The New Culture War Is Real vs. Bogus

>The London Standard brought back the dead journalist with the help of AI. The newspaper’s CEO said this was part of a plan to be “bold and disruptive.”

This is grotesque. :(

> Is greatness overrated?

People already feel this way.

> What’s next—Is disease the new health?

People currently are conflating body shaming with pointing out someone is unhealthy

> Is losing the new winning?

Being part of a minority is better than being good at something.

> Is stupid the new smart?

Tell someone you are good at something like computers. Way too many people use this as an opportunity to cope.

I hate to break it to the author of this article but we are already here.

> And now real news photos of Hurricane Helene are getting replaced by AI fantasies.

50% of stuff I read about victims, is about some dogs. The AI generated fantasies are not far from "serious journalism". AI just captures current public sentiment.

If you think AI spam is bad now, you ain't seen nothing yet. Except for the outliers in the article or the author, the reality is the majority of people do not care or cannot notice if content is ai-generated or human-generated, so to save money we can expect more of the former. I have already seen this in news stories where there are weird typos and other artifacts of AI generation. If you are not paying attention then you would probably not notice.

The title reminded me of this article, that claims that the new culture war is weird vs normal: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-new-systems-of-survival

The answer will be more exclusivity.

The masses get ignorant dreck, and people in the know get the scoop. When the genx people like me are rocking on the porch in retirement, we’ll be babbling about the golden age we lost.

The humans consuming AI video/image content and can't help themselves sharing this garbage are simply bots. No better way to describe them. That's going to be the new captcha test for me.

I was a bit cautious of Photoshop adding watermarks into pictures generated by their software but I think it's time LLMs implement this feature. It will be the only way to filter and clean the spam from your feed.

The only through-line for the author's definition of "bogus" (AI generated content; identity performance; rejection of canon) appears to me "cannot be situated in the culture of a few decades ago."

To pick on one example: he writes of the linked NYT essay:

> Is greatness overrated? What’s next—Is disease the new health? Is losing the new winning? Is stupid the new smart?

At risk of sounding uncharitable, this is the kind of reaction one might have to the essay if they read the title and skipped the content. The author is specfically talking about the idea of the Nobel canon and its orthogonality to other reasons you might want to read an author. (I don't think it's a particularly good essay, but it's certainly not saying "bad stuff is good, actually"!)

The culture war has always been real vs bogus. Mass media monopolized the real by constructing in parallel a distribution medium and a culture of authority built on top of it.

The levers of reality building include the ability to mass disseminate ideas. When social media co-oped the public to generate content in order to sell ads for money, it handed over the mechanism of reality construction to the masses - we de-monopolized reality construction for a few trillion dollars in market cap.

It's weird to see reality sold out to the highest bidder, but at the same time, I couldn't see it going any other way. The reptilians have a strange affinity for hording gold. Modern day dragons.

Curation will become even more important. Despite social media, we haven't even come close to peak influencer mania yet.

Well yeah. If you needed to have your culture come from Google images or or NYT I think you were always going to have a bad time. AI or not.

love it

let it burn

As a Danish person the most annoying thing about the American culture war is how it spreads to here. Nowhere near the scale, we still absolutely ridicule people who’d believe in most of the nonsense so that keeps it down. But it’s still here. I think what annoys me the most about it is how a lot of the bogus is very specifically “American”. When Qanon was a thing it was also a thing here. It’s so disappointing that our tinfoil hatters aren’t coming up with their own bogus about our own elite. If Obama was/is a lizard person, then why wouldn’t our Queen (at the time we have a King now) be a Lizard? We have our own rich elites, is Lars Larsen really dead or is he leading a secret shadow government?

I do agree that the “reality vs fiction” battle, which has been raging for years now will get absolutely insane with AI created lies. I don’t think it’ll really continue to be that much of a battle though. We’re already living in a world where people have extremely different perceptions of reality, and it’ll probably be hard to teach critical thinking to the people who are already believing the bogus.