0x16 LOG: I ❤️ AI but...

I’ve been a fan of Andrew Bustamante’s EveryDaySpy podcast since inception. He ported his years of experience and training in the CIA’s clandestine service to deliver tips and tricks for hacking everyday life, like a spy… His content was interesting, inspiring and most importantly authentic. And to no surprise, his humble beginnings has exploded over the past ~6 or 7 years, from mere podcaster to an exploding thought leader empire of training, books, media talking head and much more.

However, as a fan I was saddened to read of his recent decision to RAG all his notes, avatar his likeness and turn on the AI slop machine to go BRRR.

And to be clear, I don’t fault Andy for selling out. Growth and scaling is hard and every entrepreneur with a great product (themselves) will arrive at this crossroad. However, the media personality AI powered walkaway feels ick and reminds me of a pop culture icon that mimicked the future of humanoid media personalities, which never landed… Max Headroom.

Some may recognize this 1980’s pop culture icon, but like me, you probably recognize the 2000’s era throwbacks such as Eminem’s Rap God music video. But, because of those brief memories, when a Youtube video popped into my feed about him 4 years ago, I got to learn about the rise and fall of pop culture icon Max Headroom.

Max Headroom was billed as “the first computer-generated TV personality”. He was flashy (representing the 1980’s zeitgeist), he stuttered (representing glitchiness of computers of the day) and introduced edgy, provocative satire in attempt to represent how artificial intelligence would understand and commentate on our world. Max had some success in the UK, insert dry British humour comment here, however when he landed in the US he was cancelled before the second season concluded.

Why? Authenticity.

Max was meant to represent a hyper intelligent synthetic being, yet the production felt inauthentic. Rather than feeling futuristic and believable, the dichotomy of a guy in prosthetics acting like a sarcastic computer inadvertently ventured into a kind of “uncanny valley problem”, which left audiences alienated.

Now fast forward to the future, our present, we are in the midst of the inverse problem: the authenticity of human to human interactions, whether it be work product or entertainment is under siege. While I have cringed at the growing problem of AI Slop people submit as their own, the AI-ification of talking heads of the people we work with, learn from and trust… Is a harbinger of #darkfuture ahead.

We are in the “AIpocene”, a brave new era of generative AI’s shiny veneer of WOW, that is also introducing novel risks and consequences that none of us can fully fathom, until it is too late. At a very basic level, we have an authenticity crisis of truth and reality that is going to become more and more challenging to discern fact from fiction and only exacerbate the societal deterioration we have observed as of late.

📽️ Youtube is now flooded with Sora clickbait, which is funny for now, but an existential threat to our collective “reality” and “truth”. If you thought the fake news and truthiness stupidity over the past 10 years has impacted society, hold on to your butts! Because, your reality, algorithmically customized for you, will be so vivid that all other realities will be wrong. Digging bunker now.

💩 The integrity of our collective knowledge is at stake with lazy people polluting every website, academic paper and work product with beautiful echo chamber word salad aka #AISlop. This is killing the Internet as we know it today, it poisons our academic knowledge and most scary contaminates our economy’s inputs and outputs (business data) with believable inaccuracies at best, but much more dire, bad data that has and will continue to cause actual harm. I have the receipts.

👥 AND NOW, the humans we interactive with, we subscribe to, learn from, and admire are outsourcing the very essence of the relationship: being human. And I am not OK with this. 😢

1️⃣ I challenge all to leverage AI as a force multiplier and be transparent on your usage. If you aren’t comfortable bragging about your AI exploits, you are probably using it to do your homework aka cheating and contributing to the problem above.

2️⃣ I challenge all to call out lazy AI Slop at work, school and play. The lazy use of AI is a pollution to our knowledge and a cancer to our society.

3️⃣ I challenge all to👎, unsubscribe, and be choosy what your eye balls consume when it comes to AI generated content. Subscribe to Substacks, Patreons, etc. where real people are creating real content.

🔗 Subscribe to my Youtube channel here

Let me know what you think—and if you have topics or people I should feature, drop a comment! Let’s dig into the future.