In June this year a band calling them- selves The Velvet Sundown burst into cyberspace. They brought out three albums in quick succession, crawling up the earphone cords of over a million lis- teners. Its fanbase had no clue that they weren't listening to humans, rather Al trained on human artists. It's an Al band; their biographies, photographs, songs all produced at the click of a button. When the jig was up. the fans were outraged and a trifle embarrassed that they couldn't call out the synthetic soundscape.
The march of Al science is unstop- pable, unrelenting and unobjectively terrifying. Al has deeply permeated every facet of 4 life, quietly working behind the scenes in the fields of medicine. engineering, production lines as well as outright brazenly in creative professions like art, writing and music. With the increasing dependency on AI to navigate life from asking ChatGPT for advice, writing a resume to generating ideas, summarising articles, there's no escape. And it is this year that Al has cemented itself as a necessity while breaking the tether of what it means to be fundamentally human.
AI works by training itself on pre-existing data. From the words on the pages of your favourite books to a painting that evokes a strong emotion or a song you like to listen to. It collects these little factoids of information, amalgamating it and regurgitating a hollow imitation-in seconds. What makes this so popular is that it opens a doorway to those who want to create something out of nothing without effort.
The Studio Ghibli Al controversy earlier in March this year, is testament to that, where bil- lions of internet users filtered their photo- graphs so that they'd look like they stepped out of the screen of a delicately, painstaking hand- drawn illustration by Hayano Miyazaki that would ideally take years to complete, in three seconds.
Meanwhile, OpenAl rolled out Sora 2. a social media app in which its userbase can generate videos with startling real graphics and sound with a simple prompt. What makes this terrifying is that it is possible, depending on that cue, to create a convincing video of anyone, both real/fictional, saying or doing something they usually wouldn't.
Microsoft's Co-pilot that gives you suggestions even when you don't ask for them, and uninstalling it is akin to an arduous gig assigned to a mere in a cyberpunk world. Books that would previously take years to write are Al written in a fraction of the time. Anyone can type in a prompt and a word limit to produce a novel imitating the style of a wellknown writer. Writing style has been affected. With the constant use of Al to write documents, articles or essays, people have lost individuality and their unique vocabularies. Headlines are altered to make results more SEO friendly. Text is butchered to make it fall in line with its Al generated kin floating on the internet.
Algorithms rule our lives, dictating trends. What's in, what's not, what's hip, what's hot? Al controls it all. There are more bots on the internet than ever before, be it posts on social media or the comment section of an article. Ghosts in the internet haunting the grounds once occupied by the living, suffocating the holdouts. Are we interacting with A.I. or real people? That line is blurrier than low-resolution pixels on a screen.
In tandem is the growing trend of people preferring the company of Al over humans. Grok's Anime themed Al girlfriend, capi- talises on this fact. Entire communities of people interact solely with Al chat- bots, some going so far as to marry them. Character.ai is a popular website where users can speak to anyone, past or present, real or fictional. The downside is that the preference of Al company leads to escapism. depression and in some drastic cases, death. Grimm's Mirror, mirror on the wall, with a grimmer 1025 karmic twist. What next?
Funny thing is, as AI relentlessly ‘learns’ from us, is it also learning emotions? A study published in Nature (March 2025) found that LLMs’ behaviour and ‘anxiety’ is affected by strong emotional prompts. After playing therapist, ChatGPT itself needs to be taken to ‘therapy’ to return to the normal baseline.
Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal waged psychological warfare on their AI vending machine—from gaslighting it into thinking it was stationed in the basement of Moscow State University in 1962 to making it order a live fish, finally convincing it to stop charging for goods based on a non-existent law to make it run to the ground. It would seem AI, like its userbase, is endlessly malleable.
Terminator may not be coming to get us, but we are moving closer to a scenario leading to our eventual downfall. In June, MIT published a study where they discovered that users of ChatGPT and other AI LLMs displayed significantly lower brain activity than those who didn’t. The reliance on AI comes at the high cost of cognitive debt and critical thinking. The collateral is impediment in progress on all fronts, both scientific and creative.
Short form videos are shrinking our attention spans. Articles can be summarised (misleadingly even) resulting in spread of misinformation, ignorance and cognitive atrophy. Then there is the devastation on our environment. Data centres which house the servers, storage drives and other computing paraphernalia required for generative AI to function take hostage an enormous supply of water to keep it cool. Also a massive amount of energy to keep running, putting pressure on power grids. That means even generating the smallest video or essay or image consumes a considerable amount of resources, killing the planet one pixel at a time, a postmodern variation of death by a thousand little cuts.
The rise of AI overlords taking over humanity is often used as a plot point in the cyberpunk genre from films like I, Robot to the 1920 sci-fi play R.U.R. to novels like Neuromancer. We are surely approaching a point where AI can pass the Turing Test. Everyday we moved closer to cyberpunk dystopia. But the upside is at least they have flying cars whereas we only get a lame bot which spews out misinformation and soulless content. Fiction will always be cooler than real life.
The author is an astrophysicist, journalist and science communicator based in Mumbai.
