by James Corbett corbettreport.com February 19, 2023 It's official: the chatpocalypse is upon us! Just ask our <sarc>friends</sarc> over at The New York Times: "A Conversation With Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled" Or consult the <sarc>experts</sarc> over at
corbettreport.substack.com
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Yes, it will start with the celebrity deepfakes at first, but soon there will be shadowy new cyberterror groups deepfaking politicians to destabilize countries or deepfaking CEOs to wreak havoc in markets or deepfaking bank officials to gain access to bank databases or deepfaking Auntie Florence to scam you out of $100. And, as some perceptive Corbett Reporteers have
already surmised, that will lead to the pre-made "solution": a digital identity to access the internet! Finally, we can prove who we really are online! (Actually, you'll be forced at all times to prove who you are online or you won't get to be online, but that's the fine print you're not supposed to read.)
But perhaps even worse than finding out that a chatbot and deepfake technology has generated a completely fake episode of your favourite podcast is an even more worrying scenario. These "chatbots"—which will soon be rolled out as "digital assistants" and become as ubiquitous as Siri and Alexa are now—will be able to determine your likes, your interests, your weaknesses and begin to create completely new content (new podcasts featuring people who don't even exist) saying things that you will find endlessly entertaining. You will soon live in a
filter bubble so unique that it exists entirely to captivate you . . . and the people who believe they will be able to resist such content will be precisely the people most easily captured by it.
In fact, just as Huxley feared the
Brave New World of entertainment and diversion more than he feared the boot-in-the-face tyranny of
1984, so, too, might our dread of the apocalyptic war against the robots be misplaced. Maybe we should not fear the
Terminator-style showdown of Skynet vs. The Resistance so much as we should fear the world of Spike Jonez'
Her, a world in which "operating systems" become more real to us than people and having a computer program as a romantic partner will be commonplace."
babylonbee.com
