Cody Englander
Staff writer
Chris Hayes likens identifying truth in a world dominated by AI to baseball.
“In the steroid era, you had juiced pitchers facing juiced batters,” Hayes said. “You’ll have this situation where AI-generated fakes, fake content, deep-fakes, duplicity and AI filters are trying to find out what’s real, battling each other.”
At 10:45 a.m. this morning Hayes will speak in the Amphitheater, finishing Week One of the Chautauqua Lecture Series and its theme of “Themes of Transformation: Forces Shaping Our Tomorrow.” Outside of his work as an MSNBC news anchor, Hayes is an author and an editor-at-large for The Nation. In his newest book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, he explores how our world runs on commodified attention, from getting a job to finding a date.
At the forefront of this technological revolution is AI. It’s become nearly inescapable, from appearing in Google searches to making its way onto album covers and pervading social media. To Hayes, AI can be the newest form of spam mail.
“Because of how cheap technology makes it, they may be wasteful 99 times out of 100, but if you can get one out of 100 and you can reach 1 million people, all of a sudden you’re dealing with a real platform,” said Hayes. “I think generative AI now makes it possible for all the big platforms. It’s a kind of existential threat that technology can create content that doesn’t have to be good.”
As AI evolves on the internet every day, Hayes reflected on a recent moment involving the “trolling” aspect of the technology.
“I had a family member who I love, and who is a very smart person, who showed me a video of those AI deep fakes of Nikola Jokic talking trash about his teammates after a loss, thinking it was him,” Hayes said. “It’s only because I know the genrethat I can understand what it is.”
While it’s common to focus on the negatives of AI, Hayes does acknowledge areas of its usefulness. As a tool, AI can summarize large chunks of text into a concise paraphrase.
“One of the things (Herbert Simon) says is that for an information processing system to be useful to an organization, it has to conserve people’s attention who get the output,” Hayes said, referencing a lecture by the late American scholar of economics, computer science and psychology. “It has to take a bunch of information and output something that’s condensed so that the attention of the user is conserved.”
This is one of the benefits of AI chat bots like ChatGPT. On the other side of the coin, Hayes said it’s “good at generating a ton of garbage.”
With “garbage” inundating media spaces, is there a way to escape it?
Hayes believes so. As part of his own practice to detach from the online realm, he spends 20-30 minutes a day alone, “allowing (his) own thoughts to move in (his) head,” walking and listening to nothing. He encourages others to use this as a daily practice; but to create massive change, he has another solution — a strong defense against the commercialization of attention is becoming involved with your community.
Protests can serve as an example of that community involvement — things that require “physical proximity,” Hayes said. “People hanging out in real life … having scenes and places to go to, concert halls, a kind of re-embrace of the human as opposed to the mediated and the distance — social proximity as opposed to social distancing. I think you need to build spaces where that can happen.”
