Karthik Pasupathy

Imagine a 10-year-old in 2090 looking back at the social life of their grandparents from 2040.

What will they see?

Pictures and reels of them on Instagram following some trend that was big back then, the videos they've created on YouTube using AI video and voice tools, a Twitter profile filled with AI-generated content, recorded videos of their AI avatars teaching a course on app development, or even an OF account!

The kid will have access to a ton of videos and content about their grandparents from the internet.

But, the kid will have no way of seeing or understanding the real character or voice of their grandparents?

Imagine this for an entire generation in the future. It's scary.

When they look back, all they would see is a fabricated version of ourselves. A version where want to be seen as the happiest, sexiest, and the richest.

When the internet came into existence, it acted as a huge time capsule. It recorded every thought, idea, and interaction. For the first time in history, we could see how people like us thought, reacted, and behaved when they hung out with their friends, came across a social issue, or faced a personal crisis.

It was a treasure trove of information. It was a crowdsourced version of our history that gave room for very little manipulation (which was very common in previous centuries, as very few had the power to decide what goes to the future generations).

But, it's starting to fade.

Over the last decade, we've started fabricating how we'd want to be seen and heard. We go on holidays and buy gadgets we can't afford, we open up about our private lives to our 'audience' and we created a ton of AI-generated text, audio, and video - all for what? Social capital, fame, and money.

Today, the internet is being filled with millions of pieces of AI content every minute. And every piece of that content is history for our future generations. But, rather than it saying about who we are, it will show them an illusion of how we lived in 2024.

Despite having free will and freedom to do what we want, a majority of us do the same thing. In the process of making money and attaining social status, we're losing our conscience.

It's sad, but it's true.

Claude recently launched a new feature that would copy your writing style.

I thought it was a gimmick. But, it wasn't.

I uploaded a few of my essays from a personal project and it came up with a writing style it called "the memory weaver".

The description said,

Craft deeply reflective narratives that blend intimate personal observations with broader social insights

I gave it a topic to write on and the output was remarkably similar to my essays in terms of tone, style, use of anecdotes, etc.

It was fascinating!

It made me wonder,

How does one differentiate between authentic and AI-generated content? What's the mark for authenticity?

With AI models getting too close to human level writing capabilities (in fact they surpassed them mid last year), what's the filter that will regulate the flow of AI-generated content into our world?

The only answer is our conscience.

If you're a writer or a creator, you can either publish AI-generated content to speed up your creation process (to become famous, like be a become a thought leader or influencer on your field of interest) and call it your authentic work, or you choose to write everything yourself because you respect the trust of your readers.

This is where conscience comes into the picture.

There is also no legal implications of creating AI content that sounds just like you and calling it your own work. The readers will take your word for it. There is no way for them to verify.

It's like choosing milk from a supermarket. You might choose a milk carton that has a label "organic and hormone-free" over a milk brand that doesn't have the label. But, there is no way for you to verify if the milk is hormone-free.

You'll have to go to extreme lengths to prove your point. The only way you get hormone-free milk is when the owner of the company decides to do business in a honest way.

The same applies for creators.

So, if you're a creator, it's

To get a break as an artist, you'll have to be an influencer.

I'm not kidding.

Think about it.

Influencers and celebrities pretty much do everything today.

They sell books, launch their own merch, teach courses, give out commencement speeches, invest in startups, come up with their own apparel, liquor, or cosmetic brand, launch their fitness startup, act in ads, produce movies, endorse products on their Insta or TikTok. Everything!

I don't blame them. There's a huge market for this.

The celebrity craze is at its peak now.

People worship celebrities. They see them as role models. They defend them when someone bad mouths them on social media. And, they do mean things out of love for their 'idols'.

But, that's not my problem. Hero worship is part of every society. Has been and will be.

My problem is with the kind of celebrities we as a society are giving rise to…

A 17-year old TikToker who posts GRWM videos and tries on new clothes is some kid's role model today.

Kids who idolize these influencers think that they don't have to study. They think education is a waste of time. Their dream goes from going to college to becoming an influencer and enjoying a cool lifestyle.

The same thing happens to a lot of women. They quit their career and jump onto OnlyFans to make money. What the hell! If you haven't heard about the girl who quit her PhD to do OnlyFans, go read it!

If this continues, no one will become a scientist or a researcher. Everyone would be holding their smartphones on a monopod and would be scream "Hey fammmm!..."

This whole craze around influencers and celebrities is crushing the spirit of art and true artists from around the world.

Before the 21st century, artists became celebrities. Now, celebrities are becoming artists.

I read somewhere that for a book to sell, publishers have set a new criterion.

The author has to have at least 1,00,000 followers on their social media - enough to get 5,000 to 10,000 pre-orders - which makes the book a bestseller.

When numbers take precedence over content, art gets diminished and mediocrity begins to sell. And, if you really want to be a writer, you have to do more than just write.

You'll have to create content, play to the rules of the 'algorithm', engage with your fans, voice out your opinion, gain your 1,000 true fans, and do a zillion other things to sell your book.

It's crazy!

I'm scared and worried when I think about the next generation, will they create an environment for real art to thrive?

Will they celebrate the masters like we or our previous generations did?

What kind of society we will be if we only prioritized and celebrated content that are sub-par or that only focuses on making money?

It shakes me up.

Only a miracle can change all of the above from happening.

Whenever you read headlines about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) becoming a reality in a few years, you would've thought,

How can a machine, a non-living entity, have human-level cognitive abilities?

Non-living things gaining consciousness isn't a new idea.

It's happened before, billions of years ago. That's the reason we are who we are today.

The same process, when it occurs in silico, might to give rise to AGI.

Let me explain.

Probability created life

In 1924 and 1929, Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane proposed a similar theory - the extreme weather conditions that existed on the surface of Earth 3.7 to 4 billion years ago led to the formation of the first organic compounds, which led to the origin of life.

Four billion years ago, Earth had no life as we know it. No plants, no animals - nothing.

For millions of years, the only thing the surface of our planet witnessed were lightning strikes, volcanic activity, and a ton of ultraviolet radiation.

Oparin and Haldane believed that these conditions paved way for life. They proposed that these condition led various inorganic compounds to interact with each other, resulting in the formation of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Over time, these proteins led to the formation of DNA, the blueprint of life, giving rise to the first unicellular organisms.

They called this the primordial soup theory or the heterotrophic theory.

This was later proved by Harold Urey and Stanley Miller in 1953 through the Miller-Urey experiment.

Miller tried to mimic the atmospheric conditions of Earth from four billion years ago - filled with Methane, Ammonia, and Hydrogen. He then passed electric spark to mimic lightning. This resulted in the formation of several organic compounds.

What does this say about intelligence?

Conditions that favor random interactions of elements or molecules or compounds, will produce something meaningful eventually.

But, how is this related to AGI?

I'll talk about that next. But, before that, I should talk about the 2004 Will Smith starrer, I, Robot.

Will probability give rise to AGI too?

I was watching I, Robot (2004) recently and there's a scene with Dr. Alfred Lanning's voiceover. It was interesting. It goes like this,

"There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul."

Looking at unprecedented growth we've seen in the AI space over the last two years, it makes sense more than ever.

While researchers and programmers have a good handle over the inner workings of various AI models (which allows them to set guardrails and define scope), there are still several things they don't know or cannot explain.

Sometimes, AI models can exhibit emergent behavior - abilities the developers did not explicitly program. These emergent capabilities can be surprising or seem “mysterious,” but they rest on an underlying architecture and training process that is well understood.

It's like everyone of us is born with the brain that is physiologically the same. But, our interactions with our environment and the interactions between our neurons inside our head makes us who we are.

The same is happening to AI models.

Every day, they're having millions of conversations from across the world, allowing them to learn a ton of new things. I believe this is the equivalent of the scenario where the inorganic compounds interacted with each other for a prolonged period of time.

And, similar to it giving rise to amino acids and eventually life, the constant learning might give AI models new behaviors and capabilities which could eventually lead to their consciousness.

It's a huge "what if...", "only if..." scenario, but you can't rule it out, considering the times we live in.

Learning from our origins

When we look back at the primordial soup, life's emergence was a natural progression. It was not forced. It was organic. It was also sudden - unplanned and unanticipated. And, it led to us humans, who are capable enough to build AI models.

We're at a very similar crossroads with the progression of AI. The current pace of evolution of AI models might one day lead to something we currently can't fathom.

But unlike the distant past, we have the ability to observe, guide, and influence this evolution. We have some level of control.

We have an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility—to shape what comes next.

Let's be curious. Let's ask questions. Let's engage with the technology, not just as users but as thoughtful participants in its evolution.

The rest is not up to us.