When I look back over my life, a decade or two from now, when I finally succumb to the strontium smog, I’ll at least be able to pinpoint the moment when I first knew human civilisation was doomed. Ah yes, I’ll think, as I hear scavengers scuttling towards my body across the trashscape, grunting and hooting for meat: that was the moment. That Friday evening, way back in the middle of 2023, when I was spooning out the usual overcooked pasta for the usual undercooked children and I asked them what they’d been up to.
‘We found this hilarious thing on YouTube,’ my oldest said. ‘It was, like, this AI-generated video of Boris Johnson eating raw onions.’ Was, like, what? ‘Yes,’ chipped in the second oldest. ‘WHOLE raw onions. It’s hilarious!’
Not only is AI producing an infinite sludge of meaningless sort-of-art, it’s using algorithms to serve it up
It turned out they’d been watching this one on repeat – as well as the decontextualised clip from some interview (a real interview) in which he claimed to have cooked steak and oven chips the previous night and done so with an explosive enthusiasm that the kids seemed to find extremely funny.
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