Some notes on how culture is responding to generative AI
A scanner run from late 2024-early 2025
Greetings from a weirdly snowy northern Virginia. I hope readers similarly afflicted are staying warm and dry.
Today I’d like to share results of one of my regular horizon scans, this time looking at artificial intelligence in the domain of culture. How are we responding to AI through stories, art, religion, relationships, media, and symbols?
A heads up: readers might find some of these stories entertaining and/or disturbing, depending on your predilections.
To start on a light note, here’s a cute short video imagining digital assistants being unhappy with ChatGPT:
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I appreciate the historical jokes, including a quiet nod to Ask Jeeves.
Religion A Swiss Christian church set up an installation wherein users/believers could ask questions of an AI-backed representation of Jesus. A Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts IT staffer trained software on religious texts, then set up hardware in a confessional. The precise technology used was as follows:
the AI responsible for taking the role of “AI Jesus” and generating responses was GPT-4o by OpenAI, and an open-source version of the company’s Whisper was used for speech comprehension.
An AI video generator from Heygen was used to produce voice and video from a real person…
Experiences varied, according to a Guardian article:
feedback from more than 230 users suggested two-thirds of them had found it to be a “spiritual experience”, said Schmid. “So we can say they had a religiously positive moment with this AI Jesus. For me, that was surprising.”
Others were more negative, with some telling the church they found it impossible to talk to a machine. One local reporter who tried out the device described the answers as, at times, “trite, repetitive and exuding a wisdom reminiscent of calendar cliches”.
AI for dating In an interview the founder of dating app Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Hurd, offered the idea that people on the dating scene might have their AIs interact first, before the humans met in person, in order to screen out less desirable connections. She imagines thusly:
“You could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge and you could share your insecurities: ‘I just came out of a break-up.’ ‘I’ve commitment issues.’ It could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself. And then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people.”
“If you want to get really out there, there’s a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge[s]…And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It can scan all of San Francisco for you and say ‘these are the three people you really ought to meet.’”
There’s video of the moment here.
The audience and interviewer reacted with humor and disbelief, although it’s easy to imagine many people who would gladly pay for such a feature: the very busy, the very skittish, those wanting to appear avant-garde. The obvious cultural touchstone for today’s readers is Black Mirror, but as a lifelong science fiction reader, I’m reminded of Fred Pohl’s “Day Million”.
Blending art and science with AI An MIT researcher published about his AI-enabled interdisciplinary work, using software to build elaborate graphs from a database of scientific research. The initial idea was to find connections and productive gaps in the corpus, but then creative inspiration struck. At times he used this approach to produce art, turning graph structures into more material ones:
Then comes the idea of using AI to identify similar graphs between science and art:
we find that different domains of knowledge might have underlying structural similarities when it comes to how we categorize and relate concepts, even if the domains themselves have not yet been related or are not understood to be related, as of yet. This structural similarity could be used to apply analytical techniques from one field to another. For instance, methodologies used to understand and analyze the structure of music could potentially be adapted to understand or design the structure of bioinspired materials, or vice versa.
Which leads to turning paintings into inspiration for materials science:
Hollywood keeps wanting to make scary AI movies It looks like studios fought hard to buy a first script from a first-time writer. The topic: AI out of control, naturally
Alignment is described as having the urgency of thrillers such as Margin Call and Contagion and takes place in a 36-hour period. It tells of a board member at a booming AI company who wrestles with corporate politics and warped incentives as he tries to prevent his colleagues’ willful ignorance from causing a global catastrophe.
Being Hollywood, it’s anyone’s guess if they’ll make the movie. And if they do, if it’ll bear any resemblance to that description. But it’s another datapoint about the movies loving stories about fearsome automation.
One influencer gets friendly with AI Kim Kardashian (sigh) recently did a photoshoot with a bunch of robots, often backed by AI. This reminded me of the classic movie Crash (no, not that one) in terms of physical intimacy between humans and machines, yet is sadder, more flimsy, less intense and risky.
Our changing attitudes towards AI An American Federal Reserve bank asked people about their AI use and attitudes. The results fascinated me.
For one, note the profile of people more likely to use ChatGPT: male and with college degrees, yes, as one might expect, but also not white. In fact, people of all other races were more likely to use the application than Caucasians:
In terms of attitudes, on the plus side, tech users thought they could use generative AI to improve their skills. On the downside, people thought AI would exacerbate income inequality while reducing the number of available jobs.
Conspiracy theories doing more with AI A few months ago one particular conspiracy theory circulated, claiming that president Joe Biden was dead or incapacitated. Therefore what we saw giving speeches and press conferences must obviously be AI-generated.
Obviously this is lunacy, but an interesting sign of AI ascending into the mythic realm occupied by other entities with superhuman powers, like Elvis, the CIA, Freemasons, and black helicopters.
Let me conclude with another entertaining item: a group of people using generative AI to slightly… extend scenes from Hollywood movies. (The tech behind it: Hailuoai.)
What can we deduce from this quick tour of the horizon?
I haven’t assembled enough materials this time to enable a deep dive into our cultural response to AI, but there are some interesting stories and datapoints to consider.
We greet generative AI with a healthy amount of fear and anxiety, especially as the tech appears in sensitive areas, such as romance, religion, and work.
There’s a lot of creativity in our responses, from comedy to interdisciplinary thinking to a range of storytelling. We, even (sigh) a Kardashian, exhibit some playfulness around the technology.
We are capable of engaging AI with intimacy. I’ve previously insisted on the importance, if not necessarily the quality, of user interactions with character bots. Now notice these items’ accounts of people taking spiritual questions to a bot, or posing in a sexual way with robots.
Demographics have some influence in our apprehension of AI and we need more research into this.
There’s a *lot* going on in these responses as we grapple with the rapidly developing technology. We’re still working up norms, tropes, mores, and schools of thought about generative AI. Perhaps these stories give us glimpses of what’s starting to surface.
(Right now I’m working on a book chapter about AI and higher education’s future. One idea keeps gnawing at me, that generative AI is emerging into an information technology stratum which exists throughout civilization, but not as a global tech. It’s unevenly present, unevenly used, perhaps analogous to ebooks. More on this later.)
(thanks to Jesse Walker for one cool link)