This is an article I plan to post on my blog tomorrow, but I wanted the opinion of my “community” and your reaction and ideas around this before doing so, in case I see there are things that need to be added or revised. Such is putting things out to the masses, it is good to get an overview from “real world friends” first down in the comments. Thanks
The AI of Human Interaction
The next of my weekly blog series is to look at the changes AI is creating within this simulation, which is AI to the core, but that is another story.
Generally when the fast moving influence AI on our world is being presented, the article will discuss how AI will take jobs from humans, or track and monitor humans, make decisions for governments, or create fake photographs in order to try to give proof to a fake history. All that is true, and has been going on for a long while. Not that much is being said how this will, and is, affecting actual human relationships and interactions. While chat GPT might be getting the main headlines, there are some other areas to touch on with this subject.
A few articles caught my attention recently and so I will share them with you as a starting point for this discussion. The first was an online “ASMR” youtuber who has decided to launch a new virtual chatbot girlfriend for men. These are starting to pop up everywhere, artificial woman that men can pretend to be on dates with. You can already see the trouble this is going to cause.
Real people are not screens, or AI chatbots. And so how does a young man who is connected mostly to a screen at some point learn how to interact with someone who is a real physical form? The obvious answer is they can't. Only by interacting with people can we learn how to interact with them. Granted this is just not a young men problem. Young women have developed another series of issues that distances them from human relationships as well, as they focus on their screens in different ways. For several hundred years the plan was to subvert and invert femininity. In the last 40 years or so, that has shifted to doing the same to masculinity. Now it is all one giant confused mess. And there is no surprise, certainly to someone who has any knowledge of ancient cultures and how they structured their societies, that as this area has broken down, so too has just about everything else broken down.
A sad part of our world is that AI has really infected the male psyche. Over the last twenty years this has been in the explosion of video games. Some of the highest rated channels on youtube are of young men playing video games. Millions of young men and boys are not just playing video games, but they are watching other guys play video games. The point is that there has begun to be a disconnect or young men between interacting with the world, and interacting with their computer screen. The screen is winning. The average time for those spent playing video games in 2022 was almost four hours per day. That is 28 hours per week, or over one complete day in seven spent staring at a screen playing a video game. But when you add that people a similar age are also spending the same amount of time watching television, and more than that staring at a screen for various video clips, entertainment and social media interactions, one must ask just how many total 24 hours days per week are spent by most people just staring at a screen?
Another bizarre article is of a Spanish female artist who is claiming to become the first to marry a hologram-AI.
I have not really found any detail of how she made this hologram or projects it into her apartment. The claim is that she made a hologram of a male, and there is video she made of her interacting with “him.” The strangest of the lot is and video of the hologram guy in the kitchen doing dishes. The end result of course would be, the woman has to do the dishes because a hologram can only give an image of something, not actually doing it. At first I wondered if this artist wedding is just some sort of publicity stunt to showcase the woman's art, which it may well be but given how strange things are getting now, who knows. Another Japanese guy did something similar, marry a hologram a few years ago, but then for some reason there was a power outage and he could no longer “access” his virtual wife. I mean really how insane is this world getting? As this AI girlfriend technology gets better, and more “lifelike” more and more will be drawn into that world.
In my search on AI and its impact on relationships, I came across an odd realization. Do a search for something like “beautiful woman” for example. The go to the images section. You will notice that half of the images are directly AI generated,. Half of all the images that the search brings up are not even photographs of real people anymore. And look at the detail they provide, you have to look real close to even get a sense that it is not an actually photograph, especially when they add background parts to it. It is almost at the point of “can't tell the difference.” For years women have felt they have to compete with “models” (recall the word model defines as “a three dimensional representation of a person, typically on a smaller scale than the original). These models of course have professional makeup, lighting, and clothing applied so they appear different than they normally would. I don't know how many of you have known models or spent time around in them in normal day to day life. They don't look like the images of them. This happened once for me around 25 years ago when a woman I was dating was used in a poster for something (maybe the city newspaper). I was with her every day, and she was a “high maintenance woman” so she spent a good hour on her looks before we went out anywhere, yet she never looked as “perfect” as she did in that poster. It was “her,” yet not “her” at the same time.
The explosion of AI images on the internet has caused women to feel even more insecure about their appearance than previously. Now women have to compete with AI perfected images. I wonder if the current models and actresses realize they are soon going to be phased out, no longer needed, because they will not be able to compete with a computer generated image. And certainly not as cheaply produced as AI- the model and Hollywood actor-actress will be one of the first job casualties.
This is not men's fault, this is the overall plan of the controllers of this place, to make the ability for the masculine and feminine to connect in a healthy way difficult. Why? Because in nature, the connection of the masculine elements and feminine elements are what keeps somewhat of a balance to the natural world.
When you ask the average person if they could define the words feminine and masculine, they may try, but generally will be stereotypical results such as masculine is active and female is passive. Most of such stereotypes are not really true, and neither false, but a type of distortion. False is hard to get people to believe, but distortion (the way of the spiritual marketplace) can be sold for generations. It will get more confusing if you ask people, how is the best way for the masculine and feminine to co-operate and interact with each other most effectively and powerfully? Mostly you will just get stares or a shrug of the shoulders. The main co-operation and relationship the majority of people have to day is with their phone, not with people anymore, so it begins to make sense why so few have ever even thought about this subject.
For the last 50 years or so, women have tended to be judged first on how they look, then secondly how enjoyable they are to be around. Men have tended to be judged first on how much money they make, secondly how they look. Many may try to say that is not the case, but I have seen this play out time and time again. This however is a distortion of reality. And it is one that has been conditioned and programmed (mostly from television “programming”). The distortion is that a main trait women would look for in a man would be in a more ancient setting, does he create safety for me, either by being kind around me, and being able to defend the village from any outward attack. With no outward attacks, and women seemingly been conditioned not to expect kindness anymore, these traits are pushed only into the size of a man's wallet. And men tend to know, if you can't fork out the cash, you won't get forked. On the other side, in a more natural state men are not looking for what a woman looks like per sey, he is looking for the state of a woman's sensuality. By this meaning how connected to feeling and nature is she, how much life does she inject around her, how playful and fun is she to be around. Men in a sense learn sensuality from a sensual female. And a sensual woman always looks better, more vibrant. But this draw to real sensuality has been dropped down to simple base appearance. I went on a few dates in my day with very attractive women, who had a sensuality meter of about 2. Time with them got boring real quick.
If the distortion was seen through and lifted, a lot would change in male-female relations, as looking to “who someone is” would become more important than “what they look like” or “how big are their wallet, penis, boobs” as a main attraction point.
Then there is even the question “what is direct beauty.” I recall reading when doing study on sacred geometry that studies had been done that showed the more an object contained the Golden Section, the more the object was found to be beautiful. The human form is layers upon layers of Golden Sections. The finger joints are Golden Sections, as is the hand to the forearm, the navel to the whole body, and the face might have the most golden sections. Dr. Steven Marquardt even added the relationship of the face with a dodecahedron. The closer these ratios come to 1.618, the more the person will be thought of as beautiful.
Bringing this back to AI here comes the catch. No one out there, even those deemed “stunning” do not have 1.618 for any measure, that would not happen in nature, so one face measure might be 1.619, another 1.6172 etc. Close. With AI making the face, they can make every measure of that face an exact 1.618, check the dodecahedron layout or any other layout the AI sees fit. A real life human, which will never turn out mathematically “perfect” in any area of their construction, is now going to be compared to AI versions of people that look absolutely lifelike and realistic. Side by side most would likely say the AI version and the real person are both real photographs, which means again, real people will now be getting compared to a computer “model.”
I mentioned this all stems from television and movies. Go back and watch a few TV shows in the 60s and 70s. First off Hollywood wanted to make sure that all the women looked good, but the men could be chosen based on the role so looks were secondary. Female actresses did not have that luxury. But go to local bakery or library or service station, people in normal life don't look anything like they do on television. There also for a long while played out the notion of the male having to come save a “damsel in distress” which was again programming for women to act and seem weak, so a man could come and save them.
It got worse with two key genres of television that became overly popular in the time, soap operas and crime dramas. The soap opera was set up for female housewives to distract from a boring day of house routine. And these programs were mostly insane, everyone was manipulating, lying and cheating to everyone all the time. This is how women were taught to think that life should be like, so is it any wonder that family lives began to get more bizarre as the 70s and 80s continued when this (mostly subconscious) programming was being projected into the world. The opposite was the crime drama, real messy situations and nastiness played out week after week, portraying the world is violent and that led to its own level of projection into the society via the subconscious.
I can not think of one television show of the era that showed stable sane people, interacting with each other in clear, harmonious and co-operative ways. Don't think that is some sort of accident, or that would make boring television. If stable and sane is thought of as boring, that tells a lot about the day to say world people are expecting around them.
As I was finishing this article I came across another odd AI website, this one called “insert face.” It is a strange concept. Images are there of men or women in all types of various outfits, be they wedding dresses, golf shirts or Renaissance gowns. The idea is to upload your face, and the allow the site AI to “superimpose” you into the image (to see how you would look in a variety of outfits. Of course I am sure that by uploading an image of your face into the website, that it will definitely be well secured and looked after (sarcasm alert). I was trying to get to the draw of this for people. I mean someone could say, well I was thinking of buying a new suit, and so this way I get to try it on without having to go to a store and try it on, or I wondered how I would look if I was captain of a pirate ship, now I can know. Ok, but you can kind of do that by just taking a photo, and then one of your head and placing over the head in the main image. It won't have the perfect seamlessness of such an AI site, but it would give the “idea” one says they are looking for.
So it can't be that, there must be some other draw for the site.
This is an even bigger problem for young people. Someone 25 or under, has not lived a day of their life where a computer has not been in every home. At least those over 35 have spent some time dealing with life per-computers- having to call a librarian if you had a question you needed an answer to, the need to check a newspaper or tv channel to get a weather report, have to give your friend a phone call or drop by their house to talk to them. And you had to talk to people in some way, no text message quick responses. Just to ask a friend if they were still coming over noon, meant you have to call them or at least leave a voice message on an answering machine. You did not do your banking online, you had to go to the bank and speak to a teller. You tended to get used to one you liked, so yourself up in line to wind up chatting with them every time you went. Little interactions were built in this way in day to day living.
Good luck calling most large businesses today and even getting to talk with a real person, you chat with an AI bot or are forced to send an email.
And this is again not by accident. As the population becomes more mobile, very few people are say 40 years old and still living in the same city, and it so, the same area they grew up. Everyone is moving constantly and as such there is little feeling of rootlessness. No one has 30 or 40 years of interactions and connections, knowing just about everyone you pass on the street, and can share a chat with just about anyone if you feel like it. People feel like aliens wherever they are, have no feeling of roots, and know just about nobody they pass. It makes sense that under such circumstances the AI word would set itself up as way to draw in these people feeling lost in their day to day world, and pull them into what everyone wishes they have (a community of sorts where they feel heard and accepted). That was part of old village or tribal lifestyle. It almost no longer exists now.
That is what the screen and the AI has done, replaced his normal human need for community, interaction, conversation, and just simple belonging. The screen has become a replacement activity, friend, and now in some cases even partner. The blame does not go to the AI developers itself, it is on all the elements that have gone into the splintering of human society and community, to a place where the majority are feeling lonely, alien, misunderstood, ignored, stressed and confused. This advancement of AI is not the cause of any of this, one might call it the next phase of the process of fragmentation.
The only way out of it, is for individuals to in a sense “unplug” from most of it, and begin to go out and seek real world friendships, with real world people, real world communities of like-minded people, and then foster and strengthen them. You can never let go of something (even if you find it negative and addictive) without something healthy ready to replace it. Otherwise the very thing one wants to turn away from, will just get you to circle right back to it, and begin the same process all over again.
This area of discussion is part of an upcoming chapter in the new Exit the Cave 2 book that I am currently completing.
