The same as what is happening now. Manipulation of the media has been a thing since before the internet.
It’s true that manipulation of information has been the practice of the powerful for a long time, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the degree or scale to which it’s been possible to do has remained the same. As an analogy, consider that both knives and nuclear bombs have the ability to kill people while having quite different implications, particularly with regard to the health and flourishing of our species.
Obviously AI isn’t all bad. It’s not even “bad”. It just is. But the blast radius of a Bad Decision by a Bad Actor is much wider if armed with these new tools.
Take the social isolation, introversion, mental health, and suicidality of a generation raised on smart phones. Now multiply those maladies ten fold.
Exactly what I was thinking. Like even though you won’t realize it, having all your entertainment only manipulate you into spending money while being samey soulless slop probably will screw up your mind in several ways. Honestly I think AI shouldn’t be used in professional entertainment media at all, and especially not children’s media, nor should it be used in advertising.
Not far off from what already happens from the race-to-the-bottom popular content found on YouTube, in f2p games, and on social media.
AI slop will get better at grabbing, holding, and harvesting attention. Kids will grow up on it and adults will get comfy with it, shortening attention spans. They’ll end up under-educated and under-ambitious, leading to a more gullible, more anti-intellectual population.
I don’t have any sources to cite, it’s all vibes. I’m already a product of manipulative media. 💀 That, and some of this is exaggerated inter-generational grumpiness.
(This is not even touching on the potential for propaganda that a lot of other answers are getting at.)
Well let’s find out…
Let’s, uh, not, actually
I don’t think it’s a good thing! It just seems to be inevitable…
They could be the first generation to grow up “GenAI Savvy” kind of like how early internet kids developed pretty decent online critical thinking compared to previous (and unfortunately, subsequent) generations.
Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality comes to mind.
Hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality.
However, after thinking up some doom and gloom shit about the future, I reversed course: Why speculate about future kids when most of us grew up with a manipulative media diet? Saturday morning cartoons were wildly manipulative, the emergence of social media damaged a lot of people’s expectation of reality, and the last three election cycles in the US were heavily impacted by the ability of certain populists to generate memes.
AI will speed up the content generation process and introduce some absurd elements like six-fingered watch models, but I don’t think it will be more manipulative than media already is, just weirder and faster.
My ultimately positive forecast: the kids of the future will create their own networked spaces outside of the mainstream internet and just continue on with their lives ignoring what doesn’t interest them and seeking out what does. Regardless, we’ll never understand it anyway.
