AI makes obvious what social media left oblique.
Backlash to artificial boyfriends and chatbot therapists — relationships made digitally — was (and will continue to be) easy to predict, as both the innovation’s faults and motivations are easy to see.
Our reaction to something pretending to be like us is primal. In our gut, we feel that simulacrums of relationship and reality — through conversations with or depictions from an LLM — are unreal and wrong. The arts, humanities, and cultural studies resist the recreation of machine as humankind, recalling the upheaval of the Industrial Age as similar swells of disruption rise.
As we see and call out the impending harms of AI’s hubris, we reexamine another tool’s impact.
My excitement for the AI boom and bubble lies in the reality check it will bring. Finally, a modern-day invention carries enough doom-creating momentum — fueled by finance and hope — to make the framework of techno-optimism crumble. What has been building for half a century of science fiction and research promises, alongside multiplying economic and political crises, will be tested through sheer commitment to an empty vision of utopia.
21st-century people will come to either reject or concretize the paradigm that technology saves.
And this tipping point — the catalyst of our next revolution, brought about by either silicon or skin — will make obvious what we did not want and failed to see with the platforms that hid harms and heralded an identical utopia for a now-bankrupt society of artificial everything.