Humans have told stories for their entire existence, through tens of thousands of years. By word of mouth, by petroglyphs drawn on the sides of caves, carved in stone, written on papyrus, etched on linens that wrap mummies to guide their souls to the Field of Reeds, we have always told stories. The drive to pass along our history, thoughts, and fantasies is innate to humanity. As wars are fought, as loves are formed and broken, we yearn to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, to make sure our perspective is known.
Because that’s all it is. A perspective.
To the victor goes the spoils and the ability to write the story that casts us in the light we like best. Take the fall of the Aztecs: even the name Aztec is not the real name of the people who were murdered by Cortez. The people called themselves the Mexica (pronounced “Ma-sheek-ca”) which, sure, can be found in the name of the city in which the Mexica were eradicated, but the name which is taught in hundreds of schools is “Aztec.” Who picks the stories that survive? Who picks the names and the motives of colonizers or participants in war? Historians spend their life picking through stories, studying the perspectives that are written, and offer theories as to what “really happened.” But we never truly know. The accounts the historians study are incomplete, one-sided, full of individual perspectives that are further diluted by the historian’s perspective. Stories and interpretations of stories are turtles all the way down.
I would like to think that science dispels the lack of concrete evidence of what truly occurs. However, I have spent almost two decades in the science field and I have found that even scientific papers are flawed. Data is inconsistent, vendors claim one thing and our testing proves another, and engineers are lazy in testing or make mistakes in their recording. It seems like everything written is ephemeral and can’t be trusted.
Eight years ago I was an engineer on a project that required system qualification testing. The test report of my system came back and the board was excited that the test passed. However, when I read the report, which clearly said “pass” across the top, I was horrified to find that the results had been manipulated to force a pass. From an engineering perspective, I had extreme trepidation in the actual safety and qualification of the system. I spoke up about my concerns, much to the irritation of the board. The written report was wrong, but everyone accepted it as right. I was young, but that was the moment I began to doubt scientific writing.
This perspective was solidified further when I discovered that the engineers who tested the O-ring on the Challenger knew it would crack in extremely cold conditions. For years after reading a report on the Challenger I blamed the engineers for not testing the equipment properly. However, that report failed to note that the engineers knew and had warned their superiors of the failure. They were ignored. But that story isn’t told in circles that want to hide the failures of a command.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a conspiracy theorist who thinks that everything written is a lie and that “big writing” is out to get us. But I am increasingly distrustful of things that are written or stories that are told. When we interact with social media, there’s always an angle of the story teller. When we hear an advertisement, we are being manipulated to purchase something. Even certain friends tell us less than true stories that put a beautiful lens on how they want us to view them.
I’m not so elitist that I think I am above this storytelling flaw either. My own writings and verbal conveyances have colored perspectives, blind spots, and less than stellar attempts at truths. Even that last sentence in that last paragraph is commentary to a friend that I know she’s lying to me about something. Writing is communication of ideas, subconscious, metaphorical, sometimes direct. But it is fueled by the writer’s motive. So what is the real history of any event? Do we ever know? Wouldn’t videos capture the truth?
The advent of AI has exposed the falsity of writing with increasing notoriety as we see blatantly false summations of large language models that were trained using OUR stories. My irritation of writing, AI, and the whole enterprise of humanity increased when I was accused of using AI to write on a subreddit for an innocuous post I had made about something I was excited about and wanted to share with similar minds. Me? Use AI to write? AI was trained on MY writing, MY book, MY Xanga posts from when I was twelve years old. I don’t sound like AI; AI sounds like me! And I didn’t have a say in this scrapping of data for large language models. What started as a hobby and developed into a book has been used to further technology that I despise without my consent. Whatever happened to intellectual property rights?
I digress.
Videos used to be clear proof and evidence of an event. Sure, doctored images have existed since Nessie, and fake videos aren’t new, but the prevalence of AI to make fake videos and FaceTune images has exploded exponentially since 2022. In a world where historical accounts could be captured on video to show the masses and dispel single perspectives in journalism, there is no longer believable proof of anything. It could all be fake.
There was a fleeting moment of history between when stories of conquests were written by the victors and when videos can’t be trusted that we knew we were seeing the truth. The war in Vietnam was the first time America saw video footage of the destruction. The Iraq war in the mid-2000s expanded the real videos from professional journalists to layman eighteen year olds with Kodak cameras. We knew what we saw was probably real.
Now what? Writing is conducted by large language models, videos are manipulated or falsified from the start. The stories and perspectives of the conquered aren’t being covered up by human victors; they are being diluted by AI and threat actors.
This shit is depressing. In a world where everyone has a motive in their stories, in their fake pictures and fake images, I don’t want to talk to anyone or see anything posed as real. It’s probably not. And don’t get me started on the use of AI to write fiction. I know it happens. I side-eye any book written after 2021.
Anyway, I’ll be off enjoying science fiction and fantasy. At least there’s fun in the fakeness and the victors and conquered don’t exist.
