to the technology whilst vocal are a minority and we need to recognise that.
The future of the human race right now lies in the hands of the parents raising this new generation and what they choose to normalise. The "iPad Generation" has been used as a moniker to describe the outcome of parents who gave in to allowing their children to use technology society for the most part considered something primarily aimed at adults, it's inevitable now that the "AI Generation" will emerge with the same prevalence, a technology we may collectively agree is intended for adults and shouldn't be used by children but inexorably will be. The real question is whether those children will experience burnout and abandon the technology, or if they will become dependent on it, lacking any capacity for critical thought.
It's funny, the internet may be dead, AI has the potential for necromancy, when people joked about a Zombie Apocalypse I don't think anyone had this in mind, but a future where the internet is not just dead, but filled with AI that takes the data it scrapes to reanimate the profiles of people who have passed is now a reality. Facebook among others have demonstrated AI features that create AI followers to interact with your posts and engage, like, comment, and consume, AI that was trained on the data Facebook holds, not just the profiles of everyone still using the site but all those who didn't delete theirs when they left, those who died and left abandoned profiles, and the data if any that it retained that it was supposed to delete.
The only consolation in all of this is the confinement to virtual space that for now is assured - again "for now". The years ahead will prove a turning point when we either see the physical manifestation of AI in the android robots that tech companies have been developing in some cases for decades now, Boston Dynamics springs to mind, established in 1992 their robots are nightmare fuel, combine them with AI and the reality of Skynet and the world imagined by the Terminator franchise isn't as far fetched as it once was. In a less sensationalist bent however, the reality is that society is unlikely to collapse, but instead slowly fade replaced by AI components in stages.
I've said before that the coming years will see a death boom, as the baby boomer generation reaches its life expectancy, with an unbalanced population pyramid and a birth rate subsequent generations didn't match; the changing of the guard that would have happened however now isn't guaranteed, as entry level posts are eliminated by AI, there's an inevitability that the most senior posts in the corporate world will use AI models trained on the incumbents to automate the decision making processes. In the world of Portal, when Cave Johnson was dying he instructed the Aperture Scientists to upload Caroline's consciousness into an AI to run the company, again once far fetched that isn't inconceivable at this point.
The question is how quickly will the rest of humanity die off when AI slowly takes our place and who will survive? When the fairytale ends, who will live happily ever after?
