Loose Letters
Artificial intelligence never should’ve been considered as a serious or safe business proposition. The world now stands at the edge of timelines outlined by James Cameron, Philip K. Dick, the Wachowskis, Stanley Kubrick, and Cornell Woolrich in the 20th century; when the machines rise, we’ll be left in the dust, trampled underfoot and ground to powder so that another species of sorts may rule the planet. Try and think of a positive depiction of artificial intelligence in American mass media. Star Wars? Star Trek? They’re beyond our problems and our reference points. Cameron’s The Terminator is the film that has defined artificial intelligence in the minds of people all over the world since its release 41 years ago; its even bigger sequel, released in 1991, dealt directly with another apocalypse: the first major film to use computer generated images. Movies would never be the same.
Now, our very words are scrambled and confused: misspellings, typos, and extra words litter text messages, tweets, caption across social media (unfortunately, mistakes in print are getting worse, but hardly new). You can’t look at 10 tweets without seeing multiple typos—is no one proofreading their own work? I miss when the tweet was a work of art; that went away when Elon Musk bought the site and tried to rename it “X”—which is exactly what it’s called now, but people still say Twitter and tweets, that’s not going away. But along with the political migration to Bluesky (and, hopefully, for some, off of social media entirely), the spirit left the site; Twitter’s only virtue over every other social media platform was its occasional ability to produce art. Trump was one of its most notable contributors, but he, along with every other longtime regular user, are burnt out, past anything but fights and misunderstanding.
“Americans have never felt more beaten down.” Adam Friedland said that to Ro Khanna. I think he’s right, he’s obviously right, at least as far as the last half-century goes. Over the last five years, standards have slipped down across the board, whether it’s food, politics, entertainment, the media. The early pandemic years were defined, more than the virus, by the government and media’s party line: Don’t believe your lying eyes. That was erased last November, but now we’ve finally bombed Iran, and the beatdown continues apace. There’s no millennial Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders to save us; the only candidate generating any excitement is Zohran Mamdani, running for Mayor of New York and likely to lose to Andrew Cuomo. Formerly disgraced, Cuomo is the safe option, because New Yorkers know his name.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” has produced zero results, Trump just bombed Iran, and people are falling in love with ChatGPT. This isn’t better living through science. Why didn’t schools, public and private, do something about artificial intelligence before it was too late? Dough. It’s all so shortsighted, rewards that rip the lining out from our souls, a mass Dorian Gray tragedy. Using this stuff atrophies your brain, now we know it for sure—yet even those who rail against artificial intelligence regularly are victims too, scrambled by a slowly collapsing technological apparatus that promised so much in 2000, already appeared threatening and apocalyptic in 2010, and has now broken loose. It’ll only move faster and faster; the only question is in which direction. Will artificial intelligence control us or drain us? Either way, we’re destroyed.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits