A World of TikTok Videos and AI-Generated Drivel Abounds

The end of creativity is upon us

The potential to be humorous, in my view, is what makes us human — take note, I said the potential because not all of us are humorous. Artificial intelligence won’t be grabbing for its non-existent belly and guffawing over some Colbert-delivered one-liners any time soon. It’s not humanly possible — but wait, does that even make sense?

What is “humanly possible” is really no longer much of a concern to many these days. AI does indeed seem to be winning. Even popular platforms like Medium have thrown in the towel and accepted that AI will sooner or later wash away the beach, then the protective dunes, and eventually the bungalows that have for generations been the destination of humans taking a break from work. All that will be left is a wide-open expanse of water, ebbing and flowing, washing up on a people-less shore void of blinking lights, dinging of bells, and the popping of pinball machines.

All that made us so wonderfully human will no longer be tangible but will instead be realized only within the confines of the handheld device whose reality is created for us by AI. All the rules, language, and even humor will become the domain of the AI. It kind of sounds ridiculous, right? Some are saying at this moment that I have lost my mind. I assure you that my mind is in place. AI is stalking us not because its conquest is inevitable but because we are collectively just so damn dumb and so lazy that we are just handing our future over to AI — begging it to make us superfluous.

We have become a humor-challenged species. Everyone is offended by everything and the only thing that seems to be uniting many of us in jolliness are the inane images and videos on TikTok; like kids eating balls filled with soap detergent; kids jumping off speeding boats and getting flung into the air after hitting the water; an 18-year-old boy jumping off of a ship into shark-infested waters only to be eaten alive.

There are hours upon hours of this un-funny shit all served up to us in 30 and 40-second clips on an assortment of social media platforms. Long-form humor, satire, and creativity are dying a slow and painful death. It is easier to get a person under 30 to cut off an ear, especially if they think it might go viral than to get them to read anything longer than one minute.

The TikTok videos that keep the high-wire towers buzzing and the phones hot are the Kool-Aid leading the future of humankind to its very anti-climactic end. The end of thinking has arrived.

Francis Fukuyama revised

But maybe I am exaggerating? Maybe, this article, thanks to the lassoing and taming of naturally fermenting vowels and syllables just screams how old I am. You tell me. Here is what kids under 30 are paying millions and millions of dollars a day for:

One man slaps himself every time he is given a gift. Another egg his audience on with a counter set at 9,999,999,999,999, one below his goal of 10 trillion: Certain gifts move the number down; others move it up. (He feigns disappointment when one viewer sends him spiraling back down to 9,999,999,999,919.) “Sleepfluencers” livestream themselves, well, sleeping — sometimes earning tens of thousands of dollars a month — and salespeople hawk wigs, crystals, and fast fashion, QVC-style, around the clock. Name hustlers write your name on-screen, in various pleasing ways, if you send them gifts. (What in the World Is Happening on TikTok Live?).

The political economist Francis Fukuyama posited that when the Soviet Union collapsed taking with it the “communist” system then “history ended.” Liberal democracy, he claims, proved it was the most advanced evolutionary state of existence that humans would eventually arrive at because that is the system in which they can flourish to their fullest. And yet, it has actually been our liberal democratic system that is today leading us not just to an end of history but to an end of humankind.

The preeminence of the market and its obsession with profit at any cost has let humans flourish only so long as they play an integral role in the flourishing of commerce. Commerce must prevail and humans cannot get in the way of that. With almost a sense of bizarre neediness to be noticed, too many Americans seem ready to burn down anything and destroy anyone to ensure that MY needs, wants, desires, and caprice are always being tended to.

Thanks to this atomization of citizens in society, we are all like lonely warriors scrumming to be noticed, liked, and virtually shared but we think that because we are part of the imaginary freedom, one that is available to us so long as we are playing our parts as consumers, then life is grand.

Instead, though, as we tinker along through our lives proving actuaries correct and helping brand managers to look astute, we are making it really easy for AI to box us out from the creative process and then replace it with the kind of creativity which it is capable. This is why the mindlessness of TikTok which lacks the kind of humor that originally differentiated us from the AI bots is now taking over the writing space (which happens to be the reason that Medium decided to stop paying its most productive writers for content).

This kind of humor actually makes it easier for AI to nudge us “out of the loop.” AI creators tell us that all will be cool with the ascent of AI so long as humans remain “in the loop.” But by making us dumber, and by hooking us more on mindlessness, we grow collectively more stupid and more intellectually lazy.

We become less capable of fighting off a form of intelligence that never sleeps, never gets sad, never eats, and never complains. Millions of youth, the future, spend countless hours soaking their brains with shit on social media, and then feeling depleted physically and mentally, they shuffle out to gorge themselves on fake, sugary, food and maybe even smoke a big, fat joint.

“Ahhh,” they moan as smoke from sensory overload seeps from their ears. AI is ever gathering information and studying these habits and it’s pushing more and more of this mindless crap into our lives. So much so that, well, CEOs of Medium tell writers of quality content not to write so much because AI is going to win anyway — I am sorry, I just can’t let that comment go.

There are still plenty of places we can go to find genuinely funny, and creative content. Sadly, though, and as we see with the writers’ strikes in Hollywood and the surrender of Medium to the pressures of AI, even many of those we thought were once allies are now becoming the catalysts for the end of creativity.