Dystopic Deep Sea Creatures
There is something strangely beautiful and very troubling about the fake AI-generated sea creature videos circulating on TikTok right now. The largely unexplored deep ocean does in fact contain a myriad of fantastical real animals like the dumbo octopus or the sea angel. That makes these fake AI images all the more believable to uneducated people, especially because they are not being presented or tagged as fake.
These videos are not the product of expensive special effects artists. Someone is simply entering prompts into a generative AI program and training it to spit out an infinite number of weird monsters.
We now live in an era where you can’t trust any words or images that don’t come from a legitimate verified media outlet, and as we all know most of those outlets can’t be trusted either, especially after October 7.
In our current world you could be getting a video call from what looks and sounds exactly like a family member (asking for money, no doubt) and you could have a conversation with that person and never know that you were dealing with an AI-generated bot.
We willingly and more often than not unwillingly give our personal information to large corporations - with the government listening in.
Here’s what I tell young people: start a revolution, because you have nothing left to lose. Unless you are a billionaire, everything has already been taken away from you. Electoral politics, incrementalism and politeness are not going to do anything to dismantle our current capitalist tech dystopia.
—Alex
NEXT WEEK: I’ll be going back to blogging about food.