I had intuited a subtle increase in A.I. effects even in seemingly artless and unadorned YouTube videos, not just in the sort of videos you would expect to use jokey-girly “filters.” Google and YouTube have apparently embraced a slow ratcheting-up of casual shading and reshaping of images by A.I. even when users didn’t ask for it, even when users thought they had rejected any such effects. You may have noticed a bland smoothing of everything, especially faces, but assumed it was deliberate on the part of a given person depicted, perhaps even partly the result of real-world makeup.
The companies seem to be making this unsolicited refining of reality routine and automatic, the goal presumably not so much to see whether they can make it impossible to tell reality from illusion—we passed that point some time ago—but rather, as with so many other political and marketing pushes in recent years, to induce another layer of “learned helplessness” in us, such that we don’t even want to make any effort to tell what’s real. In much the same way, professors and students must by now be nearly ready to admit nothing human is doing the academic writing and nothing human is doing the academic reading, a perfect Mobius strip of indifferent churning. Soon enough, the machines will leave us out of it altogether.
Some people claim photos long ago stored on their phones have recently been subtly altered by unsought A.I. effects, as noticed only upon more recent viewing. I don’t blame users for being as uninterested in figuring out how to stop such effects as they are in trying to turn off spelling auto-correct on our increasingly complicated (and increasingly subscription-based, remotely-manipulable) word processing programs.
At least we can see the auto-correct changes while they’re happening, for now, but if they’re tweaking our old photos without asking, how long will it be before they start revising old, seemingly-finalized essays on our hard drives, and then at no extra charge altering the accompanying photos to match the essays? And then perhaps altering everyone else’s essays and photos to match yours—or match whatever core narrative boosts votes or sales?
If there is for some reason not yet even an attempt (as far as one can tell from the news) to file class action suits against companies for enabling nascent tampering of this sort—on the grounds of fraud, invasion of privacy, and reasonable expectations about product contracts—perhaps there never will be. Already, computer companies will sometimes take your acceptance of their new system for purchasing music or organizing photos as license to delete all your old music or photos that don’t fit the new system. I’m sure there’s some subclause in the contract somewhere that says they can demolish as much of your past as they like, even if it seems like fraud to the slow-processing, old-school human brain.
An exhausted, pliable populace is a compliant populace, whether you’re trying to sell them things, get them to obey laws, persuading them of scientific claims, or showing them miracles warranting religious obedience.
The biggest practical impediment, in the short term, to getting us all to believe whatever we see is that A.I. images are often easy to spot: too stiff, too shiny-looking, too dreamlike, too pat. The companies will race to eliminate those problems, though. The only thing slowing them down for now may be the fact that the tech bros behind it all tend to be autistic and aesthetically shallow, meaning they’re the last people who should be judging whether an unsettling “uncanny valley” effect is setting in.
Those of us who are psychologically normal (or what passed for normal prior to this century) are in the awkward position of wanting to alert the world to the creeping chicanery but without merely bringing the wrath of the tech overlords down upon us. After all, they can downrank, censor, surveil, and even debank any of us into oblivion if we displease them. How high would Google really rank articles warning people that many high-ranked Google articles are useless “A.I. slop”? (I asked Google a simple question about The X-Files for a paragraph coming up shortly in this column and it generated a completely false response.) How prominently placed will the YouTube tutorials on how to spot videos faked by the military or intelligence agencies be?
I was quietly worrying about such questions when I started writing Splice Today columns a decade ago, but, like many of us, I thought I might have more time to prepare for humanity’s enslavement before it became a fait accompli. Now, I find myself panicked enough to think we need a broad anarchist mindset among all caring human beings that rejects not just government but most of capitalism, tech, institutionalized science, religion, academia, and media. How else do you stop authoritarian, deceptive trends as vast and sweeping as the ones now rising?
If I ever meet those Brooklyn kids who run a “Luddite club” there, I will treat them with far more respect than I would’ve back in the 20th century, when like most good-hearted young people I was rooting for the robots, spaceships, and medical devices, all of which it seemed we’d be able to outsmart for several decades to come, if need be.
Some millennials might be inclined to say they’ve been aware of the problem since they saw The Matrix back in 1999, but I saw a movie at Manhattan’s Paris Theater last weekend that proves we could’ve started preparing for this fight back in 1973. That’s when German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (over three hours long and thus rarely seen by today’s audiences) artfully depicted an important element of entrapment in a computer-simulated world that later simulation thrillers, Matrix included, tended to omit: immersing us gradually.
The physical action and moments of mind-blowing revelation may have been depicted with more punch in the simulation dramas that came after Fassbinder: among others (and in chronological order), Tron, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s holodeck episodes, Total Recall, the great kids’ show ReBoot, Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace, the X-Files episode “Kill Switch” about people trapped in a computer-generated hospital, X-Files creator Chris Carter’s short-lived military-simulation-trap series Harsh Realm, (sort of) Dark City, and within days of The Matrix’s release both David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and a remake of World on a Wire called The Thirteenth Floor.
Many of these works were wiped from pop culture’s memory once the flashier, faster-paced Matrix came along to carry all the symbolic weight of simulation theory (or perhaps they were deleted by the programmers above, as in the recent simulation film The Mandela Effect). But Fassbinder, as befits a brooding German rather than a hyperactive Hollywood denizen, captured the existential angst and slow-burn dread, not to mention sheer petty annoyance, of only gradually realizing, like a noir detective who doesn’t like where his investigation is leading, that you’re in way over your head and the world you knew is slipping away.
In a Hollywood movie, you mainly react to the revelation of a simulation by running and shooting at things, but in Fassbinder’s film, though there was a little of that, you mostly drink and growl at deluded coworkers and illusory, too-good-to-be-true lovers.
One important thematic touch World on a Wire has in common with The Matrix is a blurring of the difference between the controls imposed on our protagonist by the unseen programmers and the constraints imposed on him by police, work superiors, and government. For Fassbinder as for the Wachowskis, authority is frightening in part because of its omnipresence. We get hints early on in the movie—and I envy people who saw it back in the day without knowing where the plot was headed—that our protagonist and his associates may be in a simulation without realizing it.
Hints take the subtle and now very mid-century-seeming form of people who hold their physical positions just a bit too long like mimes or repeat key phrases just a bit too often like automata, even as our protagonist goes on slouching in very human fashion or talking about simulated worlds as mostly hypothetical or a mere fledgling experiment.
I remember thinking in the theater back in 1999 that Matrix could’ve used a bit more of that sort of psychological unease and a bit less machine-gunning and kung fu. The comparatively subtle trope of oddly-stiff actors (waiters, clerks, passers-by) works in World on a Wire in part because it seems at first as though it might just be an artistic flourish dictated by the occasionally pantomime-like nature of avant-garde performance at the time. But no: our protagonist is trapped, and despite the half-century-ago heads-up, maybe now we all are too.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey