effort

I was listening to music on youtube and I got one of those low-view video recommendations for some Japanese jazz fusion band. I click it, because the genre is nice and because I like to discover new music, but right off the bat I start to get that uncanny feeling. Just a quick glance at the details in the thumbnail image and I can see the nonsensical asymmetry. The music sounds okay, but I can feel that it's just... not right. So I go to check the description, and it has a kind of micro-biography for this band, describing their motivations for creating music, the history of their coming together and their first album, the name of the music label that produced it, their inspiration, complete with each individual band member's name and role.

So I look up the band. Nothing. I look up the members. Nothing. I look up the music label. Nothing.

The band, the members, the music, the album, its cover, are all computer-generated. There is no disclaimer in the video, or its description. It's the opposite, in fact, it's all pretending to be real - to be human.

A deception, but also something worse. In this instance I was able to discern that something uncanny was going on, but I know that many people would not, and do not, the same way people are constantly falling for obvious lies in news, social media, etc.. So for those people, they're listening to a Japanese jazz fusion band from the early 90s. They like the music, the sounds are smooth and comforting but groovy, and there's a false promise that behind the beat there's a group of musicians from a time before the internet was even known to the vast majority of humanity, expertly working to express the combination of many years of practice, their various inspirations drawn from other humans and the world around them, and their cooperation with one another - their human relationships.

It's a mockery of art, and of human expression. The presentation isn't merely a lie; it's an insult. An assertion that that band, those people, their inspirations, their relationship, doesn't actually matter. And for every person that clicks the thumbnail, enjoys the music, and then moves on to the next thing without realizing it's an artifice, the assertion is unchallenged. The insult is justified.

But of course, this isn't limited to music, and it's not limited to art. Every single day, imitations replace more and more of what we see, undercutting with each manifestation the value of human interaction.

I could distinguish that this album and this band were counterfeit, but if all I had been presented with was the music - no thumbnail, no description, no fake names - I wouldn't really have been able to tell that it was pretending to be a product of human expression, I wouldn't have the comfort of being able to confirm any suspicions - I would only be left with that sense that something was wrong. And what fills me with this creeping sense of dread is that I know how much money and effort is being pumped into this technology to make it more and more convincing, and that every day more of it is generated and dumped into social media, videos, music, chats, image-hosts, even little forums like this, like garbage into the ocean. Meaning that as time passes, from now and onward, I will fall for that sickening lie more and more while becoming increasingly paranoid and distrustful of every conversation I have, every game I play, every video I watch, every piece of music I enjoy.

It's a wildfire, but no one's fighting it - and the people with the most power to do so are air-dropping accelerant into the flames.

This is the video that inspired this post.

I'm sure some will try to pick apart the things I've said here, but just so they know: I'm not posting this to elicit any debate, I'm only sharing a newly-attained level of awareness of something that truly disgusts and unsettles me, in the way that sci-fi horror does. Invention not to benefit humanity, but to replace a crucial component of what's important about being human with something artificial.

Footnote: my browser tried to tell me "accelerant" isn't a word, so I did a search to make sure I wasn't wrong about the spelling, and underneath the definition confirming I wasn't wrong, the first link is to some AI-based site called "accelerant ai".