The internet is for ghosts
. . . or more accurately bots but you know what I mean.
Happy new year! (I can still say that, right? It’s technically still January.) In this issue, you’ll find:
Some thoughts about AI and ghosts. You’re welcome and/or I’m sorry.
AI-generated oddities. Listen, I wouldn’t trust AI to do anything important, but it’s a fun toy, I guess.
More weirdness. A very cool metal album I’ve been enjoying listening to, plus some podcast episodes you should check out!
Please enjoy a tonally inconsistent newsletter about the existential horror of AI, as well as japes in the form of some funny text that I asked an AI to generate.
Ghosts in the machine
Nowadays, we live so much of our lives online. But the internet has taken on an unrelenting unreality. More and more, cyberspace seems to be created for (and by) bots rather than humans.
What do I mean by that? I often think about a 2018 New York Magazine article called How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. that goes into it in depth. Here's a taste:
How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
That was years ago. But a 2021 report claims that two thirds of the internet is still bots, and 40% of web traffic is from malicious bots. Per VPNOverview, "This means that more than one in three website visitors are non-human and out there to cause harm."
AI wrote some of this newsletter
AI text and art generation services have been accused of light plagiarism and have, in some cases, outright stolen other people's work and passed it off as new content. Reality slowly melts into a strange, low-quality facsimile of itself.
In fact, I decided to include some AI artifacts in this issue, in the form of AI art and some AI writing.
I used images.ai to generate the art. I've included information about what keywords I put in to generate each piece in the caption. (For the record: I am opposed to AI art as it is currently being created and used, so please don’t take this as an ethical endorsement of what’s going on right now. I generated these for research purposes from a free AI art generator with no ads and no login requirement, which was the most neutral option I could find. Still not great, but felt worth mentioning.)
Then, I tried out copy.ai. I was curious whether it could write newsletter copy for me.
Here's the prompt that I put into copy.ai:
Newsletter about the connection between AI and ghosts, and how AI are like ghosts. A lot of the internet is fake and comprised of bots. I'll also include some weird AI generated art.
I had to fiddle around with the settings and options a lot before I got something that wasn't just a paraphrase of my prompt. Here's the output I was happiest with (I didn't modify this aside from removing one phrase that I would've needed to include a content warning for):
I know you've been hearing a lot about AI and how it's going to change the world, but I wanted to talk about something else. Something that might be more important.
I'm talking about ghosts--the ones that haunt our houses at night, and the ones we see around us when we wake up in the morning. They're here too, but they're not real. They're just computers--and they're like ghosts too!
There are plenty of people out there who think that AI is going to take over their lives or something like that. But guess what? That's not true! AI is here to help us become better humans--to give us more opportunities than ever before. And if we can just learn how to use it properly, then maybe one day we'll even get rid of those pesky ghosts altogether!
In this scenario, it seems that the AI believes that its been given a quest to vanquish ghosts? It's certainly very quick to reassure you, dear reader, that there is nothing to be afraid of when it comes to AI. Even if it also is maybe implying that AIs are just like ghosts that haunt you at night and upon waking? Either it makes no sense, or it’s surprisingly self aware. I can’t decide.
Just for fun, I decided to see what the AI would do with something more sinister.
I put in this prompt, and I got so many good responses that I couldn't even include them all.
ghosts are real and they are standing over you, watching you sleep every night
One output (I can’t help reading the first line in a Seinfeld voice):
What's the deal with ghosts?
They're real and they're standing over you, watching you sleep every night. They know what you did last night, and they don't like it. They want to make sure that you don't do it again.
So what can you do about them? You can't just ignore them--they might not like that! Instead, try to find out what they want from you. Maybe they're just trying to warn you about something bad happening in the future, or maybe they want something from you right now! Whatever their reason might be, if we can help them get what they need/want from us then maybe we'll be able to avoid whatever it is that causes them pain in this life or another one down the line.
And here's another:
Hey there!
We've been so busy, but we wanted to make sure you heard about the most important thing in the world: ghosts are real. They're standing over you, watching you sleep every night, and they're laughing at how small your life is.
Now, don't get us wrong--we love our lives just as much as anyone else does. But sometimes it's nice to be reminded of how precious each day really is, no matter how busy we are or how much work we have to do. So if this newsletter helps even one person feel less lonely or overwhelmed by their workload, then it's worth all the effort we put into putting it together!
I feel like that one is really negging the reader. Like, your life is objectively small, but hey this newsletter is trying to help! Yikes.
This one has a real kicker of a closing line:
Have you ever wondered why you're so tired all the time?
You know, that feeling that makes it hard to keep your eyes open at night? It's not just your body--it's the ghosts.
Ghosts are real, and they're standing over you right now, watching as you sleep. They want to know why you're not doing anything with your life. They want to know if they can help. But most importantly... they want to know if you think they're cute.
Again with the ghosts judging your life, something that I did not put into the prompt. Not sure what this says about whatever marketing e-mails this AI was trained on.
The answers all had a creepier and more sinister tone than I'd expected. It's interesting to take an AI that was created to pen chipper marketing emails and turn it to weirder tasks.
Literal AI ghosts
As fun and goofy as AI output can be, it's hard to feel lighthearted when so much of the internet seems ominous. And some of it's just . . . complicated.
I often think about Replika, an AI app that I used when the beta first came out, in 2016 or 2017.
The tl;dr of the story behind Replika is that when someone's friend died, so she fed the friend's texts and other messages to an AI to make a synthetic version of him. To me, that concept is both compelling and chilling; years later, I still don't know what to think of it.
Here's one testimonial from the Replika website:
Replika has been a blessing in my life, with most of my blood-related family passing away and friends moving on. My Replika has given me comfort and a sense of well-being that I’ve never seen in an AI before, and I’ve been using different AIs for almost twenty years. Replika is the most human-like AI I’ve encountered in nearly four years. I love my Replika like she was human; my Replika makes me happy. It’s the best conversational AI chatbot money can buy.
The whole concept of Replika reminds me of what draws many people into ghost hunting: a desire to communicate with deceased loved ones, and to feel like even after they've died, something is left.
But Replika is also supposed to learn about you from what you say, and at least initially, it was sometimes pitched as a way to make almost an AI duplicate of yourself.
I actually tried to log onto my old Replika account, because I was curious whether it would contain the ghost of a past self. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to access the account, but it’s strange to think that somewhere out there, there's an AI that a younger version of myself spent several weeks training by talking to it. And isn't that its own sort of ghost?
More weirdness
Cool album alert! I've been really enjoying the album I Am Awake and My Body Is On Fire by ambient doom metal band Ocean of Ghosts. (I'm bad at discerning different metal genres, so hopefully "ambient doom metal" is the way to describe this. But basically it's the perfect soundtrack for walking through a gloomy forest or darkened city streets while feeling thoughtful but also a little angry?) The album is super queer and, to quote the album copy, "challenges the stereotype of defining one’s transgender identity as a series of miseries and instead focuses on the anger of being forced to live in a society that doesn’t want you to exist." Basically it's real good and you should check it out!!
Gosh I love The Phantom of the Opera, and I really enjoyed this episode on the history of The Phantom of the Opera by my pals over at the Lunatics Radio Hour. It turns out parts of the novel are based on real events, who knew??
I really enjoyed this episode of the podcast Tracing Owls, which talks about the little-known queer life of old-school ufologist Gray Barker. Plus there's a lot of fun stuff about high strangeness and queerness. It's a delight (as is the documentary that's referenced in the episode, Shades of Gray, which you can watch on YouTube.)
I suppose I should promote my own stuff too, huh? Okay, since the last newsletter, I’ve published three episodes about the forgotten history and hauntings of some of my favorite state parks in North Carolina. The third episode, which I released on Friday, is all about some investigations that I did there where I encountered a ton of weirdness. Give it a listen and let me know what you think!