Imagine a not-too-distant dystopian future where we each live powered by our own AI digital filter bubbledeveloped only for us and designed to meet the interests of companies. This future resembles 1998’s The Truman Show, where the eponymous protagonist, played by Jim Carrey, has unknowingly lived his entire life inside a reality show where all his experiences are choreographed by a production studio.
A subset of artificial intelligence, big language models, won’t turn our lives into a reality TV show, no such luck. Instead, personalized AI agents threaten to individualize and cage each of us in an illusory unreality, hoarding our digital dollars and walling us off from real connections with other people.
We are doing well. The Beta release in October of the apple Mind can be a milestone in our relationship with artificial intelligence: this new version will make it very accessible great language model experience to more than a billion people worldwide. But Apple is just one of many companies, among others OpenAI, google and a number of developing start-ups individualized, personalized large language patterns.
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The principle behind this so-called custom alignment that is, the AI model will learn about the individual user—what they know and don’t know, likes and dislikes, values and goals, attention span and preferred media—and adapt accordingly.
The goal is to put a customized AI between each user and the vast amount of information available on the Internet, finding the information they want, matching their tastes and backgrounds, and sending it to their screen. If this project succeeds, our ability to make collective sense of the world will be further fractured. We will no longer live in one of the competing filter bubbles; each of us will be in our own private filter bubble.
This is in the best case where the systems are designed solely for the benefit of the users. But, of course, they are unlikely to remain benign. As with the Internet, they will becomeenshite“, as the tech industry gathers our attention to separate it from our money.
Consider an American tradition like college football. Are you an Ohio State Buckeyes superfan? Are you spending too much time clicking on Ohio State football stories, buying Ohio State merchandise, subscribing to Ohio State videos, podcasts and news? You will receive such information on all your devices, 24 hours a day. Some algorithms will also learn your daily schedule and respond accordingly, precisely at those times when you are looking for information.
Football rivalries aside, this seems harmless (if boring); in many ways, this already describes our online experience. Facebook, X, Instagram, Google and other user tracking algorithms already follow our interests and habits to choose what fills our screens. But the next step unleashes huge language patterns to create memes and even entire articles, tailored to each of us and our interests, designed to do nothing but keep connecting with the kinds of content that will increase. Our options for making a purchase.
LLMs will create fully written articles about your favorite college football team, their recruiting process, and their predictions for the upcoming season. You will listen Podcasts powered by AI sounds like sports talk radio. And you’ll be fed conspiracy theories about a rival football team: how they’re involved in recruiting violations, how they’ve cheated, how members of their coaching staff are connected to a cocaine empire, for example.
This is a miserable reality for at least two reasons; on the one hand, there is no computational method or ethical incentive to ensure that the information you receive is true. The purpose of the company, of course, is not to represent reality. LLMs will create what philosophers call in their technical jargon.stupidity“. They are designed to be credible and authoritative, not factual.
But as frightening as the blatant disregard for the truth is an even more frightening element. Our hypothetical Ohio State football fan will not live with an accurate understanding of college football that is compatible with anyone else, not even other Ohio State football fans. This fan will only work with information created by them. LLMs are already so effective that content reuse is unnecessary; why create the same article for two different people when LLM can create two articles tailored specifically for each? This view is disturbing, even when talking about sports and entertainment. But what about organizations with more direct social consequences? Religion? Education? Politics?
Commentators across the political spectrum lament the decline of the press the polarization of everything. Conversations around holiday table they have already become impossible for large families.
Bad as the situation may be, strange times are upon us that may make us yearn for today’s echo chambers. Soon, our bubbles will shrink further and further until our digital world involves only ourselves. In an AI-powered future, each of us will live in a private the truman show. As a society, we will be completely unable to make productive collective decisions because we will not have a shared understanding of the world.
What recourse is there? For starters, remember the advice our parents gave us, and the parents before them, going back at least to the widespread adoption of television: get outside and play. Stop staring at that screen. Tell your friends, personally. Find your entertainment in spaces with real people, exchanging thoughts and creations with each other.
Even online, we must keep our understanding of the world grounded in human-written documents and artifacts. Valuing what humans create is not just a question of authenticity; it also ensures that we focus on arguments that an author cared enough about, conservations that speakers cared enough about.
otherwise the truman show‘s premise becomes our reality, unknowingly living in a fake world where all our experiences are manipulated for profit. Even more existentially alienating? to live in the truman show where the director, producer and only watcher is an AI.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific.
