Living the artificial dream

A 2023?article?by Yuval Noah Harari explores, what he sees as, one of the greatest threats of artificial intelligence; the ability to hack the human operating system through intimacy and storytelling.?

He argues that our stories, laws, scriptures, advertisements, images, media are all composed of language, and even one step further; that our culture is mostly made up of language. And language and culture was always a strictly human endeavor. But now that novel AI is becoming increasingly good at writing language and creating stories, the consequences could be dire.?

Forget about high school kids using ChatGPT to write their essays, what if instead the future holds artificial intelligence that can start a cult or religion (like those QAnon drops), can change our (political) worldviews through extremely compelling online (mis)information, or that can form romantic relations with people (something that is already happening at the moment).?

If AI becomes better at telling compelling stories and creating images than we are, we become vulnerable to machines that take over culture. And instead of consuming the dreams and imaginations of other humans through movies, books and ideas, we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of alien intelligence.

One of the most concrete steps that could be taken to at least mitigate some of these scenarios is to have laws that AI content should always be accompanied by a disclosure that the content was made by a machine. But it also begs a broader question; to what extent will we keep valuing human creativity and authenticity? Are we willing to embrace machine-generated content, stories and relationships if they are better than what we're used to right now??