AI is everywhere already, and it’s only going to get everywhere else. I can’t even sit in bed on a morning with a mug of hot coffee, scrolling through my Facebook feed, without seeing more ads for AI.

Create high quality content in seconds. Sounds like a bucket of awesomeness doesn’t it. Here I am, struggling to manage just one post a month, as I try to balance my time across work and watching telly and all the other drudges that take priority. Why bother collecting thoughts, doing research, selecting images and wot not before writing it down, editing, and, with no shortage of trepidation, hitting the publish button.

Not anymore says the AI people. With just a few clicks and a couple of key strokes, I can spam the entire internet with self referencing auto drivel.

I don’t know if I can challenge the “high quality” claim at half seven in the morning, but what is clear is the value destruction this will cause.

Anything that can be created in seconds by anyone anywhere cannot be said to have value. Value is derived from scarcity, everyone knows that.

So where does that leave bloggers? Dunno really.

I will continue to write the occasional post here and there, but I suppose the odds of being found and read will be even worse once the click bait factories deploy AI content on mass to the masses.

I picture an internet dominated by content produced whimsically and ephemerally, tailored to the user’s recent activity. Whole websites, like TV tropes for example, that took years to build with hundreds of contributors, will be created on the spot, and coloured to fit the views and biases of the individual in the interest of keeping them engaged long enough to register as an impression to an advertiser.

We won’t be able to trust a single thing we see on the internet. Photo and video and voice evidence will mean nothing. A few words uttered and you’ll have video evidence of anything you like.

The standard of the images above is low, and on closer inspection, they don’t withstand any scrutiny. The eyes are particularly creepy. It will be easy to fool some, perhaps many for a while, but I think this is a huge shift in our civilisation. This is perhaps the beginning, ironicaly, of an information dark age.

Before the invention of photography and audio recordings, if something happened, we had to go on the word of those who witnessed it. I can see us returning to that state of being. Anything on the internet will be, to all intents and purposes, unreliable, unverifiable.

What we see and hear from the internet will bear even less semblance to what we see in the world beyond our window. Everyone will have to engage in their actual communities in order to survive, or at the very least, maintain the social order.

Am I catastrophising? I don’t think I am. I think we’re about to enter a very turbulent era in human history. The reality of AI is changing our relationship with everything.

I have a love of food, for example.

With AI I can enjoy endless images of food, food porn, and not a single chef need lift a finger. Shame they can’t be eaten.

These cakes and roast aren’t real, but they look good enough for a blog to be skimmed through, and it took next to zero effort to create them.

I could be a travel blogger if I wanted, and have the AI write up convincing articles and journals of exciting exotic places that only exist in ram.

The early days of the internet were great for exchanging ideas and finding like minded groups to talk about anything and everything. There were always trolls, and you couldn’t always trust that the truth was being told. But it was more or less a certainty that you were interacting with another human, or possibly a cat. We don’t have that certainty anymore. Conversations with AI can be utterly convincing. Imagine a forum where there are hundreds of Bots chatting among themselves.

The very idea of a website is under threat. Anyone looking to buy a fishing rod might stumble across a well established forum with decades of threads and posts and helpful members happy to direct the new member to a certain rod. A well established forum with decades of  threads and helpful members that only exists for the duration of the transaction.

Does a website exist if no one is looking at it? The internet will become a probability wave.

Deep.

AI, I’m told has already encroached on the world of adult content creators. I don’t like to judge, but it’s probably not a bad thing if the demand for live acts of depravity drops out. How this plays out is anyone’s guess though.

I mean, here I am, typing my own words for an article I could have generated in seconds, and no one would have known. But that’s not the point. I would know, and as AI becomes increasingly dominant, demand for actual words written by actual people, in my view, will only increase. Real experience and real accounts of real experience will become cherished.

I’m not one of those king Canute luddites resistant to change. I have nothing to gain from shunning AI art. It’s given me the opportunity to illustrate my words without resorting to effort, and paying an artist.

Does it really matter that these images are AI generated?  I’m only using them to brighten up the page anyway. I’d be a fool not to, wouldn’t I?

The long and short of it is. AI is going to be disruptive. Blogs like this, will become unique and authentic voices amidst the plethora of valueless content, and I have some faith that readers will know the difference, but the only way they will be certain is to see with their own eyes. If we have something to say, we’re all going to have to get used to speaking in public. The written word will count for little, and this complication will, ironicaly herald in a new simpler time.