With technology daily infiltrating our lives, is the overuse of AI eating our souls? The italicised word overuse is intentional in terms of the negative trade-offs with AI/social media.

It’s true that AI can help us positively in some things, but the current deluge feels like people are drowning in it, with many of us becoming exhausted as we scroll our lives away, especially those who are of a spiritual nature, as opposed to the soulless designers (not all) driving [un]social media content, in most cases, into our brains and minds.

According to Forbes Why ‘AI Fatigue’ Is Wearing You Down And How To Beat It:

Employees who frequently use AI report 45% higher burnout rates compared to those who rarely use it, based on a study by Quantum Workplace.

Think about it: The addiction of constantly scrolling is like we are forever searching for something in a kind of eternal loop to reach a perfected digital fix of some sort. Those who regularly use AI and social media are seeking efficiency to gain more efficiency, ad absurdum.

This cannot be healthy, as we human beings are tactile creatures caught in the ‘Net’ of a virtual world lacking the aesthetics of beauty, with nothing to touch, feel, smell, taste, or hold; a world where one can at times be unsure about what is authentic and what is falsely generated (deepfake); a world that sometimes makes us question reality. Even in our physical actions on social media with mobile devices, the overuse of which may result in eyestrain, neck pain, and insomnia.

All of this hi-tech dependence has happened too fast, like a minute to midnight on the cosmic clock: One ‘minute’ in the relatively distant past we are sitting in a concert watching Elvis Presley singing songs, the next ‘minute’ after his death, we are watching his ghost (a hologram) singing the same songs on stage, ditto other popular dead singers of yore.

But AI holograms are not limited to famous dead entertainers. In my book, Cities of the Absurd, I write about this in a short sci-fi fictional story called The Ghosts of Hologram House Cities of the Absurd: Strange Tales from the Dark Metropolis by Kenneth Francis | En Route Books and Media. Here’s a brief extract:

…The internet also informed me of Hologram House, where I spent Thanksgiving Day with the hologram ghosts of my dead parents. This place is a five-storey building, west of Silicon Valley, where they produce holograms of dead singers and actors, amongst other characters. The deal is straightforward: For $6,000, a person requests a meeting to interact with a dead person for a short period of time, in my case an afternoon, with such a deceased person(s) recreated into a hologram. I had to supply the company with old film footage, complete with sound, of my parents at family events. The company also required written anecdotes at such family events which they inputted into the narrative of the algorithm’s AI for my parents’ hologram to respond to. The script was recorded by a male and female actors, then the voiceover was digitally converted to that of my mother and father’s voices…

Regarding the psychological effect that overuse of AI has on the human mind and brain, Medical News Today said:

One of the most well-studied effects of social media use is on body image, or how satisfied a person is with their appearance. A 2022 review notes that image-based social media platforms have a stronger association with a negative body image than text-based platforms, as do several behaviors relating to social media use, such as: Taking and editing selfies; viewing “fitspiration” content or posts that promote thinness; comments that promote an ideal body type… A 2021 review of past research found a weak but significant association between time spent on social media and depression symptoms. However, there was a stronger link between problematic social media use and depression. This suggests people using social media in less healthy ways could be more at risk for depression. Again, though, this study does not establish a causal relationship between social media and depression. More research is necessary to understand the relationship.

Some 30 years ago when I was lecturing journalism, the students took notes with pen and paper. As the years rolled on and iPhones, laptops and the internet went mainstream, I found my students constantly glancing at their phones and tablets during lectures. When I asked other colleagues did they experience this, they all agreed it was a major problem. Nowadays, students are getting AI to write their essays. But offloading thinking to AI can erode the skills they’re trying to build and that is a real worry and a further dumbing down of a student’s academic skills.

Paradoxically, I suppose one positive trade-off with AI is Mind Matters would have less copy without it! Also, we would not learn about information based on facts hidden from us by most of the mainstream corrupt media.

The term AI is like any potentially harmful/harmless object but the ramifications of its use is programmed by the designers, some of whom are biased and agenda-driven, opposed to some of whom inform us with facts.

Saying AI is literally evil is like saying a gun is evil, thus we must always be concerned at whose finger is on the trigger. Using the term AI is embedded in the culture and figuratively convenient. AI should really be called Human-Generated Artificial Intelligence (HGAI), but it’s a bit late in the day for a new initial cluster or any other such Hi-Tech acronyms.

My humble advice would be: Use AI/Hi-tech in moderation and consider its moral implications and how it should be regulated by known trustworthy people who discourage malinformation but encourage people to notice factual things and for the safety of oneself, and, of course, the safety of Mankind.

To repeat, AI is a tool and not evil, but some people are malevolent activists/propagandists. As the saying goes, ‘there’s good and bad in all of us’, so consider trade-offs in the lesser of two positive and negative options. And the negative options are when the AI designers (not all) build modern towers of Babel, reaching for the sky on a power grab to rival God, but ending up inheriting the wind.