# How AI breaks our most powerful technology Generative AI is flooding the internet with memes, art, text, music and videos en mass, at higher volume and velocity than human content creator's using non-AI-tools could ever hope to catch up with. The technical quality is getting better and better, making AI generated art often undistinguishable on a surface level from human made art - and no test to distinguish them will work in the long run [[Von der Unmöglichkeit der Testung des Vorhandenseins von Bewusstsein in künstlichen intelligenten Agenten | in the long run]]. Which is bad. Not (only) because how it affects artists. # The demise of the artists Almost no one seems to really care about the artists. Open AI and Sam Altman are currently openly mocking Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, allowing their ChatBots to mass imitate his original and quite recognizable style. Sam Altman even made his X profile picture in the style of Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki once called AI an insult to life itself. Now Sam Altman X profile is adorned with a Studio Ghibli-esque avatar, making a not so subtle statement about the shifting power dynamics in our world. Sam and OpenAI - and millions of users - are showing the old man in Japan and his handcrafted movies, who's boss in town. The power over the culture doesn't belong anymore to the priesthood of artists and poets, it belongs to the oligarchy of the Silicon Valley, which noq claims not only the ownership over the means to distribute but also to create cultural memes. Tough there is some outrage, it is mostly within the artistic and intellectual community. OpenAIs provoking Myazaki to purse a lawsuit against OpenAI, is at least a more effective way to use the fresh capital from SoftBank, than to train another barley improved model. Especially, as the current political climate in the USA would make a win for OpenAI, and therefore a loss for every creative creator and copyright holder rather likely. But: To be frank, most humans have never and still don't care that much about the well-being of the artists and creators, whose produce they consume. They ignore most, and idolize a few like gods in a mass psychotic frenzy. (Yes, i am referring to the Swifties among others ...). In popular perception, the creator if untalented and unsuccessful is an embarrassment, a sad and delusional animal; if talented and successful a biest or a god - but rarely a human being. Even those artists praised for being communicators of the authentic human experience, are more treated as wise spirits than mere mortals. But this is so, because culture, the collective exchange of ideas, memes, storys and vibes - it's something sacred. It's a temple build from abstractions, with the priesthood of poets and artists as the hitherto guiding architects. Culture, the intricate web of shared ideas, memes, stories, and emotional resonances, is more than mere entertainment; its a mirror, which allowed humanity to recgonize itself and coordinate and communicate knowledge. This capacity for social coordination through culture is what makes humans unique in the animal kingdom, it is what makes us different, makes us human. # Culture as a technology The creation of language and with it culture, allowed us to not only evolve through the bloody mess of natural selection and the slow grind of biological evolution, but to escape those biological shackles. It allowed us to pass down and accumulate knowledge, insights and technology from one person to the next, across generations and then centuries and aeons. It also allowed us to coordinate across time and space, create identities and ideologies, which made mass societies possible. Without culture, we could have never left the little caves and tribes. Without culture we would have never created nation states and empires, not to speak of semiconductors. Culture is the most powerful technology humanity ever created. Even more powerful than fire, because without culture, the knowledge of how to make and use fire, would be lost and rediscovered again and again, making the progress from a camp fire to a space rocket impossible. Culture is what allows large groups of people to adapt to each other and to the environment - and as the environment shifted rapidly over the last decades, it was easy and necessary to dismiss old cultural values as outdated tradtions; yet to replace and recreate values and guidance is not that easy. The cracking and increasingly disfunctionality of our cultural tools to deal with the world, is what contributes to the epidemics of loneliness, declining birthrates and so on. Old traditions don't work as guidance anymore, lead to wrong conclusions and selfdestructive behaviour. Yet, unrestrained dislodging from all values, is a common pathway to addictions and social disfunctionality. Culture as a collectively maintained and created technology was and is so effective, because every cherished artifact contributed to it's endless universes of ideas, is the expression of a more or less genuine human experience. Even if it is full of lies, it reveals something about what it means to be human. Every song about heartbreak resonating among many, every book reflecting on the terrors of war or the simple experience of quite despair, every romance full of hope, every picture taken of a special moment ... Every cultural artefact is an act of communication, where a real human being communicates his or her understanding of the world to the rest of humanity, so that they can not only enjoy, but also learn. Every artwork encodes experiences and scripts, heuristics and maps of meaning for navigating the opaque and confusing world. # Why AI can't produce really meaningful art Real art is the kind of art that gives words, forms and picture to experiences and insights into what it is like to be human, which have never been articulated before. This is why AI/LLMs can't create really deeply moving and visionary art, just technically well made, but souless slop. They may shuffle around symbols and words, but LLMs abilities is are mostly limited to mix and derive their output based on the output of humans, which is itself a incomplete expression of what it is like to be a human... Of the deep and dark oceans of humanities collective and individual psychology, LLMs and other AI System can barley shuffle around the recordings of the waves, but even the artificial creation of impressive waves, isn't a recreation of the miles of ocean beneath. Cultural artefacts are all more or less valuable, more or less authentic, contributions to the pile human culture and civilization. They have an epistemic property, functioning as maps of meaning for the world. To sort through this pile is the epistemic labour all the bilions of people on this planet - past and present - are taking part of. # The pollution of the collective epistemic landscape The task of contributing, sorting, filtering and refining the cultural artefacts created, to put them in their place, got already harder due to the internets disruptions. The advent of the internet complicated the task of contributing to and navigating the cultural landscape - it made it easier to contribute, but it incentive structures lead to constant disruption and transgression, as the ragebait give that sweet algorithmic push towards more attention and money. Social media platforms, while offering unprecedented opportunities for connection, facilitated the proliferation of content that lacks substance, relevance, or genuine insight, serving primarily as a source of distraction. Instead of engaging with the profound beauty and complexity of a novel, a sculpture, or a painting, we risk becoming numbed by an endless stream of fleeting stimuli. Social media just allowed the cultural landscape to be filled with shit, that doesn't relate to reality, doesn't teach or enlighten, but merely distracts. Instead of being awed by the brilliance of a novel, a statue or a painting, we get numbed in the brave new world of doomscrolling by a endless stream of stimuli bombarding our cortex to exhaustion. The challenge is compounded by the mass production of seemingly authentic cultural artifacts by AI bots. However, they lack genuine emotional depth or intellectual insight, merely amplifying the biases and desires of the users or developers. AI bots can in mass forge cultural artefacts like texts, essays, pictures and so on, which may seem like genuine human creation ... But they express little or nothing, maybe amplify and express the feelings and ideas of the person using the AI Tool to create content, but overall, the produce is souless - not in some mystic religious sense, but as it is the expression of a deeper human sociobiopsychological structure, but merely the imitation of such a expression based on recordings of such expressions. The flooding of Social Networks with content generated by mindless AI bot networks, which just try to farm human attention to monetize it, is disrupting the cultural pool of artefacts. AI generated content that looks like it is human made, is the worst, as it give the illusion of being a valuable expression, and act of communication and contribution to the expansion of human culture and knowldge, by a real human being. But it isn't. It's a pollutant. It isn't an expression about what is like to be a human. it's mixed up statistical noise, fine tuned towards highly appealing mediocrity, ready for consumption. It signifies to the void, but offers no meaningful maps for the human being outside of the symbolic world. How will we know in a few years time how real humans feel and how to live life like real humans, when all the cultural artefacts will be just mindless and soulless excrements of massproduced AI content machines? Only by reading classics and talking with real humans, we will be able to maintain the powerful technology which is culture - but subsequently, it would stagnate, become unfit to deal with the present, and finally break under the endless mass of AI generated slop. The decay of our culture, it's destructive flooding with AI generated content, it's almost inevitable, the incentives are set. # What to do When Rome is burning, you can play the game and join the hobbesian battlefields, or you can flee to Byzantium - given there is one in our global village. As the world we are moving into becomes more and more dystopian on the sociopsychological front, i am reminded of the visions that haunted blind Milton, while London burned in 1666. I am reminded of his vision of the fallen angels speech, who would set humanity free and on it's cultural path towards what we once thought to be enlightenment: 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven' And so, yes—I make AI-generated music now and use AIs as a leverage, to speed up my coding projects, automate workflows, to maximize my output. We all will have to become AI augmented crushers or become crushed. A bit different developement than the one I anticipated and imagined in my 2019 review of GPT-2 [[Künstliche Intelligenz und Das Ende des Kapitalismus]] to be honest. But my novels? Every word still mine. And this essay, too— tipped by two real human hands, still grasping for something true in a world filling fast with ghosts.