the boy who cried "it's so over"

there is this genre of media called “Suspended animation,” in which a character is stuck in a stasis— whether cryogenically frozen or stuck in time —for an extended period of time, and then emerges into a world they no longer recognize (a la Demolition Man). and that is exactly what living in the age of the AI bubble feels like. no longer understanding the technology you grew up with or the social customs of your culture was such a terrifying idea that there is an entire type of media dedicated to its horrors. but rather than dealing with suddenly being thrust into such a world, we are being boiled like frogs.

i used to joke about older people who couldn’t discern an AI image from a real one. i used to see an obviously fake video on twitter and think “who is falling for this?” 

but AI is getting better, it has been getting better, and it’s no longer immediately apparent whether a video is real or not. and especially with the release of Google’s new AI tool capable of generating actually realistic imagery, and not the silicon valley idea of “realism” they’d attempted to convince us of, we have finally hit the point where AI tech companies have been aspiring to. and as we all know, corporate greed is insatiable.

more and more i am fooled by an AI-generated video or photo. and it, without exaggeration, feels like i am losing my mind every time. i watched as it went from “once in a blue moon” to “every so often” to “almost every time i open instagram.”  i used to make fun of the Facebook moms, and yet my zoomer-like arrogance was not enough to save me. i am my own John Spartan, in a world that i no longer recognize.