One positive outcome of AI might be that, as a society, we move away from the drive toward the ideal, and move back to authenticity and realness. That might help swing the pendulum back away from the glitzy TikTok, Insta, and YouTube worlds that have already created a crisis in mental health, especially among teenagers.
I think it could go like this. Generative AI platforms, especially those that generate imagery (ChatGPT, Sora, Gemini, etc.), have quickly flooded the social media markets with shiny, uncanny-valley-esque imagery that is the hallmark of AI-generated content right now. Even as the models get better at creating more “neutral” looking artifacts, more people will be creating more artifacts overall, and in general I’d expect a kind of “sheen” on things for quite a while.
If that’s the case, then it might be that the overly glammed, super stylized, selective lens that is TikTok, Instagram, and the like will be lumped into that group, seen as another kind of fake.
It could be, then, that as a society, we swing back toward a healthier, more grounded, and more human-centric view of ourselves, which can only be a better trend for our collective mental health.
Who would have thought that it would have been the robots that made us more human?