Every generation struggles with new technology. When innovation promises to streamline our lives, there are always critics bemoaning the loss of the good old days. Ten years after Google search was released, The Atlantic’s Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr observed that his attention span as a professional writer was declining, which he attributed to repeated Googling. Where in the past, Carr could spend hours reading complicated prose, now he could only truly focus on a handful of pages of academic text at a time. Today’s Brunonians may find even Carr’s three-page reading capacity impressive. Just like Carr was addicted to the answers Google gave him, we are addicted to the entertainment Instagram and TikTok provide us. This may have devastating consequences for our generation.
A fifth of first-year students surveyed said they use AI to streamline their academic work, even when not permitted to do so. Furthermore, the vast majority of us spend over three hours of free time per day on a screen. Of social media platforms, Instagram and TikTok reign supreme.
Surprisingly, despite this overwhelmingly digital lifestyle, over half of first-year students also have a somewhat negative or very negative opinion of the increasing prevalence of generative AI. When it comes to social media, this mistrust is warranted due to the ease with which misinformation spreads with the help of deepfakes. This skepticism has to be channelled into healthier screen time habits before we are knee-deep in an artificial reality we can’t even recognize.
Last week, a friend showed me an Instagram reel of a figure skater performing a triple axel. It was impressive but uncanny — the skater’s wrist was twisted back at an unnatural angle and her uniform displayed the name of a nonexistent country. Still, if he hadn’t pointed out that the video was AI-generated and posted by an automated account with thousands of similarly generated reels, I would never have noticed the flaws in the three seconds I spent before swiping to the next video.
While I’m unlikely to be harmed by clips of figure skating tricks, what worries me is AI’s improvements in both ease of use and its accurate replication of human likeness. Although deepfakes have been around for almost a decade, generating them was no easy task. Now, anyone can create these videos at an incredible scale with OpenAI’s Sora 2 and similar tools. Because AI models are trained on videos and content that already exist on the internet, these generated videos often repeat and amplify the same darkness — racism and sexism under the guise of entertainment — which poisons the web.
AI’s function as a mirror for human bias has already proved dangerous, and even deadly. Adam Raine, a teenager using ChatGPT as a therapist, died by suicide after confiding in the chatbot instead of a human support network. The technology’s tendency to affirm the user’s inputs fails the most vulnerable in our society — including young people who are still finding their values, responses to challenges and sense of purpose in life. Imagine a child scrolling on Sora 2, OpenAI’s entirely AI-generated social media app, and viewing the exact videos they ask for — entering a rabbit hole of their own creation.
Intentional disinformation also spreads more easily when supercharged with generative AI. In CSCI 0150: “Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science,” students are shown examples of political campaigns conducted with AI generated content, such as the infamous Obama deepfakes. When political figures malign their adversaries on the national stage, less informed social media users may be easily convinced by the argumentative tone and realistic visuals. Our elderly relatives are especially vulnerable to this kind of misinformation, but that doesn’t mean college students won’t fall for it.
If you doomscroll, consider just how slippery this slope is. We all know how hard a habit social media usage is to break, even without advanced software designed to create content tailored to our interests, aspirations and fears. If we don’t stop now, when it’s still possible to discern which videos are human-made and which are computer-generated, we’ll soon become addicted to an increasingly artificial reality.
As a Brown student, you likely value intentionality in the things you consume and came here looking for that same trait in others. So why use your taste, your cultural knowledge and your hard-earned writing and reading skills to let a statistical model do the living for you? When the time comes, imagine sitting down after a long day of class and opening your phone to events which never happened created by machines that have never felt. On that day, will you recognize what you lost?
Arya Vishwakarma ’29 can be reached at arya_vishwakarma@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
