Good Morning,

I’ve always wanted this publication to also cover an exploration of how AI is impacting various kinds of people. As people this means our shared culture, health situations including agi…

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Good Morning,

I’ve always wanted this publication to also cover an exploration of how AI is impacting various kinds of people. As people this means our shared culture, health situations including aging in the human life cycle, the conditions we face, health situations we might find ourselves dealing with, including various groups or individuals that don’t receive adequate coverage of their own needs.

From the impact of AI on our mental health to our spiritual & psychosocial development, Generatie AI has so much potential. I’ve taken it upon myself to try to find guest writers and niche pioneers to help us explore in essays these wide-ranging impacts. This is the first in that series.

If you value these explorations, by sharing you promote an emerging writer (often with a nascent Newsletter) that nobody in the world could fill, but that person.

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I asked of the Newsletter Speculative (7 month old Newsletter), specifically to help us understand better the impact of Generative AI on disability.

As a population or demographic ages, the conditions we face and experience also changes. Can AI help with that?

In the United States, more than 1 in 4 adults (28.7%) have a disability, according to the CDC.

According to a 2022 American Community Survey, approximately 44.1 million adults in the United States, which amounts to about 13.4% of the civilian noninstitutionalized population, reported living with a disability.

The most common forms of disability vary by category and severity, impacting individuals in different ways. I think we could conservatively say about one in five American suffers from something that could be called a disability. This is not some vague minority, this is someone in your family, one of your friends or colleagues, someone you know, maybe you in the future!

• Chronic Health Conditions

• Mobility Impairment (including 20% of adults 65 years and older)

• Vision or Hearing Impairment (around 8.4% of the population)

• Mental Health related conditions

• Cognitive disabilities (think Autism spectrum disorder or brain-injury)

• Intellectual disabilities (around 1-3 %)

For example, As of 2024, approximately 1 in 36 children in the United States has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Or 4% of boys and 1% of girls. Additionally, this increase in prevalence (for a number of reasons) has been noted over the years, with a 312% rise since the year 2000. As of 2024, approximately 60% of adults in the United States live with at least one chronic health condition. As of 2024, about 9.2% of U.S. adults are classified as having severe obesity, which is often referred to as morbid obesity. Suffice to say the continuum of what we might consider disability and how AI might be able to help is also changing.

Anna’s Dallara intro to Speculative

25 seconds

Our guide today, Anna, is a freelancer and product owner based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. She is a Science fiction and fantasy author, excelling in speculative fiction 🗯, a technologist & filmmaker ~ here interested in writing, technology, culture, and where they all intersect.

The way culture and technology are intersecting is becoming more complicated in 2025 affecting people in different and unique ways. - Ed.

I’m hoping you will be able to resonate with today’s topic because it has just massive significance on how AI will impact the human condition, quality of life and providing us with new tools to cope in an ever changing world.

Think about all that this means:

Substack (this platform) itself claims to be a “new economic engine” for culture.

Let’s get into the deep dive.

Explore 🤔💭 Speculative:

💁🏻‍♀️ reading and writing in the digital age. ⭐

Speculative

Reading and writing in the digital age

By Anna Dallara

Speculative

1. The Real Problem with AI in Schools

2. Who Gets to Be An AI Expert? Part 1

3. Is Substack Doomed? The Lifecycle of Social Media Platforms

4. Death of the (AI) Author

5. The Ethics of Stealing a Library Book (Because It Might Be Stealing from You)

• This wide-ranging essay makes a lot of salient points about disability and AI that is incredibly human.

• She explores various models of disability, makes many important references, and guides us to explore various tools and strategies.

• She explores how fundamentally we as people are using Generative AI to self-optimize our lifestyle and help us navigate and deal with our unique challenges, including those somewhat outside of our control.

The AI Will See You Now: Disability in the Age of Chatbots

Read more

Image Credit: Cover Image generated with ChatGPT-4o, by Riccardo.

Hello Everyone,

This is the next issue of our exploration on AI companions and technological loneliness in the Chatbot economy. It ha…

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“Dancing at the End of the World” - Midjourney

Friends,

Technological loneliness is an increasingly harsh reality for our mental health, in particular young people.

Being a human can be lonely. But is it getting worse the more time we spend on screens?

Loneliness is a dire warning sign, but with technology keeping us sometimes in unhealthy habits and society minding its own business, it can be hard to fix. How do you “fix” a hole inside in an increasingly robotic world?

Feeling alone has been linked to adverse health outcomes including heart disease, stroke, cognitive decline and low immunity. Some studies compare social isolation to mortality risks such as smoking. More recent research found links between loneliness and Alzheimer’s disease.

I asked to tackle this difficult piece in an Op-Ed as a guest post on this Newsletter. She writes The Muse: On the creativity, ingenuity, and untapped potential of humans in an AI-obsessed world.

She argues with the adoption of Generative A.I., prompt engineering and copilots in business, we should always put people first.

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Transformer-based language models are powerful tools for solving various language tasks and represent a phase shift in natural language processing. With this book, you'll learn the tools, techniques, and playbooks for building valuable products that incorporate the power of language models.

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By Summer of 2023,

You know when the Surgeon General writes an OpEd about loneliness in The New York Times, things have taken on the color of ants, as they say in Latin America1.

It’s not just the Surgeon General’s OpEd. Headlines all over the media ecosystem have been blaring about the mental health bomb of loneliness and isolation for several months now. It first blew up during COVID, when the world was shoved nose-first into a sea of N95 masks, everyone went online for everything, and cities turned into ghost towns. We disconnected in-person and reconnected online.

Much of that seems like a distant nightmare now. But not only has the COVID tide not fully receded, there’s a tsunami forming on the horizon that might make that quarantine feel like a kindergarten field trip. The robots are coming, the headlines now warn. AI is going to take not only your job, but your last few shreds of sanity and whatever connections and relationships you had with other humans, too.

​​During COVID, the skyrocketing ubiquity of social media algorithms in our lives turned into an overdose of epic proportions. Where social media dug a trench, generative AI is going nuclear. It has the potential to displace entire professional sectors; gut the creative class; re-thread our communal relationships with doctors, educators, and law enforcement; dissolve the nuances of romance; and turn our sense of what it means to function in human society inside out. 

But before we all run screaming for the hills, let’s unpack the thing that simmers at the core of AI’s power to disengage society: the Great Disconnect.  

Typing in prompts instead of working with your creative team to design a videogame, sexting with a bot instead of a hot human, or scrolling through digital galleries of beach sunsets instead of throwing your camp gear in the car seems like the perfect way to dilute life into a plate of cold broth. If you’re concerned ChatGPT and its bot friends might uproot your life and career at least a little, you wouldn’t be wrong. But you wouldn’t win debate class, either. The visible spectrum isn’t just black & white, there are more than a few ways to peel an apple (I feel you cat people!), and the enigma of superposition isn’t limited to quantum physics. 

What isolates and depresses you, might empower and delight someone less able or fortunate. What fragments and disconnects in one scenario, might unify and bond in another. Perhaps gen AI’s true legacy will be to make us all realize just how disconnected we already are, how much worse it can get, and spur us to turn the loneliness epidemic around. But that’s only if we’re willing to a.) see it; b.) accept our responsibility to address it; and c.) addressing it.

Read Articles by the Author - see the archives -

• Hallucination Nation (Part I)

• We are an auto-immune disease

• Death by a thousand edge cases

• AI at Work: Bubbles in the Sand Part II

• The AI:Human Interface (Part II)

The Muse

On the creativity, ingenuity, and untapped potential of humans in an AI-obsessed world

By Birgitte Rasine

Great, but why should I care?

Fair question. I don’t expect this essay to resonate with everyone. But if you’re a startup founder, CEO, or manager in the process of integrating AI into your operations, you might want to know how to keep your people motivated, performing at the top of their game, and feel respected. If you’re a techie, wouldn’t you want to know how not to be rendered redundant, and why people are not doing happy hour anymore? And for the creators out there, as much outrage, frustration, and anxiety you might be feeling about generative AI, it is more strategic and useful to educate yourself about AI, how it works, where it fails, and how to ensure creators continue to thrive.

Finally, if you’re any kind of human at all, unless you’re completely unplugged—in which case you’re probably not reading this post anyway—the worst thing you can do is dunk your head in the sands of denial. In the case of this formidable technology that’s poised to upend global society, ignorance is anything but bliss.

OK, but give me some context please

First off, let’s clarify the difference between loneliness and solitude. Solitude is the sense of contentment or even joy when being alone, present with one’s self. Those of us who write, paint, compose music, or engage in other activities that do not require communal participation, for example, often prefer solitude to do our work. I’ve never been able to join a writers’ group because I need to write alone. Loneliness, on the other hand, is a sense of isolation that persists whether or not there are other people around you. It’s that sense that something deep within is missing or out of tune, and perhaps even lack of a fulfilling inner life. 

Personal isolation and loneliness have been a focus of concern for the mental health sector for some time, certainly prior to the release of generative AI. There’s even a documentary film that bears the same title as this essay (I discovered it after deciding on the title). The Great Irony of the Great Disconnect is that the very technologies designed to connect more of us across the world, such as email, smartphones, and social media, did connect us but they also isolated and alienated us, each new technology driving us further and further apart. How can this be? Three critical shifts took place. 

First, the foundation of contact stopped being about communication, storytelling, and exchange, the way human societies have connected for millennia. It turned into likes, followers, heart icons, GIFs, and other digital compliments and feel-good indicators. Slowly, insidiously, our thoughts, opinions, and musings, and more crucially, our mistakes and unintended impulses began to be published for the entire world to see, and judge, and respond to, and, AND… reshaped as data. We’ll come back to this point, because it’s foundational to the discussion about generative AI. 

Second, the opinions of everyone reading our posts, listening to our songs and voices, and viewing our art and photos and videos, were given public life. Never before were creators—here I use the term “creators” in the most generic sense of the word—given such wide and deep access to the reactions and sentiments of the public, whether that public was their intended audience or not. 

Imagine what the Instagram feed of Cleopatra would have looked like! Assuming every inhabitant of Egypt had a connected device, the most she would have had is 2-4 million, a mere 0.95% of Beyoncé’s IG. Then again, Beyoncé doesn’t have her name carved in two-thousand-year-old sculptures.

Third, we began to connect at lightning speed with people we didn’t know in real life. Those new connections were no longer based on in-person, multi-year relationships, but digital representations of people’s lives, carefully—and not so carefully—curated. We went from getting to know the people we talk to over time and through experience, to making flash judgments on the basis of a single post or comment. As we’ll see, these three shifts have made a perfect storm of disconnection, alienation, and loneliness that generative AI will make quick work of if we’re not paying attention.

Datafication of the fully expressive human

The first shift in the way we communicate and connect, as discussed above, has to do with the mutation of the value and meaning of our expression. Digital communication tools, whether AI-driven or not, distill the words, images, and sound we express online into data. This data takes on various forms known as attention metrics, such as:

• Comments

• Likes/dislikes

• Icons for somewhat more nuanced reactions, such “insightful” or “funny”

• Shares & reposts

• Impressions

• Reach

• Open rates and click-through rates

• Bounce rates

• Length of time spent on a webpage

Of course, the full range of human emotions and expression does not fit into neat little categories, and that’s always a problem when you’re running analytics and trying to tie user activity to some kind of benchmark. It’s a particularly important challenge if you’re using those benchmarks to drive traffic to your online store, social platform, or search engine, or otherwise keep your investors well fed and happy. 

The biggest shift on the individual level is that we are no longer viewed as full human beings and bodies. We are “users.” “Consumers.” “Subscribers.” “Followers.” “Customers.” “Use cases.” Why not just say it out loud: we are Data Points. Stats. Numbers. In short, we have been datafied. Ironically, this datafication extends to everyone working in the tech sector as well, from investor to startup employee. They’re human too—and they post, comment, and browse just like the rest of the online world (albeit maybe a little less). This is the biggest step in the disconnect on an individual level: being human is an experience that is at once physically embodied, emotionally felt, and, for most people dare I say, spiritually traveled. When you consider yourself, or others, to serve the purpose of a data point, you’ve disconnected the humanity from the person.

Looking at it from the POV of the market, you need a way to quantify, analyze, and forecast the behavior, preferences, and opinions of all those annoyingly diverse and unique humans if you’re going to launch a (massively) profitable product or service. Well, you're in luck, because those annoyingly diverse and unique humans are also deeply tribal and constantly strive to fit in with their peers and communities, and so they’ve jumped right into the data pool, ​cold water be damned. We now routinely ask our readers to “please like, share, and comment below!” because we want data on them just as much as the algorithms do. The algorithms have trained us well.

Too well. The real reason we ask readers to like, share, and comment is not the data. It’s how the data makes us feel, and how easy the data makes it to get an instant result. It is a profoundly human thing to seek approval from our loved ones, friends, and now, increasingly, the rest of the world. It is an equally profound human thing to not want to have to do the work—the work of reading nuanced comments and opinions from fifty people, vs. a quick glance at that nice fat figure “42” next to the “like” icon atop your blog post. The number itself, of course, is relative—relative to how long you’ve been posting, relative to your overall email list size, relative to how many of your hard-earned dollars you’ve sunk into promoting that blog post. But it’s a concise, easy-to-grasp indicator of likability. What you miss, of course, is the real reason why any given person has “liked” your work. Some did it because they know and like you, and haven’t bothered to read the post. Others because they scanned the post and decided, in the spur of the moment, to like it. And some do it because they genuinely appreciated what you had to say. Now what about those readers who also read and appreciated your post, and maybe even told numerous friends about it, but chose not to ring that little bell? You’ll never know about them, just like Gabriel García Márquez never knew what the vast majority of his readers really thought of his work. 

And so the algorithms have effectively succeeded in transmuting our natural proclivity for peer and community approval into the data points they can work with. The invention of the “like” icon was a brilliant, if brutally world-altering, idea. Too many of us now create “content” with the intention of “engaging eyeballs.” (Whatever happened to the rest of our bodies? The disconnect thus becomes digital dismemberment, too.) 

How long—and deep—can we play the numbers game?

But why do we chase the highest numbers, instead of being content with whatever followers we’ve got? Because we can. Because the algorithms connect all of us in fractions of seconds. And because superlatives always impress: the fastest car in the Indy 500, the richest person in the world, the biggest predators on land and in the seas. The fastest growing app on the Internet (hello ChatGPT—no wait. Hello Threads, good-bye ChatGPT). So yes, we do numbers because assessing quantity is truckloads easier than trying to gauge quality and craft, and because we’re hard wired to seek and value resources, be they food, shelter, money, or yes, even those digital thumbs-up. In the latter case, digital status is a type of resource—it feeds not just our ego but expands the potential to earn revenue. (How some of us humans plan for that revenue is another matter.)

We can appreciate big numbers but we can’t process them properly beyond a certain size. Close your eyes right now and imagine a hundred-dollar bill. Now imagine a suitcase full of them. An entire warehouse of suitcases. How about a trillion hundred-dollar bills? Not so easy now, is it. Beyoncé can’t physically interact with every one of her 317 million Instagram followers either. I don’t pretend to sit in her head, but I imagine she doesn’t have the time to read all of their messages. 317 million does not represent the singer’s friends and peers; it’s a number that represents her success, her status on the world stage. Yet for all intents and purposes, Beyoncé is disconnected from her adoring tribe until and unless she pulls a few of them up on stage with her and puts her arm around them as they swoon. But what about the fans, from where they sit? How connected to their queen does any one of them really feel? Clearly, many do, as evidenced by their fierce loyalty and hordes of bee emojis. But is adoration true connection? And are the algorithms good for Beyoncé’s own mental health? Numerous sources would say not so much.

AI systems, on the other hand, can crunch unimaginable volumes of data, and they can do it 24x7. All they need is lots of processing power and a nice big data center with a steady supply of energy and water, the environment be damned. They are also completely unaffected by any of those pesky human emotional, psychological, or physiological consequences of excessive screen time or the nature of the content their own code serves up. 

When you, a human, spend even just an hour or two scrolling through the output of AI-driven social media feeds—TikTok videos, LinkedIn posts, Twitter (X) threads, how much mental or emotional energy do you have left for you, your work, and the people in your inner circles? How do you feel after subconsciously comparing yourself and your life—personal, professional, financial—to what the screen dangles in front of you?

And if you’re not impressed with the big numbers on Beyoncé’s Instagram, try the 500 million tweets posted daily on the site formerly known as Twitter, and the herculean task assigned to its recommendation algorithm to distill them down to “a handful of top Tweets… [on your] For You timeline.” It involves a neural network of roughly 48 million parameters “continuously trained on Tweet interactions.” Such work is not for the human of brains. Here’s a fascinating rundown of Twitter’s distillery—er, recommendation process if you’d like to slide down that rabbit hole.

Whether and how to connect, that is the question

Many argue that connecting online is still connecting—and in many respects that is true. I have personally made numerous connections online that have turned into friendships, including here on Substack. In some ways, the quirks of AI algorithms seem similar to the quirks of everyday life—a chance meeting in the hallway, on the train, or in line at a coffee shop seems just as accidental as stumbling across a thoughtful comment you decide to chime in on and end up with a new colleague or friend. And just like in real life, the experience and impact of those connections depend on the intentions and character of both parties. If you’re looking for trouble, you can find it online as well as in the real world. Granted, you can’t hide behind an avatar in the real world. At least not yet.

The dynamic of connecting with total strangers in an online world, itself disconnected from the physical environment, and interacting with them through text, images, and symbols, has inverted our natural, innate forms of communication. One could say we’ve evolved. A more accurate assessment, however, is that our own technology precedes us. We certainly know how to use it—and misuse it—but we remain biologically wired for physical contact and in-person interaction. You don’t need a stack of research studies to prove this (but here’s one, and another, if you like)—just notice how you feel in your body the next time you meet a good friend for dinner, vs. chatting with that same friend via text. 

The problem we have is not a simple question of quantity vs quality, or even AI vs human.  The problem we have is one of nuance, empathy, and context. Everything we do online is getting reduced to ones and zeros, to algorithms following instructions designed to maximize the indicators of popularity and profit. Influencers are voicing their frustration about their content being served less to their own fans and more to random people based on algorithmic assessments of what content is likely to spark the strongest reactions from which user accounts. When those reactions are less than pleasant, that can impact the influencer’s mental health. In fact, we’re seeing rising numbers of celebrities speaking out about their mental health struggles fomented by social media, and that is helping to bring the topic to the fore of public awareness.

Civil debate and thoughtful conversations do still exist online, but they tend to be drowned out in an increasingly virulent online environment that might get worse before it gets better. The feelings of loneliness, isolation, and the ever-present FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) that social media has wrought upon us are being taken to a whole new level by AI-powered algorithms and the automated firehose of content and targeted recommendations they’ve turned on. It’s one thing to feel pangs of envy about the Instagram influencer with the crazy-perfect dream house, but it’s another to stare down the black hole of your entire professional career in customer service going up in flames because it is likely to be made redundant by a much more cost-efficient chatbot. And it is quite another to have law enforcement break down your door and arrest you while pregnant and getting your kids ready for school because their facial recognition system glitched.

Social media platforms do not interact with you; they are platforms, digital canvases upon which you, along with other humans, paint your words and emojis and little dancing pig memes. AI-powered chatbots are different—they talk back. They effectively step out of the platform and onto it, wielding their own talking brushes, as it were. Up until recently, any time we received a digital communication, we could safely assume a human initiated and produced that communication. Now that chatbots have blipped onto the digital scene, that safety has begun to slip away. We’re aware bots write conversational threads, and that’s primarily because of a.) their still-stilted communication style and b.) the context of their delivery: a ChatGPT window, a chatbot on a company website, a Siri on your phone. Would you be able to tell, assuming the chatbot’s natural language functionality is advanced enough, whether any given Discord, LinkedIn, or Facebook post or comment was written by a human or a bot? Maybe you can now; just give it a few months.

If certain interests have their way with generative AI, there will soon come a time when you won’t be able to tell whether any text or voice on any platform has been produced by a human or a bot, unless you have an established relationship with the human. 

The nuclear option

Since AI algorithms in general have been running beneath social media for a while, you might think this type of AI isn’t much different from other digital communication tools in terms of its impact on our isolation factor. But there is one simple but fundamental distinction, and that is the virulent, adaptive, and weaponizable nature of generative AI that other AI algorithms do not share. Specifically: 

• The ability to respond to your question or prompt in natural language (read: the ability to respond, period)

• The ability to produce new content in response to said question or prompt, in multiple modalities

• Training on billions of words, images, sounds, strings of code, and other content

• The ability to develop synthetic data

• The ability to analyze complex or voluminous data and find hidden patterns and trends

• The ability to automate and accelerate a broad range of tasks and processes

This kind of power and speed should not be taken lightly; in fact, it has been argued that generative AI systems like ChatGPT should not (yet) have been made widely available to the public. A little too late for that now.

Content, the meat and bones of the online ecosystem, used to require human energy and effort. Teams of copywriters, SEO analysts, marketers, social media consultants, and product managers would spend weeks building marketing and media campaigns, launching them, and gathering the results. Now we’re seeing teams of 4 accomplish the work of 3x that number with generative AI tools and workflows. This is an extraordinary improvement in efficiency of time, cost, and scale. 

So what do we do now

The AI cat’s fully out of the bag. ChatGPT & co aren’t the first AI interfaces to have impacted our lives, but this is the first time an AI system has captured the imagination and dread of the public in such profound and powerful ways. The Internet has been trawled for content gems without anyone’s permission, and literal tons of collateral damage float in the wake of the gen AI ship. Myriad questions and quandaries abound, from the professional to the very personal:

• Do you hire a designer or use Midjourney for your blog post images?

• Can you let that staff writer whose work you’ve always disliked, finally go and use Jasper instead? 

• Will you get sued if you generate a sound-alike song for your video?

• Can you trust code generated by AI? 

• How do we define (and enforce) copyright now?

• How can you tell an AI-generated dating profile from a real one?

• Should I trust the voicemails I receive are really from my friends and family?

• Is it ok if I want ChatGPT to be my BFF?

True to form, it’s the headlines that scream end of days that draw those clicks and shares, but the real issues are the ones with the quieter headlines. We need to worry about human misuse of AI systems much more than any AI-spawned apocalypse or conquest. Perhaps the most sobering reality that we will need to come to grips with is not what AI can do against us, but how humans can use AI to our mutual detriment, whether intentionally or unwittingly. Never has technology saddled humanity with such existential burdens. To borrow from the poet Robert Frost, the only way out is through the AI fire.

A few tips for the road: 

• Don’t outsource your creative or critical thinking agency to an AI system. Continue to rely on your experience, insight, and wisdom.

• Always put your people first. If you want to leverage AI in your company, identify the workflows where it can best support, rather than replace, your staff.

• Give them agency: involve your team in determining the best ways to integrate AI tools into your operations. 

• Don’t be seduced by the temptation of fast, cheap image generators. There is no replacement for skilled human artists.

• Likewise, don’t be seduced by what reads and sounds like a sentient entity. There is no mind, heart, or soul behind your chatbot screen.

• Never, ever forget there’s always a non-zero chance your AI dreams of electric horses.

Oh, and one more thing. 

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to leave a comment, I’d be thrilled to respond.

~ Birgitte

Leave a comment

Short Bio of Guest Author

Birgitte Rasine is the CEO of LUCITÀ, a hybrid content and communications firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has worked with Fortune 100 and 500 companies, the United Nations, NASA, Google, and many other companies, non profits, educational institutions and government agencies.

She has given talks and presentations on three continents, and received awards for her literary work. In her previous career, she was a journalist for the Hollywood film industry, and in 2016, she joined the Google Assistant creative writing team and helped launch the Assistant in 4 international markets. Birgitte speaks 5.5 languages, serves as a chocolate judge, and writes The Muse, a Substack about human ingenuity and creativity in the age of AI. See her books.

The Muse, to write is human - check out the Newsletter.

The Muse

On the creativity, ingenuity, and untapped potential of humans in an AI-obsessed world

By Birgitte Rasine

What do you feel about the intersection of technological loneliness and the generative A.I. too-kit and consumer products?

Hello Everyone,

This is a rare Sunday edition. I usually make it a point to not bother my readers on a Sunday. It’s now Tuesday.

This past weekend I was having some weird thoughts, and I feel compelled to share it with you. I don’t often write Op-Eds, it’s not that I don’t think about these things.

My paid rate is going up from $8 to $10 a month, get it so you can grandmother the cheaper price.

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I do not know how to say it, but if social media induced technological loneliness, more anxiety, increased mental health issues, and less human bonding for young people growing up with mobile, I fear for what Generative A.I. will do to us?

Loneliness has emerged as a significant health threat. And new research finds that the number and frequency of social contacts in healthy older adults is linked to brain volume. That is, loneliness literally shrinks your brain.

On social media, app incentives turn people into more robot like actors desperate for dopamine rewards that are a poor replication and shadow hallucination of real human connection. Much in the way LLMs plagiarize-blend art or writing, chatbots “replicate” a sense of empathy, of being heard, and a sense of dialogue that some of us lack in our real lives even at chronic levels for increasingly prolonged periods. It’s unbearably inhumane. But can you clone human intimacy? And if you can, is it desirable for the human condition and for people to interact with said clones? Before ChatGPT was released, there should have been a choice, an opt-in, a decision made by democracies.

I believe loneliness is a real epidemic in society since the inauguration of the internet, and I also think it’s progressively been getting worse. ChatGPT, Pi, Claude and any variety of A.I. are not the answers. Young teenagers growing up on products like Snap’s My AI, won’t lead to great outcomes. At least not in terms of well-being, mental health and the acquisition of skills that uplift their lives filled with community.

Chatbots that prey on our lack of human intimacy caused by the same corporations that want to harvest and sell our data for profit while serving us Ads, could unsurprisingly, become very toxic for the human condition. The lack of consent is striking at scale. It’s the ‘human interface’ that requires the most regulation. It’s the ‘bad actors’, not the Generative A.I. itself. Having the bad actors themselves involved in regulating A.I. of course makes little sense. They have their commercial interests to protect, first and foremost and not the well-being of their users.

Loneliness research is finding a shocking reality: People with the fewest social contacts have smaller brains, while people who had the most connections had larger ones. Specifically, the temporal lobe, occipital lobe, cingulum, hippocampus and amygdala were smaller in people who had less social interaction, according to a study published last month in the journal Neurology.

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The crisis of loneliness poses as grave a threat to public health as obesity or substance abuse, that fact that we’ve realized rather late in our exploration of the internet isn’t exactly a coincidence. The consequences of digital dopamine loops can be fatal. It’s so dangerous, China wants to limit screen time for kids to just 2-hours.

But I think it’s not fully understood, recognized or even debated fully that Generative A.I. will instantly makes technological loneliness, a crisis of epic proportions! LLMs will make products, whether it’s apps or games, a lot more sticky. I’m going to try to make a case for how I see this happening. More time spent online, more time spent alone, more young people living alone - is not a trend that ends well. The infinite scroll is tearing lives apart, one hour of digital time lost forever, one penny for your loneliness.

Digital play, gaming, minecraft, roblox or YouTube binging is not a substitute for social play for the young forming brain. Trapping children in dopamine-loops in the digital world does not prepare them for the real world. GenZ who are graduating into the labor force in the early 2020s often now are lacking basic office, social and etiquette skills that we used to take for granted. Employers are so concerned they are even giving them more training.

The Rise of Synthetic Friendship and the Next Big Immersive Platform

The experiment ushered in by social media, apps, gaming and now Chatbots, is not going well for real people and their development of lifelong friendships, dating, relationships, prospects of marriage, prospects of parenthood and it’s going to become a global crisis of fertility and the mental health story behind this new reality. The loneliness epidemic is actually going to hurt GDP. Digital and A.I. is disrupting how people used to relate and the town square didn’t bring us together.

“Social isolation has been associated with … premature mortality, increased risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, increased reporting of depressive symptoms, as well as increased dementia risk,” Dr. Alexa Walter and Dr. Danielle Sandsmark of the University of Pennsylvania wrote in an accompanying editorial of the recent research I mentioned.

TikTok in the grand scope of things might have been weaponized and not just with regards to the privacy of children. Instagram brought us a new kind of dystopia and now gaming is set to overtake all other entertainment in the next decade. If gaming is bigger than movies and music combined, BigTech will leverage Generative A.I. to make even more addictive better games faster. Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision is way more symbolic than people realize. As disruptive as Generative A.I. is in the future of coding, I believe it will eventually be way more disruptive in the future of gaming and all entertainment. Think about it:

We’re starting to understand the protective features of good family, community and friendship bonds literally in our study of the brain. The people with the fewest social contacts had overall brain volume that was significantly lower than those with the most social interaction. Additionally, socially isolated people had more white matter lesions — areas of damage in the brain — than people with frequent social contact.

A world of more addictive games, apps and digital Advertising platforms ultimately is bad for mental health outcomes and technological loneliness spiked by A.I. for profit. As Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon hit the “generative A.I.” button as hard as possible, there can only be one outcome, more technological loneliness at a scale we cannot even today in 2023 fully imagine.

A Generative A.I. chatbot mimicking “human relationships” isn’t making the world a better place, it’s substituting people for bots and making us behave differently without our consent. It’s not just toxic for our mental health, and deeply unethical, it’s a new kind of technological coercion taking us further from our instincts to invest time in friendships, dating, community, socializing, exploring groups and finding real human life partnerships of various kinds.

The Generative A.I. bubble is a Venture Capital event, a capital intensive centralization scam to a few winners. A technologically enabled new kind of pyramid scheme. But what is it doing to the human psyche on a generation to generation level? This is not the AI-human hybrid society the Silicon Valley optimism of the early 1990s imagined. This is transforming the attention economy into something far more malignant, pervasive and we’re all quickly becoming captive agents in terms of a new more subtle elements embedded and driving surveillance Capitalism. Generative A.I. will unlock new levels of persuasion, immersion and gamification, and it will be next to impossible to regulate them.

The health risks of loneliness for our mental health and physical well-being may be even higher than we previously thought. In July, a study revealed that lonely diabetics are more prone to cardiovascular disease than the general population. In fact, isolation was found to have more influence on diabetes patients than depression, smoking, physical activity or diet.

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Sharing my secrets with Pi and ChatGPT being able to profile me by the sum total of my interactions are not events that will lead to good outcomes in my life. Being watched by A.I. from birth is the new reality for the next generation, like something out of a Black Mirror episode. Generative A.I. is is a gamified barter system for our soul. By cloning human interaction and replacing itself with chatbots and other tools in front of us instead of other people, Silicon Valley is attempting to create a great deception of dependency.

But loneliness kills. If loneliness lies at the heart of nearly all mental illness and that the lonely person was just about the most terrifying spectacle in the world, why have we created technologies that augment it and profit from our vulnerabilities while experiencing it? The Ad-based internet is indeed demonic from a standpoint of our psychological well-being.

Ariel Lee

If Generative A.I. is leveraged to make advertising more profitable, it means exploiting the human layer, over and over again. This repeated exposure is similar to the over-use of social media or gaming. We are all in the middle of a Playtest of the deepest secret of Monopoly Capitalism, there will soon be deeper levels to this game of Advertising optimized by A.I.

Apple, Amazon and Microsoft rushing into more profitable advertising businesses is a sign of where this will lead when it comes to the implementation of Generative A.I.

Apple’s Vision Pro headset will enable Apple Services and its advertising profits to soar, protecting it from hardware fluctuations. Apple’s Services revenue jumped 8.2% year over year in its latest June Earnings. On recent earnings calls, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and his team said “AI” 66 times. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his execs said it 47 times. They are pumping the bubble up because they know Generative A.I. can enable them to become like Gods.

What will be your place in the Garden of Technological Loneliness?

In a few years, you never considered yourself a “gamer” until Generative A.I. began to design games that were entirely personalized to you, specifically you. Hard to imagine such technology today in 2023, when it took Starfield (an upcoming game) 7 years just to be bug-free. Things like the “Metaverse” or Apple Services or Amazon’s rush into advertising have a purpose, they will be designed to lock you into a particular state. A state where your ARPU (average revenue per user) as a user is the highest, no matter the mental health consequences.

If you thought TikTok was addictive, or that Instagram held you visually in the infinite scroll, Generative A.I. will enable the design of unprecedented immersion that movies, music, art or other people, just won’t be able to compete with. You are already seeing it with the generation who grew up on mobile. The texters were replacing with the scrollers. But what comes after the scrollers? Gaming will one day begin to take attention from video. Everyone from the maker of TikTok, to the New York Times to Netflix have realized this. Generative A.I. will enable games to become vastly more immersive and therefore, coercive. Generative A.I. will be the catnip for new more addictive layers of the attention economy.

GenZ is a case study for technology’s impact on loneliness

A study released in June suggested there may be a link between cancer sufferers who have strong support groups and higher rates of survival. And it isn’t just the elderly or sickly who feel the effects of social isolation: Gen Zers may be feeling it the most. About eight in 10 report feeling isolated — twice the rate of senior citizens.

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With Generative A.I. these few corporations, the ones who already control Cloud and digital advertising, will be able not just to augment education and search, but all aspects of the entertainment products best personalized to you. This is how LLMs will actually change the internet forever.

Digital dopamine replacing sex, a pornification of all media, where even our loneliness is exploited and all if it captured by A.I. like never before. A world where OnlyFans is the closest some of us will come to intimacy, where YouTube is the biggest media company, where Generative A.I. will be weaponized against people in ways we cannot yet fully imagine. Wait a few years and you will see, I am not even exaggerating.

Generative A.I. is being heralded if it was a boon to human civilization but what if it were really a very dangerous pandora’s box or worse yet, a trojan horse? What do you suppose is the real reason Apple doesn’t use the term A.I. or Generative A.I. when it’s come out they have been working on it for years? Transformers came out in 2017, and if you cannot beat Google, you must join them:

Microsoft, Apple and Amazon will continue to make a greater share of their total revenue from digital Advertising and thus their incentives to use A.I. en entrap users like Meta or Google will be one and the same.

Apple Services will be Boosted by Generative A.I.

In the recent Earnings, Advertising continues to be a booming business for Amazon, with quarterly revenue jumping 22% in the period to $10.7 billion. This means eventually Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and the likes of ByteDance, Netflix and OpenAI will challenge the Duopoly (Google and Meta) in digital Advertising.

The Generative Gamification Moment

The incentive of digital advertising will turn Generative A.I. into a device weaponized against the user and greater ARPU squeezes. We know how the internet works, it’s 2023, we’ve had two decades of trial experience. The narrative that Generative A.I. will boost productivity is just a ploy narrative. It’s basically a dummy narrative for politicians, the public and executives of other industries to spur adoption. It’s a sales elevator pitch. Generative A.I. will reshape coding, gaming and the most lucrative parts of the internet like Search Advertising.

Google's top revenue source in 2022 was search ads. Of the $279.81 billion in revenue the company brought in, a whopping $162.45 billion came from search ads. That’s 58% of its entire business. Microsoft giving $10 billion to OpenAI in a complex deal and putting “Copilot” everywhere and adding multiple new expensive subscriptions and bundlings them isn’t just an anti-competitive tactic, it’s a preliminary example of how Generative A.I. will be used (with the excuse of inflation) for even greater profits. Generative A.I. may simply redistribute more wealth into the winners of Monopoly Capitalism. This is why the GABNAMM companies are pushing Generative A.I. so hard:

GABNAMM stands for:

1. Google

2. Apple

3. ByteDance

4. Nvidia

5. Amazon

6. Microsoft and

7. Meta

These are the most valuable companies in the world by Market Cap as of August, 2023:

These ironically are also the companies best positioned to leverage Generative A.I. to usher in a new kinds of dominance, conversational A.I. and enterprise LLMs that bolster both Cloud, Advertising and Gaming bottom lines. It’s not by accident Apple and Amazon have both gotten into gaming in recent years and why Microsoft has bought its way into a dominant position there.

a16z basically spells out how pivotal Generative A.I. will be in the future of gaming, and I don’t even think they fully understand what it will become. But for the future of technological loneliness, I think we can take a fairly accurate guess. I understood it fully when I watched the announcement of Apple’s Vision Pro on June 5th, 2023.

There it was, a vision of an ecosystem where you are alone, but not “really” alone of course! The illusion of connection always dances seductively at the fringes of the experience. But the user experience will amount to Generative A.I. learning how to manipulate you.

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Generative A.I. is a Precursor to the Brain Computer Interface

A world of such convenience that the office was basically on your head. Where collaboration and both work and play lived inextricably near, profoundly intimate and a seamless merging of the human and the machine. Not A.I. or Generative A.I., Apple calls it “machine learning”, the more academic term it prefers as part of its marketing and branding narrative.

But GABNAMM have their playbook that Silicon Valley evolved, that Google and Facebook so famously exploited to dominate. With about half a dozen major corporations it’s not like a duopoly, they really do compete at the onset of Generative A.I. to incorporate the new shiny tech into a new shiny product and human interface. They compete for A.I. Supremacy of Generative A.I., and in that light gaming and advertising take on new importance bolstered with LLMs.

So far as we can tell, that seems to be Apple’s Vision Pro. China’s ByteDance may even end up beating Meta to the Metaverse, we’ll have to wait and see. China clearly has a lot riding on ByteDance and TikTok not getting banned.

Building social connection does not mean spending more on Tinder, or Meta swallowing even more monthly active users. Generative A.I. will be fundamentally be used in product optimization that hurts people and fundamentally makes them more lonely. All that BigTech revenue is blood money if you think about it. It’s tainted, because it harms more than it helps.

Corporations will Leverage Generative A.I. for Attention

There is no application of Generative A.I., where technological loneliness is not made worse. Not in VR, not with chatbots presumably replacing even more human interaction, and not with gaming ecosystems like Roblox or whatever Microsoft ends up creating. That Netflix and Roblox are getting more into Advertising isn’t surprisingly, it was inevitable all along.

The future of media are not movies, streaming or subscription based pure-play models by the way. The future of media are Generative A.I. Ad-based ecosystems that can do everything including offer other businesses LLMs, quantum computing and A.I. in the Cloud. The future of media isn’t just YouTube, it’s gaming, video and apps (the current human interface), augmented by Generative A.I.

Apple Services and Microsoft are dependent on subscription revenue, but a subscription revenue of hundreds of products. Subscriptions in the hundreds diversifies the sustainable revenue generation and builds platform moats. But these only complement Azure or Apple’s hardware revenue or allow Amazon’s engine of commerce with Amazon Prime and AWS to be funded. Advertising is invariably the incentive that will turn Generative A.I. to the dark side when it comes to consumer convenience and consumer coercion. The dark arts of the UX and ‘Black Mirror’ side to product optimization. Generative A.I. can make products more persuasive, not just make us think workers will be more productive.

Entertainment is the Currency of Persuasion

It’s not by accident the likes of Alibaba, Amazon and Apple have invested so heavily in entertainment and media. Cultural persuasion and your brand is the currency that matters in creating a moat that few others can replicate. That’s why ByteDance has gotten into music streaming, even book publishing, A.I. supremacy also means cultural supremacy and the game of influence. Digital advertising is the ultimate stamp of influence. The rise of Apple services and not Netflix getting into advertising is the real story here. The rise of Microsoft as a gaming giant and not Meta pretending its an A.I. leader is the real story here.

Generative A.I. has an astounding ability to manipulate users and create convenience in product-market fit. Some of the art, music, video and chats with LLMs feel “real”. It’s the seductive illusion that makes it such a great fit for advertising, gaming, software as a service (SaaS) and other lucrative ways humans immerse themselves in the digital, losing a bit of themselves in the process. Being at greater risk of becoming lonely.

Just as TikTok knows if you are lonely just from what you end up engaging with. Whatever your emotional reaction to content, you are a target for a certain kind of content. That’s why facial recognition (e.g. TikTok) and pupil dilation (e.g. VR) can predict so much of what you will end up liking or even doing the next second. Surveillance Capitalism in using facial recognition and pupil dilation have more data points to manipulate your emotional state, either to increase engagement or serve you Ads at the right time, among other touchpoints. Eye-tracking in VR is a substantial upgrade for surveillance capitalism for advertising based Generative A.I.

Apple is bulking up its talent for Generative A.I. All these companies have realized how important LLMs will become to optimize the product experience, the human interface and more importantly in boosting Ads revenue and adoption of new more immersive human interfaces, like brain computer interfaces (BCIs). The Vision Pro is a primitive BCI.

We Spend 40% of our Waking Hours Online

Generative A.I. isn’t some neutral tech that scientists discovered. It’s a new kind of artificial intelligence that is being weaponized against users, consumers and even citizens. Whatever social media did to our mental health and however it damaged our ability to socialize in the real world, Generative A.I. will take us deeper down the rabbit hole. If not by Silicon Valley, then by China. Generative A.I. will allow Surveillance capitalism to mature, even as what we call “democracy” or “capitalism” is uprooted from what they were originally intended to be.

GABNAMM will tell you that Generative A.I. is incredible and that it’s going to lead to so many great advances. Meaning your agency online will continue to diminish, your freedom of choice and even your time online, time in gaming, time not with people will continue to impacted.

The typical global internet user’s average daily internet during the past twelve months is around 6 hours 37 minutes per day. That’s nearly exactly 40% of all time you spend awake. Keep in mind for young people it’s way way higher and higher still if you are a heavy social media user or gamer, or both. By 2030 it will be a lot more than forty percent. Generative A.I. will be responsible.

Generative A.I. will simply be another launchpad for Surveillance Capitalism to betray the users in new ways. Ask an A.I. “Scientist” if this can be regulated? Go ahead. The acute problem of Technological loneliness will mean mental health will continue to be a huge issues as the era of personalized Ads will become more coercive by the nature of the tendency to manipulate that is the very foundational nature of Generative A.I. products. Nobody fully understands how Generative A.I. does what it does or how, so Generative A.I. is the black box of the black mirror. And, that’s why it’s so dangerous.

Generative A.I. will usher in new ways for authoritarian regimes to increase their power, whether that’s of Chinese origin or Silicon Valley in origin.

• ByteDance (the maker of TikTok) has an estimated 31.7 billion U.S. dollars in digital ad revenue from Douyin and TikTok in 2022, the company remained the fifth spot among global ad publishers. I actually believe this estimate under-reports the true figure even back in 2022.

Since advertising is the central hub of how the internet has been monetized, everything that is revenue-centric such as how Generative A.I. will be used, and the fastest growing kinds of entertainment like gaming, stand the most to gain from whatever LLMs become and Generative A.I. is able to do by 2025, 2030 and so on.

Thus Technological loneliness will only be augmented by that intersection of advertising, gaming and generative A.I.

Other kinds of media will become less important and finally obsolete, like TV, News or Moves not generated by Generative A.I.

That’s the future of the internet, whatever form it takes exactly doesn’t really matter. That’s the future of capitalism too, that’s the future of the human condition. Even U.S. politics is now a charade impacted by social media, advertising, Generative A.I. deepfakes and so forth. You will see in 2024, it’s no longer democracy. There is no alternative reality to that internet. To that American flavor of reality. Whether it’s by virtue of a BCI (brain computer interface) or a VR headset, it’s all the same. One homogenized future filled with myriad ways to feel technologically lonely.

Generative A.I. thus will impact all human behavior that can be monetized. Including our tendency to feel lonely and vulnerable in this increasingly digital world where we spend at least 40% of our waking ours “connected” to it. Even when this connection feels strangely hollow and disconnected. Even when we are able to pause and disconnect, we find the world has gone on without us in the same way as usual, as if by design.

Thus in even five years, there is no escape from “Generative A.I.”. because it will be generating your digital reality and in almost every product. We will embed our most manipulative and coercive illusions into all our hardware and software, and we’ll call it, wait for it, a “triumph of technology”.

We will squeeze the human soul to the limits of human psychological despair, just to get the maximum ARPU from each person. But our human spirit and what’s left of our humanity will feel something is inwardly off. Until those born before the internet was invented and Generative A.I. was invented, will no longer be alive. Our descendents won’t recognize a reality without Generative A.I., before the internet became alive.

We will still be lonely. Yes, even in greater convenience and living with more coercive products. Our privacy, freedom, human rights and ability to connect with others will have been striped from us, as if by default. As if intentionally, because it’s profitable. And as such, there will be no escape from Generative A.I. and whatever AGI becomes.

Loneliness and isolation represent profound threats to our health and well-being. But also tells the story of the predatory nature of technology and the human-interface when we place advertising, attention and entertainment at the forefront of the internet, instead of education, well-being and human progress.

Generative A.I. is a blooming garden of synthetic media, yet it will, I predict, end up feeling even colder, emptier and more barren than social media. I believe it will make us even more lonely. I look forward to reading the studies, if they ever do indeed come out.

Thanks for reading!

I’m looking to start a series on technological loneliness, DM me on LinkedIn if you want to pitch an angle for a guest post in A.I. Supremacy.

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