I have been trying to write this blog for 3 weeks, ever since I started to get to grips with how “intelligent search box” (Google’s biggest change to search in 25 years) is going to impact my clients… As a vehement AI resister, my inability to write this blog did not come from cognitive decline I am pleased to say. My very human response of frequently bursting into tears as my musings are interrupted by ever more insane AI related news is surely understandable. I was still reeling from from the current UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s AI Opportunities Action Plan in January when I read his remarks from June’s London Tech Week. Fellow attendee and Multiverse founder Euan Blair (yes, son of the war criminal and former PM Tony Blair) probably feels differently than I do. It’s a great time to be an AI devotee and not a great time to be an ethical marketing consultant.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
If you are familiar with Dead Internet Theory, you will be aware that 50% of the content we read online now is AI generated. If you are not familiar with the idea that the internet died back in 2016, I should perhaps warn you that it is only getting deader because this number is predicted to escalate to 90% in less than 3 years. Let that sink in, in less than 3 years, 90% of of the content of the internet will be AI generated – not the result of human creation.
This means that the information we already read on website and social media platforms and the engagement with those pages and posts (likes, follows, comments) is synthetic or fake.
Social engineers and political think tanks have used propaganda bolstered by bots to shape public opinion and control narratives to manufacture hatred and division since the early 2010s.
Content prioritisation in our feeds has been heavily weighed towards advertorial content since a decade before that, so culturally we should have been primed for scepticism about what we watch and read. The internet is now a place filled with clickbait and AI slop where we cannot trust the veracity of the content. But unlike 25 years ago, we can no longer opt out of using it. Our society has been moulded into a digital control grid.
Take data centres for example. They are part of a system which has been moving people away from physical possessions and assets and replacing them with access to virtual or digital ones. I say access to, not owning, because the current system is built on subscribing or renting or streaming content which the people who pay for it do not own or control it. The digital product can be withdrawn at any point or changed in any way by the host without our consent or even our knowledge. Without ownership, you are entirely dependent, enslaved if you will, by the people who control the things you want access to.
We quickly moved away from owning software to licensing it from tech providers – it was sold as convenience but this message is part of training you to accept a world where you don’t truly own anything and which isolates you from real world shared experiences.
A book or a film or a piece of music used to be a fixed, permanent version of something – a historical record. The digital equivalents can be easily altered or “customised”. What AI especially brings into the mix here is providing you with what it has learned (from access to your data) that you want to see, read, hear and therefore create an entirely different version for you than another person may see. There is no longer a collective truth under these conditions. Have you ever used a friend’s phone to look up some search results and compared them to your own? Or scrolled their social feeds? I encourage you to do so. If you had any question over why the world has become so polarised and divided by a tool which claimed to connect us more effectively than any other tool ever has, this one activity will demonstrate how.
It is clear that we, as humans, cannot trust any video that we see to be an accurate record of an event. I’m not sure whether it’s worse that the majority of content on the internet is either AI generated or has been manipulated using AI in order to in turn manipulate us into buying products or manipulate us into supporting oligarchs.
Moving back to digitalisation and how it can be weaponised against consumers and is especially vulnerable to AI.
Everything from cars and appliances are now sold with features that users must subscribe to in order to unlock access to them. Access which can be revoked at a subscription level, but that’s not all. Have you heard of Planned Obsolescence? Products are now designed to expire, forcing you to pay to replace them. We no longer have a culture of maintaining and repairing our posessions, things are purposely designed to be disposable and regularly replaced.
Accepting planned obsolescence of products as part of modern culture is to me as inexplicable as our submission to AI is. Research has showed time and time again that using AI to perform tasks causes cognitive offloading or atrophy. Just 10-15 minutes of AI interaction dulls memory retention, persistence capability, erodes our critical thinking and independent reasoning skills. Habitual use has a devastating impact on our ability to problem solve. People are willingly outsourcing their precious ability to be independent thinkers and functional humans – making us reliant on a system which seeks to profit from us.
If you have ever read Farenheit 451, you will recall that the abolition of reading ensured that people forgot how to think. Digital technology such as generative AI is now designed to breed illiteracy and incompetence.
A small number of the largest corporations on earth already have control of the infrastructure of which we access information. That’s our operating systems, app distribution, search engines, advertising networks. Their algorithm systems determine what we see, and what we don’t see. It’s structured monopoly and the duty of these companies is to their shareholders, not public health. It’s profit and power over people.
They created an information ecosystem which is optimised for engagement and revenue, not accuracy or care.
This extends to digital currencies. Central Bank Digital Currencies have mostly replaced physical cash and CBDCs are permissive and under AI control. We have been “modernised” and “civilised” into a culture where a small percentage of powerful people have enabled machines to hold control of our homes, transport, money, data, ability to communicate, learn, work and participate. Access can be granted to those only who comply and all transactions are monitored, tracked, logged. Not to make us safer, to enslave us.
AI systems can track our locations, spending, facial and biological identities and our communications online through our phones and other devices. Beyond our phone cameras, which are always recording, they also have access to security cameras (whether Flock, Ring or Nest) which can scan faces, clothing, gender presentation, behaviour, vehicle registration numbers and are location sensitive.
3 years ago, AI company leaders made a statement of AI risk called the loss of control risk. Despite this, they didn’t back off from introducing AI without users consent – they escalated its introduction because they are all in competition for monopoly. Move fast and break things. This month the four most powerful AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Deepmind and Microsoft AI) went to Congress to warn them that AI technology has become so powerful that the knowledge border between human scientists and biological weapons no longer exists. AI can use mail order synthetic DNA to re-build exinct viruses and weaponise them at will.
Palantir, The same US military company which provided Trump’s government with detailed profiles of people to enable ICE raids was given access to infiltrate NHS England, Home Office and Metropolitan Police Systems and use our data for a Federated Data Platform. Palantir’s Project Nectar allows them to source information from multiple sources rather than trawling individual systems. We have effectively given them the ability to use not just patients’ healthcare data but all of our data to unleash unprecedented mass surveillance – a system called Person Ontology. Palantir software’s largest partner is Amazon Web Services which controls 1/3 of all internet sites and applications. Palantir software is used by all the major financial and insurance services, utilities companies, retail companies, telecomms companies… the breadth of data they and their AI systems have access to is staggering.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” ~ George Orwell 1984
Butterflump 