# Human connections in the early days of AI
<span style="float:right;">*2025-06-03*</span>

*Special thanks to [dhole](https://dhole.github.io) for review and suggestions.*

### 1. Online world as an extension of physical world
IRL stands for 'in real life', used to describe the *offline* life of a person.
Many years ago, people started to notice that the online world is not
disconnected from the physical world, furthermore, it can be seen as an
extension of it. This was observed by the Invisible Committee:

> *[...] if the hacker is ahead of his time it’s because he “didn’t think of this tool [the Internet] as a separate virtual world but as an extension of physical reality.”*
> <span style="float:right;">'To our friends' - by The Invisible Committee, 2014</span>
> <br>

We've seen examples of this over the past couple of decades; with social
networks and their impact on professional politics and people's lives, but also
with cryptocurrencies, which on the early days most people considered them not
real money (not part of *reality*), while few hackers already saw them as a valid
form of currency.

Another example was the [usage of "AFK"](https://youtu.be/KCAGb7oSwDs?t=72) by
the ThePirateBay founders, to refer to the world offline (instead of "IRL"):

> *"We don't use the expression IRL, we say 'Away From Keyboard", AFK; we think
the internet is for real"* - Peter Sunde, 2009

### 2. HyperReality
The offline world being extended by the online world brings us a form of
[*hyperreality*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality).
The simplified idea is that on top of *the reality* we create the hyperreality,
where traits from reality are enhanced, exaggerated, to the point where it's not
the original reality but something more, still to be consumed as reality.

The music analyst Jaime Altozano [links](https://youtu.be/ySa67e0jKNA?t=759)
this concept (hyperreality) together with the [supernormal
stimulus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) to the widespread
usage of autotune and similar tools, not for robotic-voice effects that we
usually identify as 'autotune', but for any singer that thanks to autotune
sounds 'more natural' with better pitch, without notes out of place (both live
and on record).

Another example are the instagram filters, which while allowing people to
'enhance' their pictures, they define a new hyperreality of (among others)
smooth skin and white teeth, which renders the physical world not good enough
compared to the online filtered and enhanced hyperreality; this affects back to
the physical world, with people wanting to emulate the hyperreality that they
get in the online world into the physical world, resulting, for example, in the
increase of plastic surgery interventions and into teeth whitening treatments.
<br>People want to see their instagram filters in their mirror.

### 3. Moving from content production to content consumption
Before the era of AI-content-generation tools, we were already seeing the normal
users (non-socialmedia-influencers) reducing their amount of posts creation on
the various social networks. The main chunk of the population was already on a
timid trend of reducing active production of content towards a more consumerism
role of social networks, where the production of content is left mostly in the
hands of a reduced minority (influencers, 'content creators').

<div style="text-align: center;margin:20px;">
  <img src="img/posts/ai/idiocracy-couch.jpg" style="max-width:300px;
  display:block; margin: 0 auto;" />
  <div style="font-style:italic; font-size:80%;">Optimized <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqQ6D0Bu-a8" target="_blank">couch from Idiocracy</a> movie.
  </div>
</div>

In the early days of social networks, people were sharing their daily life
experiences. As attention-gathering professionals (aka. influencers & marketing
professionals) started to proliferate, people reduced their rate of post
publishing, moving from a content-creation usage of social networks towards a
content-consumption kind of usage.

Part of it might be due to just tiredness of the dynamics, in part as
consequence of the algorithms of the social networks being silently reshaped
towards exploiting human psychology for the respective app profit, or even due
cyber-maturing of the users; but it seems plausible that part of the reasons are
related to the attention-gathering professionals dominating those networks.

<br>
On top of all those trends, this past year we've experienced an acceleration of
the enshittification of the major online social networks, the catalyst of it
being the usage of AI to generate content.

### 4. aicceleration of the enshittification

Social networks like reddit, since are mostly text based, were the first to be
hit by the first wave of AI-generated content. They suffered a substantial
[increase](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1jojjdj/anyone_else_noticed_many_aigenerated_text_posts/)
of the [AI bloat](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ap2fzi/reddit_slowly_being_taken_over_by_aigenerated/)
over [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadInternetTheory/comments/1kauscy/spotted_on_reddit_ai_responding_to_an_aiwritten/)
past year, with 'real' users not being happy about it, usually flagging the
AI-generated posts, which become more common each day. In the long term, users
get fed up and migrate to other similar platforms with less AI bloat for the
moment.

A potential conclusion is that, generally speaking, people don't feel eager to
spend (or waste) time to read AI-generated content that tries to appear as
human-generated. They want to read content from other real humans. As mentioned,
the result is that people get burned out from the platform.

<br>
With the [refinement](https://youtu.be/zmlbAbWQCVY) of AI-generated video,
similar effects can happen on other social networks; it's now easier to generate
attention-gathering content for instagram, facebook, tiktok, etc.

### 5. Two overlapping worlds

Leaving aside the implications around political manipulation and social
disinformation, this can lead to two main outcomes with regards users relations
with the online social networks (which both can overlap at different ratios):

The obvious one is a bit of a dystopian future where people get more addicted to
social networks to get the daily dopamine shots
([soma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World)) style), and they
prefer that to the physical world experiences.

I would like to be a bit more optimistic and imagine a trend of people getting
burned out by the AI-bloat and moving away from online social networks; valuing
more real-human connections (which can happen also online, but filtering out AI
content).
This might result in a deepening of physical world connections, together with a
revaluation of the physical world experiences (the famous *"touching grass"*
meme), as a counterweight to the fake AI-generated hyperreality of the online
social networks.

<div style="text-align: center;margin:25px;">
<img src="img/posts/ai/two-worlds.jpg" style="max-width:50%;" />
</div>

Online social networks could stop being *"the place where you get news from your
friends lifes"* as it was some years ago, to become another cog of the
machinery that provides passive entertainment (together with streaming services
such as youtube, netflix, etc.), while the real-social connections happen
offline, where AI can not easily inject content.

<br>
It could be the case too, that the platforms react to the AI-bloat and adapt the
algorithms to avoid exhausting their users, therefore avoiding the mass exodus,
since it would affect their bussiness. In any case, I encourage you to
strengthen your bonds with your friends, family and communities :)
