Saturday mornings were the best as a kid. No school, waking up late, not having to comb my hair… and cartoons.
One Saturday Morning was the name of the segment where I would cartoons on TV, allowed to watch it from my parent’s bedroom without interruption. Cereal when I wanted it. I liked the stories they told, though to me, they were just series that we would later talk about in school.
“Did you watch Bobby’s World?”
“Check out my Pepper Ann shirt!”
We all knew the cartoons themselves weren’t real. Like they didn’t actually happen. Dogs can’t talk and kids don’t magically turn into astronauts to defeat monsters in outer space.
Our reality eventually had other twists and turns. Like when I realized that an actor from one movie would later become someone else in another. No matter how much I think back on it, I don’t remember exactly how I took it. I remember the silliness of it all when my mom’s novelas on TV included a slap, or a kiss. I used to think that it was so weird that they were up there playing pretend the whole time.
After that, it was smooth sailing. A drip of new discoveries showed up. Presenters on the news actually read from text in front of the camera lens and they didn’t just happen to know the news or memorize them beforehand.
Or when I learned that my teachers actually based their lessons from a book that was given to all of them.
It made me wonder how much of what we see and hear is real. Even now, as a writer myself, I think on how its my turn to fake things and make people believe things that never happened. Things that could happen, but haven’t yet.
But there’s something unusual when I think of algorithms and what we’re forced to see when we open up instagram. Everyone watches what they want to see, whether its fake, real, or a mix of both, and as long as it keeps us entertained, we’re okay with it.
If we had a problem with artificial intelligence images or audio, we would have called it out already. “They’re tricking us!” “Cancel AI!”, something, of course, I come across in comments sections already, usually by authors and illustrators who see their fate (and jobs) vanish before their eyes.
Others, like me, look for visuals of things that we can’t find anywhere else. A baby transforming into a dolphin in an ultra-realistic format. Not sure why anyone would want to see that, but it kind of reminds me of the old Animorphs books and what my mind came up with back then when I read about these transformations.
If we look at the pace of this, however, how fast our ideas make it onto a digital format and how easy AI is learning how to entertain us, it makes me wonder of how this is going to play out.
Sure, it’s fun to see images come to life. Videos and books being made completely with artificial intelligence, which is really just a mix of everything that came before it, unable to conceive a truly original material –the same problem we have as humans. But is our idea of a wonderful world with AI truly about being entertained by the things it comes up with? It helps us make music, make movies and storyboards. Endless content for the masses. That’s it? It can’t be.
Just like machines get better at making things that appear real, we also begin to train our ears and eyes to catch when something isn’t real. We will start craving that same wave of entertainment of being in a live theater, listening to a live concert, or maybe going even further back into the times when we gathered around a fire to tell stories.
If you create content on the internet, surely you’ve seen a rise in interest with live interaction and streams. We’ll start craving subtle mistakes in production, physical autographs, film, and relics of a life that shows we’re real.
It won’t be long before our phase of Saturday morning cartoons once again also fades and our interests shift. We’ll stick around for the stories, sure, but like with Disney and it’s repetition of exact same, data-proven formula of storytelling begins to bore us. We’ll appreciate them for what they are, simply another language of story.
But eventually we’ll start to appreciate people for who they are, and what they make, again.