Chris McCandless starved to death alone in the Alaskan wilderness. He’s the subject of the 2007 film Into The Wild, something I come back to when I think about how AI will change our culture.
A quiet, sensitive boy, Chris leaves his hometown and travels alone across the United States, ending up in Alaska.
He knows nothing about surviving in the wilderness and just when he decides to give up and turn back, it’s too late.
The tiny stream he crossed to make his camp in spring has become a roaring river in the summer, leaving him stranded. He dies of starvation, leaving behind a journal.
Amongst his final entries was the line: “Happiness is only real when it's shared”.
There’s a wealth of new AI tools out there. Creating audio, visual or written content has been democratised to become available to anyone who can pay a monthly subscription.
And it’s taking us into strange and uncharted territory: a culture shattered down to the atom, where common ground is a memory as distant as the telegram and in which each person only sees the truth that their heart desires.
The fracture has already started, but I predict that soon AI will take it to the next level.
Even if we’re watching the same TV show, the algorithm knows that I prefer strong female leads and you watch shows longer if there’s a subplot involving hidden addiction, so it can give us both what we want, in the same episode.
One show, infinite variations, all instantly available.
You might wonder what’s so bad about getting exactly what you want, all the time. But seeing what you expect to see isn’t how you grow.
It isn’t how we evolve because we’re not all made to think differently. And we lose the threads that bind society together, the shared understanding of cultural norms.
Would Netflix’s Adolescence have ignited the same cultural firestorm if your colleague’s AI-generated series showed him that the teenage boy was innocent of the murder of his classmate?
Would the story of Romeo and Juliet have echoed through the centuries if each spectator could choose for themselves who died? The tragedy of the narrative only works if catharsis is collective.
When art becomes atomised, we can opt out of the discomfort that is part of the message that the artist intended for us.
Atomised art means choosing comfortable content over poignant, universal truths.
The one immutable characteristic of art has been, up to now, that we experience it together.
Art is only real when it's shared.
As a podcaster, as a community leader, you can resist this change and choose the universal over the fragmented.
You can keep making your art and sharing your message with the people who follow you.
Record your episodes.
Write those emails.
Connect with your audience, especially the ones that disagree with you.
Make your community a collective experience that you live together.
The art you make isit's only real when you share it, and others share it too.
So keep sharing,
~Sarah at CopyHop~
I'm Sarah Hopkinson and I write meaningful emails that help podcasters increase their revenue and build a community around their podcast.
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