#5 - 👻 OpenAI Sora 👻
It's back. The sense of impending doom, the sense that you need to gather resources, gather your tribe, and hunker down before it hits.
It's back. The sense of impending doom, the sense that you need to gather resources, gather your tribe, and hunker down before it hits. Today, OpenAI released SORA which produces life-like videos.
The drastic price advantage to generated content over shooting it means it will become the standard. The media we consume will be a simulation of reality instead of staged version of reality. And in consuming this reflection, it will become part of our shared reality continuing a spiral away from whats real.
The amount of content will continue exploding allowing algorithms to better comfort our mind in their own bias. Our current niches around certain creators or ideologues will further narrow to include a group of one. Our revealed preferences in consuming content will become the input generating our future videos. Algorithms further and further refine to attract our attention making reality seem more dull in comparison. Alternatives will sour, as they already have. The drastic increase in phone and video game usage and decrease in time spent with friends will only increase.
But, AI video isn't what I truly fear its an AI therapist, an AI girlfriend. A shallow but functional replacement for human connection giving enough comfort to to completely remove yourself from social life. A shallow, short term fix for something that will leave a longterm hole of belonging. In my current sense of doom, I fear for my own sanity and by extension those like me. I’m not special.
How do you resist such a world? Perhaps you should just stop consuming content now. Learn to live and find others who can manage without these toxic influences. Work on social skills and organizing strong communities to resist the tide pulling others away.
Maybe there is nothing to do but accelerate past it. The same immune response that is slowly resisting social media’s more harmful effects can be brought to bear on whatever externalities result from this. The question becomes how much do we believe in our collective sense making. How much can we avoid capitalist run away effects where profit and business inertia harms us? Perhaps AI girlfriends and children are actually a good thing. Human connection is too specific, we actually just want the experience of status and love that was once preserved for the few. Now we can give infinite love to the many. I’ll start <3.