The Algorithmic Era

The End of Shared Reality

Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash

One thing is clear from the recent release of Google’s Nano Banana and the resulting flood of images on the internet generated using this new model: AI imaging has taken another step forward in realism.

Comparisons between Nano Banana Pro and OpenAI’s GPT Image 1.5 demonstrate the substantial advancement in realism of Google’s newest AI model.

Users on Reddit’s r/isthisAI post pictures and videos to determine whether AI created them, and it is often unclear, with internet sleuths poring over the submissions to look for clues.

And people are having some harmless fun with it, for example, by inserting themselves into outlandish scenes with celebrities.

AI-generated music has also reached the point where it is almost indiscernible from the real thing. AI videos are harder and harder to recognize as fake.

What’s scary isn’t only how easy it is to be fooled by these productions, but also how cheap and ubiquitous they are. We are approaching a point at which anyone, regardless of skill level, can produce credible AI-generated products.

The deluge of realistic, AI-generated content has just begun. And we won’t be able to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.

We are in the final chapters of the era where collective reality is possible for humanity. What follows is an era of algorithmic discernment, in which machines determine our reality.

The Final Era of Collective Reality

The idea of a collective reality is a modern concept.

Before there were photographs, people knew what something looked like only by seeing it for themselves or its representation in a drawing, which was obviously someone else’s interpretation of the subject.

Before the printing press and the spread of literacy, institutions like the Catholic Church shaped reality by defining it for their followers, reinforced by the customs and vestments of a shared culture.

Before the written word, elders told stories by campfires, passing on legends and traditions. With each resulting generation, the understanding shifted.

Each subsequent era has further consolidated the institutions that define our reality, moving us from the community level to the global level of reality construction.

The common thread is that, throughout all of this, institutions have shaped reality. First, it was the distributed leadership of small, hunter-gatherer communities. Then, the concentrated power of the aristocracy and the clergy. In the modern era, it is regional and global universities, media, politicians, and cultural and business leaders who have broadly defined our understanding of reality.

And yet, until now, we had always known it was a leap of faith to believe in the reality presented. We could take in information, distinguish between objective and subjective information, and decide whom and what we wanted to believe.

To an extent, we determine our understanding of reality individually, through discernment. But there is a sense of what constitutes an objective fact, determined through observation and the scientific method, versus what is opinion or belief, filtered through the lens of culture and worldview.

In the next chapter of the Information Age, there will be no such thing as objective facts. Anything can be fabricated to look, sound, or feel real, and humans will not be able to tell the difference.

This raises the question: how will we define reality moving forward?

The Algorithmic Era: When Reality is Decided Entirely at the Individual Level

Shared reference points are eroding to make way for personalization.

The “monoculture” is dead. We no longer all watch the same TV shows and discuss them around the water cooler at work.

Even social media, already a tool for personalizing online experiences, is fragmenting. People are flocking to online platforms that align with their tastes and ways of seeing the world, which, in turn, are defined by those same platforms.

And all of it is driven by algorithms that are growing ever more powerful as they suck in information about user preferences like a straw, learning human psychology and how to exploit it. These algorithms distort our view of reality while reinforcing our confidence in (often incorrect) understandings and opinions.

Social scientists and public intellectuals have long criticized the manipulative nature of social media algorithms. But now the same algorithms that identify and shape our tastes and preferences can also create content that matches those tastes and preferences, content we think a human made. Content that we may think is real when it is fiction.

What happens when AI content creation pairs with augmented and virtual reality? When machines can produce fully immersive content instantly, we will each live in a curated world of our own, defined by AI creators.

Neil Stephenson writes about this in his novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. He envisions a future in which everyone has a curated reality bubble, formed from augmented reality content customized to their preferences. The wealthy can afford to hire an expert to curate their reality, while the poor subscribe to an algorithm to do it for them, and each lives “twenty-four/ seven in their own personalized hallucination stream.”

We Choose Our Beliefs

Religion and spirituality are topics I’ve considered more as I grow older. In my teens and twenties, I was an atheist. Now, I’m more agnostic. I don’t know if God exists, but a part of me wonders if it is not easier (and potentially healthier) to decide that I am going to believe.

With religion, we get a pre-defined set of beliefs, a community, and an instruction manual for how to behave in the world. Wouldn’t that be easier than fumbling along, deciding everything from first principles?

Perhaps whether or not we actually think God exists is incidental. What is more important is choosing to believe and accepting everything that goes with it.

In the Algorithmic Era, every belief is a choice because there is no objective reality. People may gravitate towards what is comfortable and convenient because of where they are born, who their families and friends are, and what media diet they consume. Still, they will be able to move in a different direction and accept an alternative, equally viable, version of reality.

The thing that scares me is the illusion of choice. We may think we are deciding which reality to accept, but an algorithm built for a specific purpose and designed to hack our psychology is pulling the strings.

So, who designs these algorithms becomes central. What are their goals, and are we conscious of them at an individual level?

Misinformation in the Algorithmic Era

We’re already seeing that not only do falsehoods proliferate, but proof is less persuasive. When evidence can be synthetically created, it ceases to have power.

Iain Banks’s Culture novels are set tens of thousands of years in the future in a post-scarcity society governed by all-powerful AI “minds”. Overall, it is optimistic because the people living in the Culture a.) still exist and b.) are protected from material want and free to live lives of their choosing.

In the novel Player of Games, the main character is threatened with blackmail, and muses on the obsolescence of the act: “Anybody could make up anything they wanted; sound, moving pictures, smell, touch… there were machines that did just that…Where nothing could be authenticated, blackmail became both pointless and impossible”.

We are on the cusp of realizing Banks’s prediction just 37 years after he wrote those words, and twelve years after his death.

Experts are already warning us that we can no longer trust any photos we see online. It is still possible to authenticate images, kind of. How much longer will that last?

There is already no way to tell with 100% accuracy whether AI wrote something, and there may never be.

Inequal Unreality

Returning to Neil Stephenson’s concept of curated information streams, we begin to see a new way that wealth inequality will manifest.

Wealthier people will be able to afford higher-quality information environments, curated by qualified institutions and free from (or less infused with) manipulation.

Those who are unable to pay are left with the freemium tier of reality. Their feeds will be engagement-optimized, shaped by ad and algorithmic incentives. The poor become productized, their thoughts and behaviors harvested for data, their choices engineered by the people or machines pulling the strings.

Who is curating free reality environments will become a critical question. Will a crowd-financed, open-source alternative reality arise? Or will every option for those unable to pay for quality be either a state propaganda instrument or a commercial vehicle designed to drive purchasing behavior (or both)?

How Society Can Respond

I get it. This is all scary. Living in an entirely AI-designed alternative reality is not something most of us had on our bingo cards.

For those of us who grew up watching The Matrix, the concept of a fully immersive metaverse seemed as much a fantasy as it was grounded in reality. Mark Zuckerberg lost billions by betting too big on the near-term viability of virtual reality.

That said, while the Matrix may not be imminent, reality is not defined solely by what we can touch and feel but also by what we see and read. What’s real is already shifting, being redefined, and cast into doubt. We’d be foolish not to anticipate that we will continue down this path in the near future, as existing trends are accelerated by technology.

One thing that seems like a no-brainer is legislation requiring AI-generated content to be tagged. Currently, large technology companies that can and should be regulated are the ones developing the algorithms. Why not require them to label content when it is made entirely by AI?

We should also invest in infrastructure that supports a humanly beneficial understanding of reality. I think most would agree that AI should not be able to scam or outright lie to people. There should be both public and private agencies tasked with identifying these harmful abuses of algorithmic power and protecting people from them.

Finally, and this is far more subjective, I believe that we, as a society, should value human creativity beyond merely a means of producing outputs.

One thing that capitalism has done is financially incentivize creativity. People can monetize their art, enabling them to create more.

But that means that art is also a product to be bought and sold. If AI can more quickly and cheaply create art that appears no different from that which humans can make, one day, humans may no longer be financially compensated to create.

And yet, creativity is one thing that makes life worthwhile. We will need to grapple with this conflict in the future.

How to Anchor Ourselves

We can all choose to practice creativity, read literature, watch old movies, and listen to classic(al) music, and I highly encourage doing so. But that’s not an antidote for what is to come. The Algorithmic Era will soon be upon us, regardless of our individual choices.

Some of the images I have seen being produced by AI are powerful. Already, they have the ability to evoke emotions. When coupled with an algorithm’s understanding of human psychology and ability to ingest all of the public knowledge that has ever been produced, there is no doubt in my mind that AI will create and shape our reality in profound ways in the near future.

We, as a species, are collectively responsible for deciding which elements of our shared reality we want to preserve. We should always ask ourselves what lies behind the algorithm and what its incentives are.

And whenever possible, we can choose the reality that works for all of us, not just a select few.