Sitting in a scorching hot room, my heart beating at my neck, I observed a little girl. She was next to her mother, who was blindly staring at her screen. The little girl was making rapid jabs with her finger at her phone, repeatedly. I wondered if she was on the spectrum, or if that’s just the way she interacts with her phone. I continued with my own world, feeling my heart and beginning to try to transcend. Then I heard that voice, that robotic human voice, the one that is ubiquitous on the short dopamine videos on Instagram. I realized she was consuming videos made by robots. The matter of the subject Is not important. It was something about purchasing, and consuming. I began to think, “why are we okay with the fact that our children are consuming videos, meaningless ideas, and overall content that are made by artificial intelligence?” Why don’t we care that our children’s attention is snatched by a screen that has content that is made by an algorithm in a cloud server somewhere? When did we accept that this is normal, that being glued to short form videos for hours on end, every, single, day, is okay? This is the future that terrifies me—this is the future that makes me want to put a blanket over my head and hope and pray that it will all go away. I want the use of our brains, our human creativity, to be retained. And not only be retained but be retained by humans. The world is just going along with it, as it always has, following the money. Already, some AI generated videos are indistinguishable from reality. We are watching the beginning of the end of truth, and possibly reality as we know it.
