this week, on la revuelta, david broncano announced they would stop using artificial intelligence on the show altogether, after several people complained about an ai-generated image in which his face appeared without permission. it’s the sort of thing that has been an everyday occurrence ever since artificial intelligence began to go mainstream — or rather, to democratise access to tools with real and useful capabilities — a couple of years ago or more.
i’ve seen it very close up in my personal life: friends who declared themselves openly against the use of ai for pretty much anything, from the very beginning; and others who have incorporated it more organically into their daily lives and workflows. by now a year and a half, two, three years will have passed since that democratisation, and i see the situation is almost politicised: there are those who were strongly against it at the start and remain strongly against it; those who were against it and are little by little accepting these tools; and those who perhaps never even posed the dilemma — what it implied, what ethical or social issues it raised — and are only starting to do so now: some carry on forward, others decide to stop and look around. i get the feeling that this is what has happened with la revuelta.
this has led me to draw an analogy with the world of social media. i’ve never been much of an enthusiast of the concept of a social network, nor have i known how to handle myself well within them. i came late to facebook, and with instagram i decided not to go in, because very early on i identified what it was about: the treadmill of perfection, the oversimplification that your life is perfect, sharing only the good moments, appearances. i didn’t want to go in. and i felt in my own skin the effects social media were having, whether on society or on myself.
but one thing surprised me: the very act of deciding not to be on social media also affects you. a striking phenomenon has emerged at a sociological, almost demographic level: social media perhaps affected those who decided not to use them more than those who did. normally, when someone decides to enter a place, the consequences affect those who enter. a restaurant serves food to those who have come in, not to those standing outside. with social media it’s the opposite: they serve the food to those who are outside. and it feels strange when you notice it in your own skin: i decide not to have social media, and that affects me more than if i did have them, even though it goes against my principles.
this is more or less how they operate: get as many people inside as possible, and generate a disconnection between those who are inside and those who are outside. those of us who decide to stay out feel excluded — not by social media, but by our own friends and family who are inside. it may sound extreme, but if we think about it for a minute it’s true: people share everything; whoever goes on a trip uploads the photos, whoever goes to a concert shares it. and a muscle memory takes shape: “i’ve already shared it, whoever wants to has already seen it, i’m not going to bring it up”. that’s where the disconnection lies. i’m generalising, but the generalisation holds: many of your closest friends no longer tell you things, no longer send you keepsakes, photos or videos of what they’ve been up to, because they’ve uploaded it to social media and expect you to see it. one-to-one contact stops being cultivated and everything is directed to a one-to-many treatment — and the more, the better. whoever decides not to play the game feels excluded, because in that “one to many” you aren’t included; and it’s “your fault” for not joining.
this is how social media grow. an adult with clear ideas is aware of this and has to decide every day: to fight against it, to accept the disconnection from their loved ones, or to enter the game. if for an adult it’s already a conflict, imagine a child, a teenager, where the fear of exclusion is inherent to that stage of development. a child is capable of understanding when their parents tell them they can’t have a phone yet, even if all their friends upload dances to tiktok; but they are not capable of managing the exclusion. for me it’s a horrible poison of social media, terrible, with a brutal power over people.
and what does it have to do with artificial intelligence? ai has taken this exclusion one step further. until now the effect of social media was purely social: connections between people. ai turns it economic, occupational. it remains social, but with many more ramifications. ai tools, just like social media, open the tap so that people gain access to skills and capabilities they did not have. with social media it was at a social level — connecting with people you wouldn’t otherwise know; with ai it’s at a professional level, because it allows you to do things you wouldn’t know how to do. and, just as with social media, you have to be careful: you can’t believe everything, it can fail, it can have adverse effects. but it gives you a range of capabilities that without it you didn’t have.
the example i’ve heard most often from my friends: “i’m against it because now people turn to ai to generate images and designs that a graphic designer used to make”. that’s true, but the deeper issue goes further: ai allows people who aren’t designers to do things a designer would do. i’m not entering into the question of quality, or whether it does it better or worse; the capability is granted to you, even if with flaws. i don’t belittle anyone’s work: a specialist with their own ideas will be much better than an ai, today and probably for years to come. and a designer who also uses ai will be better than one who doesn’t, because for someone who already knows their craft it broadens the scope and lets them exploit their knowledge further.
with ai, if you decide not to step onto the wheel, you stay out of jobs, of earning a wage. it’s no longer a matter of principles, but of necessity.
where am i going with this? to the point that whoever doesn’t incorporate ai tools into their day-to-day — at a professional level, but also personal — is going to be left out. left out of skills, of abilities, of things you are capable of doing. that’s why the dilemma ai puts you in is so dangerous. with social media you could say “i’m going to isolate myself from my friends, it doesn’t matter, i don’t want to jump through the hoop”, and even draw something positive from it: tending more to the relationships i do have, seeing each other in person, not letting them dissolve into the one-to-many. but with ai, if you decide not to step onto the wheel, you stay out of jobs, of earning a wage. that’s where it becomes so dangerous: it’s no longer just a matter of principles, but of necessity. there will be those who feel forced to use ai to keep their job, because in theory with ai you produce more. whether by your own initiative or because the company imposes it on you — “use it, it makes you more productive and that suits me” — you are practically obliged to fall into these tools. and that’s no longer social, it’s survival. and nobody is talking about this.
we look at the adoption charts — facebook so many days to reach a million users, instagram, whatsapp, tiktok, each one fewer — and along comes chatgpt and breaks every barrier, and nobody stops to ask why. the real reason is this: it’s going to be imposed on all of us, whether we want it or not, and we’re going to have to deal with it until the bubble bursts, or until it becomes more expensive to use it than to hire a person, and we go back to the beginning. because there’s another issue: the financing and the consumption of these ais. today all these companies are running at a loss, and somebody will end up paying for it; for now the investors, but a moment will come when it’ll be the customers, because the investors will want their returns. and by then we’ll be so hooked, we’ll have delegated so much of our work to ai, that we’ll have to relearn how to do it: we haven’t stopped doing it, but we’ve changed the way so much that we’ve unlearned it. what’s going to happen in that situation? it’s very worrying, and it isn’t being talked about. what do we do with all this? how do we frame it?
