AI and the future of faith

Some months ago, Meta announced that it intends to fill Instagram with slop. This would include fake AI-generated video content from fake AI-generated creators. Fake AI-generated commenters would then leave fake AI-generated feedback on these posts and quite possibly, even have a back-and-forth with other fake AI-generated bots like them.

This isn’t decorative use of AI for the benefit of people. This isn’t a tool to enrich the lives of real human creators and consumers. This seems to be more a replacement of the human being from every part of the social equation.

If you are not fake or AI-generated, what position do you occupy in this new unreality?

Whether we like it or not, we are all prone to thinking of our social feeds as a representation of the real world. We look at our videos, reels, shorts, Tiktoks and tweets and form our opinions. In time, we form beliefs about the reality we live in. Then we act in accordance with those beliefs and engage with the world.

When literally everything we see on our social feeds is machine-generated bullshit (at great cost to the environment I might add), what kind of opinions will we form on their basis? What will be the worldviews that will be inculcated in our minds? What will be the beliefs that shape our future?

More importantly, will there be any beliefs at all?

Mysteries of our own making

As an atheist on the internet, I write and speak a lot about beliefs, their nature, their impact on society, and how mass adoption of certain beliefs has shaped the course of human civilisations – for better or worse – right from the days of the first proto-human tribes (as far as modern anthropology can tell). Strange and unreal ideas about the nature of reality spread from mind to mind until they created societies full of people who thought they were chosen by a cosmic being or beings to be masters of the natural world but were also subject to the unseen will of their gods.

These religious ideas were pervasive, so much so that despite the scientific revolution and the powerful light it shone on the question of human origin and nature of the human condition, they managed to persist by making use of our tribal natures and all the cultural scaffolding that rose around it. This tribal nature comes from our evolutionary history. It meant that in order to survive, we don’t have to be strong or fast or even smart. We just have to agree with members of our tribe and our collective strength will provide all the protection and resources we need. Our reliance on our tribal nature has been so great that it has managed to sideline even our understanding of physical reality. As long as we are in alignment with the reigning dogmas of our society, our religion, our caste, or our race, we will be safe from most threats.

Perhaps it is time to wonder what shape these reigning dogmas are going to take in this incoming age of meaninglessness. I know it seems like we cannot agree on anything in a time when lies are called truth, cowards are called brave, and dangerous ignorance is lauded as wisdom. But agree we will, because we have to. It is the foundation of the human social condition. So what exactly will we need to agree with in order to have access to the tribal safety net? What is the unifying thread running through all the bewildering AI slop? What single message is silently being broadcast from behind the scenes of all the social media feeds where no humans and no signs of humanity exist, except as generous approximation