Tech companies have intensified their drive toward turning our realities into synthetic post-truth simulacra where all is real and nothing is real, where ‘facts’ are merely conveyances of ad-coin, and reality itself is pasteurized into mush serving venture capitalist narratives.
Some may have noticed the preponderance of AI bot responses on Twitter and elsewhere, with the entire internet slowly becoming an industrial cesspool of misbegotten AI datamosh. Google search has become “unusable”—so say dozens if not hundreds of videos and articles highlighting how the search engine is now riddled with results preferential to Google’s paid spam—services, useless products, and other dross. Not to mention the results are riddled with AI slop, making it nearly impossible to fish out needed info from the sea of turds:
Many have taken to using a “before:2023” hack in search queries to bypass the slop singularity, or slopularity now befouling every search.
Adding ‘before:2023’ can enhance your Google web searches and get rid of AI-generated content
Meta has announced a flood of new AI ‘profiles’ which will act like regular human Instagram/Facebook users in interacting with people. For what purpose, exactly? Your author hasn’t the vaguest idea.
Meta confirms they plan to add tons of AI-generated users to Instagram and Facebook They will have bios, profile pics, and can share content
Intrepid researcher Whitney Webb seems to be onto something though—save the bolded thought in particular for later:
The Kissinger/Eric Schmidt book on AI basically states that the real promise of AI, from their perspective, is as a tool of perception manipulation - that eventually people will not be able to interpret or perceive reality without the help of an AI via cognitive diminishment and learned helplessness. For that to happen, online reality must become so insane that real people can no longer distinguish real from fake in the virtual realm so that they can then become dependent on certain algorithms to tell them what is "real". Please, please realize that we are in a war against the elites over human perception and that social media is a major battleground in that war. Hold onto your critical thinking and skepticism and never surrender it.
And this part bears repeating: “For that to happen, online reality must become so insane that real people can no longer distinguish real from fake in the virtual realm so that they can then become dependent on certain algorithms to tell them what is "real".”
Seriously, just take a look at Meta’s black queer new AI replicant:
This may be a philosophical quibble, but can AIs really be queer? And what about an astroturfing, culture-and-personality-appropriating AI in blackface? Have these sick corporations no shame at all?
I mean, come on:
Gobsmacking.
In fact these weird psychological operations masquerading as “AI profiles” were another embarrassing failure for Meta, with people quickly glomming onto how dystopian and broken it all is:
The obvious point being that social media networks meant for humans to allegedly ‘form deeper connections’ are now being deliberately populated by their creators with slop-producing AI junk accounts to pose as real humans. Is this simply a filler-stuffing ploy to prop up dying businesses like Facebook, making them appear more ‘active’ than they really are? Or is there a darker groove to this Black Mirror-esque imposition?
According to Meta itself, it’s part of a serious long term strategy to drive ‘engagement’:
Meta is betting that characters generated by artificial intelligence will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3bn users.
The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook, as it battles with rival tech groups to attract and retain a younger audience.
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta.
“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.
In short: the more ‘interactions’—meaning, clicks and page views, et cetera—they can get you to have, the more opportunities for ad placements, farming of your data, and the like, they create—thus, more revenue.
The problem is, in their drive to maximize profit margins from an ever disinterested populace they are indirectly transforming all of reality into a synthetic jumble of slop. All of this is done without any forethought for the social and cultural consequences—no one is asking what kinds of long-term effects can be expected. The push to quickly utilize AI as a crutch, or to get ahead of competitors is resulting in the slow effacement of authentic experience.
Case in point, new phones are no longer even recording reality, but are now utilizing AI to ‘upscale’ images, thereby creating a false simulacrum of artificial detail that did not actually exist:
Hey, as long as it ‘roughly resembles what you remember the moon looking like’ it should be all fine, right? But at what point is the collective memory of the real thing wholly replaced by the artificial construct?
This new trend is rolling out everywhere. Even the newest graphics cards are now utilizing AI to, essentially, construct phony pixels—a kind of simulation within simulation:
As stated, AI will soon be used to lazily bridge every possible human and social deficiency without any thought to second and third order consequences.
And in line with Meta’s “generated users”, companies are now farming us to create AI surrogates, even without our consent:
Instagram is testing advertising with YOUR FACE - users are complaining that targeted advertising with their appearance has started appearing in the feed.
The creepiness comes if you've used Meta AI to edit your selfies.
Use any of the latest AI tools to upload photos of yourself or your family and you may soon find the images used in grotesque for-profit AI experiments like the above. It’s not a fluke, there have been many such cases recently:
Ukrainian YouTuber discovers dozens of clones of her promoting Chinese and Russian propaganda Each clone has a different backstory and pretends to be a real person "She has my voice, my face, and speaks fluent Mandarin."
Hell, the guy who allegedly blew himself up in the Tesla Cybertruck even reportedly used AI to plan the attack:
The suspect in the explosion of the Tesla Cybertruck electric pickup truck near the entrance to the Trump International Hotel used the generative artificial intelligence (AI) ChatGPT in planning the crime, city police Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a press conference.
According to him, this is the first known case of ChatGPT being used for such purposes in the United States. According to law enforcement, the suspect in the crime, Matthew Leavelsberger, wanted to use AI to find out how much explosives he would need to carry out the attack and where he could buy the required number of fireworks.
Even our cozy home of Substack is reportedly being overrun:
The report above claims WIRED paid for some of the biggest Substack accounts, in order to access their paywalled sections, thereafter identifying AI-written content. Normally I’d chalk this up to false positives, given that my own writing once scanned as “AI generated” according to one baffled user—afterwards I learned these “AI detectors” were very flawed. But that was a while ago, and things have likely advanced now: following the above report’s tests, WIRED claims several of the authors privately admitted that they do in fact utilize AI in their workflow. Well, now, dear readers, you know why I personally privilege such ornate, eccentric, or outright ‘experimental’ prose in my writing, ever keen to stay ahead of the AI curb. The coming drab-pocalypse will likely subsume the entire internet under an endless blanket of bland, procedural, boilerplate-style AI scratchings; allow me to go out in a blaze of offbeat glory.
It should be noted, the article clarifies that Substack had some of the lowest AI content by percentage of any of the popular writing dumps like Medium:
Compared to some of its competitors, Substack appears to have a relatively low amount of AI-generated writing. For example, two other AI-detection companies recently found that close to 40 percent of content on the blogging platform Medium was generated using artificial intelligence tools. But a large portion of the suspected AI-generated content on Medium had little engagement or readership, while the AI writing on Substack is being published by powerhouse accounts.
They even rolled out a “Certified Human” badge for the blogs who passed the test and envision a future where writers can signal their humanness—sort of like “female/LGBT owned business” tags on Google maps.
Over the next few years, similar badges and seals asserting that creative works are 100 percent human may proliferate widely. They could make worried consumers feel like they’re making a more ethical choice, but seem unlikely to slow the steady seep of AI into the media and film industries.
I decided to preemptively badge myself, just in case:
But I’m not the only one to take notice of this wholesale decline.
This recent Financial Times piece highlights the internet culture’s bizarro descent into terminal-kitsch-singularity madness:
Weird pictures of a slimy pink Jesus made out of prawns probably weren’t what OpenAI had in mind when it warned that artificial intelligence could destroy civilisation. But this is what happens when you put new tech in the hands of the public and tell them they can make whatever they want. Two years into the generative AI revolution, we have arrived at the era of slop.
The proliferation of synthetic, low-grade content like Shrimp Jesus is mostly deliberate, designed via weird prompts for commercial or engagement purposes. In March, Stanford and Georgetown University researchers found Facebook’s algorithm had in effect been hijacked by spammy content from text-to-image models like Dall-E and Midjourney. The “Insane Facebook AI slop” account on X has kept a running tally. A favourite in the run-up to the US election showed Donald Trump manfully rescuing kittens.
As a quick aside: have you noticed how dreadfully ‘dead’ the new AI voice-overs sound, which have completely crowded out the market in YouTube documentaries? They sound ‘uncanny-valley’-levels of realistic, but the longer you listen to them drone on, the more you begin to miss the tiny nuanced layers of subtext provided by a human presenter’s natural inflections, pauses, and other ingrained communicative devices. Listening to a human narrator gives a new dimension of meaning—subtle though it is—whereby your brain naturally seeks connections of context between the narrator and the material, opening up imaginative pathways and indirectly leaving you more receptive to the presented material. The AI narrator has something missing, and it leaves the material itself—though it may be splendidly produced—feeling like it’s lacking an inherent connection.
But though all the ‘silly’ and droll AI saturation gimmicks may seem benign, many believe them to be a deliberate intensification meant to trap us in an information vortex, to scatter reality into a ‘post-truth’ matrix where our new AI godfathers will author our new “truths” on behalf of their programmers.
Brandon Smith covered this in an article last year, writing:
To summarize, globalists want the proliferation of AI because they know that people are lazy and will use the system as a stand-in for individual research. If this happens on a large scale then AI could be used to rewrite every aspect of history, corrupt the very roots of science and mathematics and turn the population into a drooling hive mind; a buzzing froth of braindead drones consuming every proclamation of the algorithm as if it is sacrosanct.
In this way, Yuval Harari is right. AI does not need to become sentient or wield an army of killer robots to do great harm to humanity. All it has to do is be convenient enough that we no longer care to think for ourselves. Like the “Great and Powerful” OZ hiding behind a digital curtain, you assume you’re gaining knowledge from a wizard when you’re really being manipulated by globalist snake oil salesmen.
After all, just heed what the tech elites at the top of the totem pole are saying about AI’s integration into our coming new control paradigms:
Naturally, the article states Ellison’s ‘Oracle’ company is heavily investing in AI. And interestingly, Oracle mentions how in the future even cop cars won’t be needed because AI drones will surveil the city and pursue suspects on their own. This matches an initiative already being rolled out by another tech titan Mark Andreessen’s partner, described here:
He explains how the Las Vegas PD now has the “ability to place a drone to any burglary or 911 call in 90 seconds. The drone can then follow the perpetrator and you can’t get away from these things.” Most interesting is that beyond the pedantic utility in “saving lives”—or whatever cheap stock excuse he gives—Andreessen further predictably stakes the technology on the dystopian big elephant: “The deterrent effect”.
Beaming with senseless glee, the mollusk-headed would-be tyrant revels in the drones’ ability to create a dragnet of fear in citizens. Demonstrating his inability to understand second and third order consequences, he vainly intones that:
“If you know that in Vegas if you break into a 7-11 at 2am you’re going to get caught by a drone, you’re not going to do it, right?”
Anyone with intelligence would weigh the dangerous potential for abuse against the claimed benefits of such a use case. Thought experiment example: in the post-9/11 Patriot Act and Homeland Security era which saw the creation of the TSA, compare the number of major crimes the TSA solved, or terrorists it “caught in the act”, to the number of wide-scale abuses the repressive agency committed against hundreds of thousands of fed-up citizens. Is one or two caught criminals or solved crimes worth the total reenvisioning of society into a fear-based panopticon?
It leads to the natural slippery slope question: at what point do you stop? As AI advances do you keep enacting greater and greater surveillance, restrictions, control, et cetera, until all crime and human suffering are entirely eradicated? At what point would that come? And the natural follow-up: Why not just eliminate all humanity itself, or plug everyone into a perpetual “Matrix” to keep anyone from ‘being hurt’ ever again—the ultimate fragile radical leftist snowflake telos, it would seem. There has to come a point where a line is drawn, and people of wisdom acknowledge and accept that some crime and pain is a necessary price for living in a free society. Why has this simple calculus always been so utterly elusive for insane radical leftist utopians’ comprehension?
A little more elaboration from the utopian mollusk:
Remember this?
Much of this, by the way, is cast with a decidedly ominous shade given recent revelations surrounding the death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji. Just as of this writing, Tucker Carlson released a long exclusive interview with Suchir’s mother featuring a series of shocking revelations: she plainly contests that his death was not a suicide as ruled, but was almost certainly a murder-homicide. Watch it here for yourself:
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1879656459929063592
Amongst her bushels of evidence are these three key facts:
His entire apartment was splattered with blood
The bullet entry wound is around his forehead at a 30-45 degree downward angle—an impossible angle with which to administer a self-inflicted gunshot wound
Most oddly: pieces of a blood-spattered wig were allegedly recovered, whose hair fibers do not match Suchir’s hair
The point of that is to say these tech companies are playing for keeps. It’s common knowledge that OpenAI has now almost fully merged with the governmental deep state, with people like CIA officer Will Hurd and head of NSA Paul Nakasone joining the OpenAI board. That means companies like OpenAI are merely extensions of powerful governmental interests which do not play by the rules, and have a history of ‘eliminating’ anyone that may pose a threat to their technocratic order. Will Hurd, by the way, reportedly also served on the board of infamous CIA cutout In-Q-Tel, famous for seed-funding Google and its connections to Facebook as well:
In short: mess with OpenAI and you’re messing with some nasty folks who will protect their assets at all costs.
Funnily enough, channeling Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial-complex warning speech of January 17, 1961, Biden last night in his own farewell speech happened to warn of the rise of a “tech-industrial complex” and oligarchy which presents a threat to the United States. As always, Biden and his minions were never concerned for any of this when Soros, Adelson, Murdoch, Koch, Pritzker, and the many other billionaires were running around funding pro-establishment causes. Now that a pair of billionaires has emerged in Trump and Musk who have taken a stance against the orthodoxy, suddenly it’s a panic alarm for the ‘tech-industrial complex’.
Well, better late than never, I suppose.
In the meantime, the big-tech-big-intel matrix will continue pumping the slop to reorganize our relationship to truth and reality to make it easier to inject their small, skewing everyday falsehoods.
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I will risk appearing a bit nutty here. When I went to grad school in the US I was pleased to see that the motto of my school (Caltech) was "The Truth Shall Make You Free." Not that I saw it in a religious context, but I happen to believe in that sentiment. Truth derives from knowledge. And honesty.
It's been a few years now and I have retired and revisited the spiritual aspirations I had before I became a scientist. So I am going to give y'all a hypothesis. What we are seeing here, and in US politics up till this point, is the "Beast of Revelation." (I told you it would seem nutty.) I am not sure who the "antichrist" is but this person will be revealed. We live in a world society in which lies are what govern now what we (are supposed to) believe. Soon it will be impossible to carry out a commercial transaction without a "social credit score." The mark of the beast. The final destruction will come when the beast is given authority to think for our leaders and allowed to decide for itself the fate of the world. And power plants the size of Greenland will needed to provide it with the power it needs to think for all of us.
I told you it is a nutty hypothesis. So if you feel like replying with a "fuck you" then good for you. You need more imagination.
The future is that there simply is no such thing as reliable photo or video.
Fortunately, human civilization survived for a long time without those things.