being stuck in an echo chamber

of Taylor Swift, genocide, and your own voice

Non Fiction, 2020

Have you met the new kids on the block? The ones I’m referring to are, of course, Meta’s group of friendly AI bots that bear the same faces and voices of our beloved celebrities (who only sold their likeness for a couple of cool million). We have Kendall Jenner, pretending to be “billie”, aka “your local ride or die”, who posts pictures of food, streets, and beard-bro cabins like the rest of us.

Except everything obviously looks fake. People are catching onto this, with the account’s engagement steadily dropping and every comment pointing out how creepy it is. This is the space of the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley refers to the phenomenon where the more something looks like and pretends to be human, the less affinity you’ll have for it. So, the closer AI gets to being like us, the more cold and distant we’ll feel toward it. The exciting thing about the memoir is that it doesn’t come across as any anti-AI cry, partly because things like ChatGPT didn’t exist when it was written, but partly because Anna Wiener is focused on something much more interesting: how we—but particularly “tech-bros”—keep modifying and updating ourselves for maximum optimisation. In other words, she is less concerned with human-like AI and is more focused on AI-like humans.

Uncanny Valley is the feeling of staring into your phone for so long that the world feels disorienting when you look up from it, or it’s like hiking some of the vastest landscapes only to meet your step count. It is “overwhelming myopia.” I picked it up for cheap voyeuristic thrills (and publishing bashing) but stayed for sentences so clean they could crack a screen in two.

Song - 1 Hour Hyper-Focus: Beta Waves for Concentration & Memory, Increase IQ

Film - The Lobster