Manu Joseph: AI killed the remarkable video clip and took apart an old pact humans have long had with nature

An American woman who was not a target of the raid but was there to protest against it blocked the road. We can see an ICE agent grab the handle of her car door; she reverses and then drives ahead, perhaps trying to get away. Another agent responds by shooting the woman dead.

Until a few years ago, most people in the world had never seen a human die. Then the proliferation of mobile phones made it common. Today, we can watch shootings, fatal accidents, plane crashes, executions and even people just dropping dead after being hit by lightning. But there are also more pleasant extraordinary video clips of killer whales working in tandem to dislodge a seal from an iceberg, though they may not be very pleasant if you ask seals.

Maybe in olden times, people saw some extraordinary things but surely never such a wide array of remarkable sights. It is odd that we don’t marvel enough about this. This has happened not only because of the invention of the smartphone, but also because it has now become so ubiquitous that wherever there are humans, there are as many phones.

This is all very new. Even 10 years ago, the very definition of a remarkable event was that there was no video of it. Today, it is taken as a mystery, even as shady, if something remarkable has occurred and there is no video of it.

The sheer number of such videos has reduced our shock and diminished our wonder. We have transformed from being witnesses of tragedy to its consumers. Yet, we still retained some of our capacity for amazement at the extraordinary. This was because we believed our eyes. The video grab was evidence that something had occurred. Today, that is gone, taking with it the final layer of our collective innocence.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) videos has complicated the ultimate human treaty with nature: That seeing is believing. Suddenly, not only do we look at an extraordinary event on screen without wonder, we also suspect it might be fake. And when it becomes obvious that an event is not real, it tampers with our pursuit of wonder. Because if AI can create such reality, it diminishes reality itself.

The era of extraordinary videos has been one of the shortest spans of a new human experience. Even the electronic typewriter and the pager, which were doomed to be very brief parts of human life, seem to have lasted longer.

At least electronic typewriters and pagers were killed for honourable reasons by more advanced ideas. The deluge of AI generated videos, though driven by a fast-developing technology, is all about fooling people and earning money from mass appeal. Oddly, many of the fake AI videos around are of wild animals attacking women.

AI reels, generally, look very real, but I can easily tell they are fake. Take my word for it, I have a 100% success rate in calling them out (to myself). Usually, what gives them away, apart from the fact that they have a lion or tiger mauling a young woman, is how well-made they look. They are clear and properly framed and more remarkable than what we are used to.

This is another aspect of the evolution of the extraordinary video that AI has ruined—now anything that is better than remarkable has a stamp of fakeness. But soon, it would be hard for me to sustain my success rate in identifying fakes. Reel-makers will start creating videos that mimic human bad luck with timing—the action would be relatively unremarkable and framed clumsily.

A good thing may just happen. It is possible that the proliferation of AI videos might return the value that we once used to place on real-life incidents, just like how mind-numbing visual effects in cinema have increased the value of a Tom Cruise doing things any middling stuntman can do. A star performing ‘real stuff,’ like jumping off a plane, is so special today that studios think it is worth a hefty insurance bill; they even spend money promoting that fact.

But, all things considered, it does appear that we have lost a form of wonder. Over the past five years or so, true videos reduced our capacity for shock and now AI fakes have reduced our capacity to trust what the eye sees. It appears that the only thing that can shock us is the appearance of aliens or God.

But then, if our reaction to extraordinary videos is any indicator, it is possible that we will be amazed by those apparitions only briefly before getting accustomed to the extraordinary and then bored by it.

The only images that retain our primordial wonder are space images. For instance, one of the most famous pictures that has appeared in recent times is the image of a ‘black hole,’ a dense object whose gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape it, and as a result, it is invisible. As a result, it is invisible, a phenomenon that was theoretical until recently, and which is still only theory for niche scientists who doubt its existence.

However, there is an ‘image’ of a black hole that has thrilled millions across the world. But it is not really an image as we know images but a reconstruction of data put together to generate something that the human eye might see. Yet, the world paid it the ultimate compliment. It believed what the eye saw.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’