Like Demna, Kane discerns in AI-generated looks a lack of a sense of “fashion.” “But it’s near enough to human creativity,” he says, “it makes you wonder—wonder if the technology will improve so much that there’ll be no difference—or wonder if there’s something in us that technology can never have. I guess,” he adds with a groan, “I’m talking about a soul.”
Here’s a thought that occurred to me, apropos the question of whether my love-mail came from men or bots: Does it matter? Countless users of dating apps engage in lengthy chat flirtations with people they never end up meeting; the vast majority of social media relationships are exclusively virtual. At a certain point, one must admit that the actual bond is between you and the interface.
For the record, I think it does matter—maybe not when you’re tapping through customer service prompts, but yes, absolutely, in any circumstance staked on human connection: dating, therapy, taking in art that’s meant to tell you something about what it’s like to be a real person with memories, dreams, ethics, a body—with subjectivity, in a word. Could an algorithm develop some form of that? We’re getting deep into existential questions here—what is consciousness, anyway?—but as University of Paris professor of history and philosophy of science Justin Smith-Ruiu assures me, those issues can to some extent be set aside.
“I don’t think we’re going to experience the dawning of qualia in the machines,” says Smith-Ruiu, who dug into the history of outsourcing thinking to machines in his book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. “We’re different systems: Humans evolved to look under logs for food, to sniff out decay and other kinds of potential danger. A machine that skips straight to higher-order thinking isn’t going to reason the way we do.”
For Smith-Ruiu, the key matter is how much authority we allow the AI. Do we continue down the path of letting algorithms determine everything from which songs we hear on Spotify to who gets a job and who goes to jail? One straightforward example of algorithmic influence: TikTok’s AI-supported “beauty scanner” filters, which rank users on their attractiveness. Because these algorithms rely, like all AI, on prior data, they wind up perpetuating bias toward certain types of beauty: fair-skinned, slender, young. Ugh, but at least this code is comprehensible to its designers—who could, hypothetically, adapt or dispense with it. But what happens when a self-teaching algorithm starts making decisions no one—not even its original engineers—understand?
“We’re moving into a phase of technology where the machines engage in independent learning and self-replication,” Smith-Ruiu explains. “But if we can’t follow the reasoning in the machine, how do we know when it’s gone wrong—or when to turn it off?”
Midway through researching this story, I realized I was out of my depth. Even people who engineer AI are flummoxed by it—I, meanwhile, am intimidated by automatic software updates, and so I decided that the best way to trace the contours of the debate around AI was via analogy to that other hot-topic technological breakthrough: Ozempic. Demna got it immediately: “Oh, yeah: Some big new thing comes along that’s going to change our lives—do we go with it? And if everyone does—then what?” Bingo.
“Ozempic” here is shorthand for a class of injectable medications, initially developed to regulate blood sugar in patients with type 2 diabetes and now—another tidal wave breaking onto shore—in skyrocketing use as an aid to weight loss. If you’ve noticed people in the public eye getting suddenly, sometimes shockingly, thinner—no, your eyes are not deceiving you. It could be the Ozempic effect.
Actors and influencers aren’t the only ones rumored to be partaking: Analysts at JP Morgan Chase reported that in the last week of January 2023 alone, US doctors wrote over 313,000 Ozempic prescriptions—a 78 percent increase from the previous year, and that’s not counting other brand-name injectables, like Mounjaro, or generics retailed by compounding pharmacies.
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