Mostly Unchanged

Hello, hello. Back at it again with something a little different this week. I play around with collage sometimes, digital and physical. This one's made up of all sorts of things, including a picture from a game of 'auto polo'. Which, if that isn't the physical embodiment of 'why women live longer' I don't know what is.

I keep getting served an advert at the moment where a clearly AI generated speaker tells the the story of its 'life'. It talks about how it showed promise in its (faked) youth. How it outperformed classmates it (never) studied with. How, despite all these successes and the advantages (not) available to it, it somehow struggled in its (non-existent) professional life. And how it was only after it (absolutely, unequivocally, never) took a quick quiz that it turned everything around.

The simulated speaker is surrounded by four simulated nodders, generated to look like people whose approval might be important to a human viewer. They are all impressed by the simulated speaker. It had all these problems, but look at it now. Speaking in front of an implied audience, with the adoration of other simulations.

The advert is long. It is un-skippable, and as the ad goes on the person who has generated it clearly loses interest or runs out of credits because the generation's mouth starts to open too wide, go out of sync with what's being said (the nodders are apparently cheap to generate, dutifully bobbing their heads while the speaker unhinges its jaw wider and wider).

I've seen AI ads before. At this point it's difficult to avoid them. I thought I was numb to them. A little tut, a shake of the head in disappointment at how quickly it's happened. This one cut through though. I think, at some level, I could anticipate and prepare myself for it being used in marketing cars and holidays and technology. But it being so flagrantly used to generate a false story of a person learning something about themselves (even through a dumbfuck quiz), cut me.

I raged online in the places I felt safe to do so. 'Doesn't the person behind this advert see how disgusting this is. To have made something that purports to help people, and then to not even bother to find a real person that it has helped, or is helping?!' How hollow. How disappointing. How naive of me to be disappointed?

There's no clean ending to this. I think I just wanted to say something in response. To speak through a mouth that can't take a bite out of a 2x4. Whoever made that advert has dug a pit for their humanity. And they are working as hard as they can to widen it, make it deeper, and push yours in too.