I have a confession to make: I’m a sucker for a cute animal video. Cat videos, dog videos, that dude who teases his dog with all the delicious bacon in his fridge (which he bestows, with exquisite cruelty, upon the cat). I love them all. But it’s a pastime in which I no longer partake. Because what’s the point? Everything is now likely AI-generated, and even if it’s not, you can’t be sure, which robs you of any innocent enjoyment.
Well done, everyone. Pop the champagne, which is actually just discounted spumante.
It is such an unavoidable sour note of life here at the end of our civilisation that I cannot understand why the Germans have not yet engineered a new word to describe it (they haven’t, I checked). But I’m confident something is coming down the Autobahn. Ersatzenttäuschung, perhaps, for “the disappointment of the substitute”: the deflation of discovering that what seemed authentic was counterfeit, the melancholy of the unreal.
That increasingly common experience — the moment of uncomplicated delight curdling into something irksome and unwanted — got me again last week. This time, it was CCTV footage of a grizzly bear bringing its ailing cub to a vet surgery where it had been treated previously. I don’t know why I was suddenly overcome with aesthetic nausea when watching it, but a quick check confirmed my suspicion: it was slop. I swore off animal videos forever.
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Why does this admittedly minor deceit feel so much like personal treachery at the level of the gonads? As an author, I tell lies for a living, after all. That’s what fiction is: the long lie; the sustained con. Sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes grotesque, but it’s always a lie. Movies and television are the same: they’re not real; none of these people exists.
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An episode of Neagley doesn’t leave me irrationally angry that Neagley couldn’t win a brawl in a stairwell with a hired killer twice her size, nor does Slow Horses make me seeth that Jackson Lamb couldn’t possibly break into the townhouse of MI5’s Diana Taverner without being punished for serious violations of the civil service code of conduct. I’m pretty sure Taverner isn’t the head of MI5 either; I clearly remember seeing her in Four Weddings and a Funeral when we were both younger. But of course I have consented to be lied to by Kristin Scott Thomas. I consented to being assaulted with all sorts of kinetic nonsense by Neagley.
But there is often nothing consensual in the exchange between a producer of AI-generated content and its consumer. That doesn’t have to be a universal rule. The briefly ubiquitous Iranian Lego videos lampooning Donald Trump didn’t disguise their nature or intent, and in their candour we were free to take our pleasure, perhaps even our Schadenfreude. They were a perfectly fine use of an accursed technology. But it is Ersatzenttäuschung that most likely awaits us after clicking play on their bastard siblings: the AI-generated fake videos pretending to be real.
All this Germanising raises the possibility that what we feel, at the moment of the dupe, is a sense of unheimlich, the uncanny, which Freud said calls forth feelings of repulsion and even creeping horror. The maximum headshrinker, mogging a lesser-known poster called Ernst Jentsch, traced these feelings back to a lack of certainty, so that “the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were.” (It sounds very convincing if you really crank up your stagey Viennese accent and suggestive beard stroking.) The better oriented and more firmly we are bolted into the world of real things, said Freud, the less purchase the uncanny has on us.
Until that fake grizzly bear turns up.
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I don’t know that we need to go spelunking all the way down into the subconscious to locate the root of the slightly sick-making violation in being deceived by a machine. As so much of our lives has migrated online, one of the fragile but deeply significant goods we have lost is trust. Because everything in the digital realm is so easily transformed, we can never know what’s real. We can never trust the ones and zeroes.
Our faith in everything has eroded over the past 50 years; in church and state, in science, in the media, in authority, in expertise. We could at least huddle tightly together in the shared enjoyment of pointless little flimsies, like Grumpy Cat or videos of dogs dressed as giant spiders scaring the shit out of random strangers. But even that has been taken from us and fed into the ravenous maw of the content hellmouth.
It’s like finding out that none of those dads actually got punched in the nuts by any of those toddlers on Australia’s Funniest Home Videos. It was all a lie, and they weren’t even actors. They were just pixels, extruded by algorithms, to excite the dopamine pathways of eight billion primates with email addresses, credit card numbers and no agency. That’s what you’re feeling when the grizzly bear shambles onto your phone screen: that something has been taken from you.