As IF Times

It’s interesting how far the world of mass media consumption has come.  Only a hundred years ago, if you wanted to be entertained, you had to dress up and go to the town theater to watch some kind of performance, typically including some singing, dancing and maybe some vaudevillian theater.   Then, radio came along and although it wasn’t the same visual experience as theater, you could listen to stories in the comfort of your living room, or parlor as it was probably known in those days.  This was a marvelous technical invention as it allowed listeners to create scenes in their own minds drawn from the sketches of audio only broadcasts.  The apex of influence of this medium was probably HG Well’s 1938 broadcast of The War Of The Worlds when people were led to believe that a Martian attack was under way.

But when Television came along after WW2, entertainment made another great leap forward.  No longer did people have to suffice with just audio, or with silent films at the movie theater, you could have voice and video in your own home.  However, the technology was still ahead of the content and despite classic pioneering shows including Milton Berle and Lucille Ball, most of the early offerings were rather banal.  Why? Well apparently most talented writers were working on real entertainment; Broadway plays and motion pictures.

But as in all things, the ability to make money from this new medium spawned an explosion in the amount and quality of content available on the small screen in the years to come.  Thus advertisers willing to pay to hawk their goods drew people into the business of putting out popular content.  During this time, the output of content fell to 3 major broadcasters who had a monopoly on all kinds of entertainment including news and sports.

This was pretty much the model for another 30 years until a guy named Ted Turner decided that audiences were willing to accept partitioned and specialized entertainment, thus heralding cable channels with narrow, specific fields of interest.  This shrunk the audience and influence of the big 3 networks.  To this day, you can still find a midget basket weaving channel or similar on your two hundred channel cable guide.  The next evolution was streaming.  This is essentially the same as cable channels except that you pay extra for ‘premium content’.  It’s like Only Fans, but non pornographic.  This caters to people who want to control their entertainment and on their schedules. It also contributed to the phenomenon of binge watching.

But the real 800 pound gorilla of entertainment today is Social media:  Instagram posts, Tik-Tok videos.  To the degree that most everyone on earth is able to have access to a mobile phone, they are also all consumers of Instagram or Tik Tok videos.  These are the platforms of our time. They are comprised of very short clips on any given topic.  For good or bad, these platforms truly shrink the expanse of the planet. Unlike the history of entertainment which has always been in the hands of the few, now EVERYONE is a content creator and the audience is truly vast.  Unlike all other avenues of entertainment, there are no boundaries for content, nor for that matter, taste. But these are not purely artistic and expressive works; these short videos are all now made with commercial intent.  As some may know, there are entire ‘farms’ in China which produce only short social media content for commercial use.

As with TV a couple of generations ago, everyone is looking for a way to capitalize on people’s appetite for amusement. Grand oeuvres won’t be found here, but you will find mostly themes of humor or prurience. And it’s lucrative. If somehow you are able to catch lightning in a bottle and acquire millions of view, you would be an internet sensation and all these views translates into real cash.  These ‘influencers’ make thousands or hundreds of thousands depending on the volume of clicks. They will benefit from affiliate marketing and branding.  Some of the top influencers are Cristiana Ronaldo and of course the Kardashians.   But even below that tier, many content makers can make very comfortable livings by simply putting out banal things and often simply following established formulas for content.  Who hasn’t scrolled through cute animal videos or food recipes?

Interestingly, the audience and sweet spot for marketing is and always has been to teenagers, both boys and girls as indicated by the people with the largest audiences.  But it’s also a powerful marketing tool for the entire spectrum of ages and there are probably no businesses today that don’t have a social media presence. Thus influential media has moved away from the gatekeepers of the past.  Now, anyone with a phone can influence the minds of millions as if they were stars. This is a great egalitarian platform.  So instead of professionals, people are essentially entertaining themselves!  But while this platform can reveal great minds when they otherwise would never have had the opportunity, something tells me it’s more like water…which always finds its lowest level.

So we’ve postulated that a Dopamine response can be targeted by businesses to increase sales or to shape behaviors.  Employing sounds, smells and sensations, are known actionable triggers for consumers.

But let’s pair that with rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence tools.  Mostly everyone in the developed world has exposure to streaming music and entertainment platforms.  When they were first introduced, they were simply tools of convenience as mobile phones once were.  But with the deployment of their internal algorithms, these services now create suggested material based on your viewing or listening proclivities.  Thus, being fully attuned to the material that gives you the most satisfaction, which means Dopamine hits, they continue to feed you material based on their predictive models. You are now a commodity to whom marketing will be specifically tailored.

No doubt, they’re succeeding with these tools.  However, one of the shortcomings of AI (at least thus far) is that projections are necessarily based on past events.  They use pattern recognition and extrapolate trends based on previous samples.  One could say that it’s as if you are driving forward using the rear view mirror.  If your playlist is full of Barry Manilow, it’s unlikely that anything by The Beastie Boys winds up in your suggested rotation.  If you’ve watched more than one Reese Witherspoon movie, you will have tons of blonde ingénue films populating your suggestion box.  In this instance, use of AI is similar to politicians who tune their message to whatever they think people want to hear.

Which is fine.  Except that this does not provide something that humans innately need….the desire for variety and novelty.  While the old and familiar are stable bets, humans generally have a need for variety and novelty rooted in natural curiosity.  This is why human input cannot be completely replaced by the emerging creep of AI in our lives.  People should be aware that present popular AI platforms such as Chat GPT and Grok rely mainly on their ability to scour and assemble vast known data sources to create an appropriate response to a defined problem.

AI’s capability for pattern recognition is unmatched.  These platforms can very rapidly give solutions to existing problems based on the vast database of similar events that are known. As of right now, they are not yet able to solve problems for which there are no known solutions. Of course, this may change with time, but as an example, in the medical field, they can’t provide the cure for cancer, BUT they will sift through mountains of known data to provide what has been effective therapies for resolved medical issues.  AI won’t be able to solve conflict issues in the Middle East nor be able to predict the Super Bowl winner; it can only give statistical probabilities.   AI is not a magic 8 ball.

I can see these tools being used to drastically reduce the backlogs in the legal and justice system.  A large part of the law is based on historical legal precedence, thus running the variables through an AI filter could eliminate the need for parsing words, nonsense arguments and activist judges.  We can certainly see the use of AI in the field of medicine for treating most of the routine ailments that afflict people.  Even a casual dive into the dozens and dozens of AI content creation sites is astounding and it’s all just beginning.

While AI is probably the greatest technological leap by man post the industrial age next to microchips, it also brings with it some complacencies and dangers as yet unknown.  While it can figuratively assemble all of the available ingredients in a pantry to make a meal, it cannot create unique solutions outside of the known universe of recipes.  At the very root of any data set are human inputs which then result in acceptable outcomes

For the sake of illustration, imagine that we are in the 1800’s and leeches are commonly employed in the cure of many medical issues.  If AI were available at that time, any search for a treatment for circulatory issues would result in the application of leeches….because that was the known and acceptable treatment of that era.

In today’s world, it’s very possible that requesting an answer to a question such as “who would make the best president?” may return an answer of Kamala Harris, depending on whom entered the variables.   Thus, while AI can satisfy specific requests with logical outcomes, the baseline of data points had to have been created by human input.  We all know the programming mantra of GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.  An apt illustration of this is the Wikipedia site.  While many refer to this site for research, many are not aware that entries are edited for ‘appropriateness’.  Thus, if this site was referenced as part of the process for determining an answer to a question, the response will be skewed because of the flawed input.

With broader employment of AI tools in every aspect of our lives, there is the real danger that it can assume the role that television once did when it became a ubiquitous household appliance; that is, people will think something is true because they saw it on TV.  Even at this early stage, it’s often difficult to discern reality from deep fakes in many AI video presentations. As Abe Lincoln purportedly said, you can’t trust everything you see on the internet.  Knowing what we know about human behavior, it can be very easy to create narratives that reinforce acceptable worldviews just as they play algorithmically created music on a Spotify feed.   You will hear what the machine thinks that you want to hear and you will experience what the machine calculates what you want to experience.

Notwithstanding the enormous power and potential of AI to modify our lives, the key task of real innovation and imagination will always require the human element.  The source code will always have at its root, human input. Ironically, the abilities of AI may make populations more complacent, more malleable and less innovative and more derivative. This is a real danger.  While certainly we are exposed to new things that seem to appear daily, many of those things are derivative or just iterations of an existing thing. In fact many of these new ‘things’ have a certain sameness to them.  Think Gothic dragon films, rap music or SUV’s.

But no amount of AI writing tools will replicate the creative mind of a J.K. Rowling nor the insightful, sensitive humor of a Bill Watterson.  No AI tool will replace the stark depiction of the human condition like a Solzhenitsyn.   No amount of data crunching will replace the mind of an Elon Musk in pushing the boundaries of technology and imagination.  People like that will always be at the leading edge of human aspiration, not content to listen to the usual comfortable playlist that life has made for them.  It turns out that achieving satisfactory, comfortable results is not the end game for bright people, nor should it be for mankind. Innovative pioneers will continue to make their own original life playlists with great unpredictability.  This brings to mind the Roadrunner cartoons.  Even as Wile E Coyote brings sophisticated technology to use, the Roadrunner always finds a way to escape.