Aborigen

When I say reality’s up for grabs, I mean woo-woo concepts like hopping parallel universes, tulpas and egregores, manifesting, &c. You know, meditation and using your brain to change things.

But there’s also a pretty serious reality-warping going on, with the advent of AI and deepfakes. Generated art isn’t perfect, but it’s getting closer all the time. It’s already getting harder to determine whether a news broadcast is real, whether a real person’s song is rising up the charts, and the nature of an “author” behind a dozen books that appear on Amazon in the space of one week.

The concept of “dead internet theory” describes a scenario in which most online content has been generated by AI rather than humans. I ran into this while researching a Maltese giantess myth. I uncovered four identical websites, structured the same, naming conventions the same, all with only the slightest differences. To make a long story short, my guess is that someone grabbed the transcript of a YouTube video, tasked an LLM to extrapolate it into content for a webpage, then created four variations of it. Each website had the same structure and thematic colors, but was titled slightly differently (like “Mysterious Wonders” and “Wonderful Mysteries”), and the webpage in question had the same AI-generated artwork banner of an earthy giant, an embedded link to the YouTube video, and one of the four variations of content.

Maybe it was a proof-of-concept project for someone to demonstrate how easy it could be to rapidly construct a loaded website. But in practice, it got in the way of my own useful research, and watching that wild-haired History impresario rant about aliens building Ġgantija definitely killed a few brain cells.

Now, it’s very difficult to know who you’re encountering on social media. This is a step beyond simple scammers pretending to be beautiful Chinese women to get you to invest in crypto trading. It’s beyond Meta creating chatbots on Facebook and Instagram for people to interact with.

I restarted my DeviantArt account because I’d heard word that the season of rampant suspension may have passed and it’s once again a stable platform for Size Fantasy artists, among others. Recently someone followed me there and complimented my story:

A fantastically tense and hilarious scene! The physical comedy and the overwhelming presence of the two women is brilliantly described. What was your inspiration for the dynamic between Linda and Vanessa, and did you always plan for their intimidating presence to be both playful and slightly menacing?

That’s inordinately concise and lively writing. To my editor’s ear, the weird combination of formal speech and gregarious tone sounds like an LLM. I checked out the account and found their response to someone else’s comment:

You very Wel ❤ btw can i ask you some thin about your story i am exited to discuss about that do you have discord?

That’s quite the shift.

This could be someone anywhere around the world who’s just not strong in English. It could also be an obscure scam I can’t perceive yet. The artwork they posted is weird: many images are done in substantially different styles, and some posts on their webpage just look like scans of DC Comics. If I had more curiosity I’d do a reverse-image search on some of their work and see whose work they’re claiming.

My point is, all of these aspects and factors are colluding to make being online more exhausting than it was 30 years ago. Back then, you could put in a little work to determine whether someone was lying to you, like in a conversation. Now there are consumer-grade tools, getting better all the time, to challenge even the most discerning eye and amateur sleuthing. Are you talking to a real person? Is this leading to a phishing attack? Is your interaction with them training a model to become more undetectable within a month?

It’s enough to make a body want to unplug altogether.