I posted my holiday shots on Instagram and no one believes they're real
Not too long ago, I found myself in Switzerland. I had just celebrated a milestone birthday and decided that a suitable way to mark reaching a mildly terrifying age was to view some very impressive mountains up close. And when I say up close, I mean from the safety and comfort of an air-conditioned train carriage.
Most of the two-hour journey was frankly breathtaking: perfectly hydrated green valleys, sugar-dusted mountains and small herds of cows that looked as though they had been grazing on Valium-infused grass. I hadn't intended to pull out my phone and start filming videos like a basic tourist, but that is what I did. And then, in an even more basic tourist move, I uploaded those videos to my Instagram stories.
My partner, a truly empathic and thoughtful person, has a policy of not posting photographic evidence of holidays on social media because he doesn't want to make other people feel bad about not being on holiday. (Yes, I know – he is too pure for this world.) I, on the other hand, am a few rungs down on the evolutionary ladder, and have been known to post a small selection of holiday highlights on Instagram. I do set myself some guidelines, though: I don't post every day (I don't want to be unfollowed, or worse, hate-followed), and I try not to clog people's feeds with generic, postcard-style photos. But something about the way the sun hit those Alps on that day, coupled with access to a miniature bottle of Schnapps, made me hurl my self-imposed rulebook over a metaphorical rainbow. Thus began my posting spree.
I wasn't expecting much of a reaction to my videos, maybe a few little red hearts fizzing upwards in that cute way of theirs, or some vague exclamations of delight from people who still tolerated me even though I was rudely posting my holiday on Instagram. Instead, I received a handful of friendly but incredulous direct messages, wanting to know if the videos were real. To be fair, the scenery did look as though it had been subjected to digital interference. Had I not sat on that train recording mountains with one hand while thrusting chocolate into my face with the other, I, too, would have assumed that the videos were AI-generated. I reassured everyone that not only were the images very real, they didn't even require a filter. I ended my message to each of my benign inquisitors with my customary sign-off: #blessed. (Just kidding – only a Millennial would do that.)
Being duped by an AI-generated image reminds me of the time a student offered me what I thought was a Lindt ball but actually turned out to be a perfectly spherical glob of Blu Tack in a Lindt ball wrapper. That's what AI images feel like to me – a gross, old piece of Blu Tack in a shiny wrapper handed to me by a budding psychopath. Lately, whenever I'm confronted with a display of stupendous beauty on social media, my first instinct is to suspect AI and to curse the grubby little way it messes with my head. I worry that, sooner or later, we'll all stop asking 'Is this even real?' because we'll just assume that it isn't. And we won't even care any more.
There was a time, not so long ago, when I still believed everything I saw on my feed. In the murky depths of lockdown, I fell in love with a photo of a Gaudi-inspired pink house and promptly added it to my mental bucket list. But a few months later, when I tried to locate the house online, it turned out to be nothing but a big glob of Blu Tack sculpted by a digital psychopath that had never had its heart broken by anyone or anything.
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AI does not care about you, your heart, or the planet: ChatGPT chews up 10 times more electricity than a ye olde Google search, burning fossil fuels in the process. Moreover, the infrastructure required to run AI data centres consumes ungodly amounts of water, which is a problem in a world where a quarter of the population suffers from insufficient access to it. Maybe we should keep this in mind the next time we feel the urge to see a dog in human form, or a human in dog form, or to be reassured by an AI therapist that we are not narcissists but the people who mistreat us definitely are.
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