For the Guardian, Nesrine Malik warns of generative AI leading towards a reality where we don’t know what to trust with our own eyes:
But whatever the intent of its creators, this torrent of AI content leads to the desensitisation and overwhelming of visual palates. The overall effect of being exposed to AI images all the time, from the nonsensical to the soothing to the ideological, is that everything begins to land in a different way. In the real world, US politicians pose outside prison cages of deportees. Students at US universities are ambushed in the street and spirited away. People in Gaza burn alive. These pictures and videos join an infinite stream of others that violate physical and moral laws. The result is profound disorientation. You can’t believe your eyes, but also what can you believe if not your eyes? Everything starts to feel both too real and entirely unreal.
Social feed algorithms were already pointing us in this direction, but that was at least an aggregation of reality. The sheer volume of generated artificial images, video, audio, and text only speeds up the convergence.
