Mukti and Revival: The AI edition

One of the hardest conversations I had in life has been trying to convince my father that the WWE is fake. He argued that it is real, their blood is real, the punches are real. I argued that the punches are real but not really like they are in professional boxing. The storyline is all predetermined but sometimes it isn’t by mistake (see Montreal Screwjob). It is constantly moving between being real and fake. It made for super frustrating conversations with Buwa. I still haven't fully convinced my dad that it is fake in the sense that it is predetermined almost all the time. He has a point too in that it is real at times, so it has made for an extremely frustrating conversation that has spanned for decades now. But, WWE holds a dear place in our hearts since it was a huge part of our childhood and also some of the first exposures for us kids in Nepal to America; my wife cringes when she imagines me watching it as a child in Nepal.

Now, we have AI and fake slop all over the Internet. I have already had conversations with my father to try to convince him that the man, who looks almost like Leonardo DiCaprio in that profile picture on Facebook, is in fact his old friend from Rampur, Chitwan, and that the picture is AI generated. That's not that uncle's hair or his skin tone. That's not his jaw. It's not him, but it kind of looks like him. This is like our WWE talks. Almost real, but not quite. We could probably live with it, because there is room to convince either way.

But it's getting tougher to distinguish what's real and what's not. It's getting harder for even people like us who have grown up in the age of technological boom and social media, who are “too online” to determine what's real and not sometimes. I see older folks falling for this slop quite a bit already. No, Donald Trump didn't go on a bender with Kamala Harris in London on a Limousine right after the election. That AI generated video looked very real--and very fun. I can already see that it's going to take a lot of convincing in a lot of households. It is scary to think that it can generate such believable images at these beginning stages of AI development. Where and when will it stop?

There must be limits to everything. You eat the right amount of food; you feel good and healthy. You eat too much, soon enough there will be debilitating problems. You talk just enough in conversations; you will walk away fulfilled and fruitful. You talk too much; you will annoy people or spill secrets. You drink or smoke the right amount; you might end up having a wonderful time. You go over that a bit, you may find yourself spinning wild on a galaxian trip while trying to fall asleep, not exactly fun at least from what I remember in my college days. Maybe the trajectory that AI technology is moving in with producing extremely believable lies is going over the limits and into an uncharted territory.

Not to turn into an old man yelling at the cloud meme, but I feel like AI is betraying us– and much more than how the WWE was betraying us. Maybe I am getting old, but AI is turning the fire of technology into an inferno. It's getting out of control. And perhaps deep down, we recognize this trajectory, and it doesn’t look very appealing, so we are longing for a more simple and organic way of living. We can sit around fire and enjoy our moments of warmth, but we can’t survive an inferno that will burn us to death. Or will humanity just be cremated by this inferno and get reincarnated and purified, making us closer to all the answers and ultimately closer to the Gods? Maybe this could be the mukti and revival of our humanity, but I wonder what will be left in us after the inferno burns everything to ashes in the meantime.