Again: Collecting Information, creating content, mass-communicating. Sound familiar? That is what AI does. And more: We seem to resignedly accept the fact that Twitter is now a bot-infested propaganda tool where political agendas, mis-information, defamation and agitation are the News people digest. Worse, they consume it like fast food and make decisions based on it. Meanwhile, the information rebels among us are trying to figure out whether they are arguing with paid demagogues or bots. The latter have not only taken over X, but have also entered chat rooms. There they discuss and argue not only for political parties, but also for brands and products. Bots. Telling you to change your consumer taste.

This is the true information age: machines having access to all data (which is why Musk is spending such an outrageous amount of money on a twat like Donald Trump). Carole Cadwalladr calls it a repressive engine in a state that will ultimately become – or already is – a techno-authoritarian surveillance state. These days, the US is screening Facebook accounts to determine whether foreign applicants pass the MAGA test, which grants access to American universities. Peter Thiel’s Palantir does this and much more with the data collected by DOGE.

The situation is hardly any better on scientific levels. This raises an essential question: From whom should artificial intelligence actually learn from? AI constantly produces new content that is to a large degree initiated by poor prompts and based on unverified or false information. In doing so, however, it pollutes its own biotope and gene pool. Or rather. it descends to digital cannibalism developing a form digital BSE. At the dawn of the new millennium it was only discovered later that cattle should better not be fed their own corpse parts processed into super-protein. Really not being polemical here: what can intelligence actually learn if the material isn’t intelligent but self-produced? And what is supposed to come of it?

Dudley Lynch and Paul Cordis in their book Dolphin Strategies ask what comes after constant innovation (which can be imagined as an ever-increasing frequency of sine wave amplitudes). Their theory: the return of inventions. That is indeed happening in music, which at some point became innovatively exhausted. Today’s charts already consist largely of borrowed compositional elements. Similar situation in fashion. And now dissertations.

So then, what kind of innovation can AI deliver if it isn’t even intelligent? Should it even be expected to? Or is the real data reserved for the Lamborghinis among AI computers, their coders and investors, while the rank and file lower class inhale recycled data waste in some kind of AI McDonald’s? A scenario that, judging from what we see on X is frighteningly real. And so t is not religion but AI that is the opium for the common people. Add to that South African Mars explorer and amateur anthropologist Elon Musk, who threatened in one of his X announcements wanting to completely rewrite history using X-AI. An intelligent reworking of our human and cultural history. Redefined by the very techno-oligarchs who, in this brave new world and together with their political patrons, decide what is art or culture, what is politically expedient and what is not. In this context, we no longer even want to talk about true and false.

Until then, we devote ourselves to the daily AI hysteria, especially in the world of digital work. GPT prompt & frame charts for digital jobs and job searches are now being posted on LinkedIn with a frequency worthy of RTB heavy spending. On X, the American president already has a historic title ready for a war before it even ended. That is the digital age. History is being written while it happens. The wet dream of any propaganda expert.

There is no more deliberation in development. Instead there are solutions to problems that haven’t even been explored. And that is the real problem: we no longer think for ourselves; others think for us. Entrepreneur Mikael Pawlo sums up this situation in sombre terms: this new version of the Internet will no longer be open. It will be personalised, predictable and closed. The Internet of the future will no longer be searchable. You won’t go there anymore – it will come to you. Summarised, evaluated, commented on and tailored to your personal preferences. And, more and more often before you even ask for it.

Back to AI for the layman. Yes, AI-driven techniques are getting better and better, no question. Nevertheless, I still need to be a trained designer, photographer or producer to recognise where AI creations become boring or downright wrong. To intervene and apply common sense, human knowledge or simply humanity.

We are being bombarded with artificial creations that look and sound anything but natural. On top of that, we digest information that has not only been compiled, but is often invented. By idiots who post it on the Internet and an AI that does not recognise or check it. Or has generated it itself, just like you would programme a bot. Here, too, there are apparently the same price and quality differences as with chat and service bots.

Speaking of which, from now on we’re not only discussing complete automation of creative services, but also government services. That’s right: advice, assistance, decision-making, social services and health-care. With that degree of inhumanity, insensitivity and obvious lack of depth and realism? You have to be kidding. Or not.

So let’s return to Ms Cadwalladr and her view of the political and social hype surrounding AI: it’s bullshit. It’s not inevitable – and we can stop it. If we trust our senses. Okay, in an age when people blindly walk into busy roads because they’re staring at their mobile phones, it seems unimaginable. And maybe it is. But what will be the result?