The ghost of our time
For anyone who hasn’t discovered the work of documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, I’m currently watching Shifty on BBC iPlayer. It’s a five-part series built around archive footage documenting the decline of democracy and how life in Britain changed at the end of the 20th century. Its timeline roughly follows my lifetime, starting in the late-1970s with Margaret Thatcher. I was born on election day 1979.
Shifty tells stories with what the Guardian review of the series describes as “a kaleidoscopic assemblage of archive clips from news reports, TV shows, vox pops, pop videos, home videos, celebrity and political profiles.” It’s a unique type of visual storytelling built around fragments of our past captured on screen.
Adam Curtis was interviewed this week on The Rest is Entertainment, a podcast hosted by Richard Osman and Marina Hyde. At the very end of the interview, Richard Osman asks him about generative AI, and where this might be taking us. And, “Is it somewhere positive?” What follows is a unique perspective, at least one that I hadn’t thought about before. He answers with the following right at the end of the interview (transcribed in written form as clearly as I could here):
“Well, I’m extremely suspicious of all the theories about whether AI is good or bad because I don’t think anyone knows. They’re just projecting their own fears or their optimism onto it […] you don’t know. What I think about it is, let’s look at how it works.
It’s the ghost of our time because it goes back and scrapes all our past. The fragments of our past …It takes them and mashes them up into this complex thing which then feeds itself back to us. They are taking our own past and haunting us with it …Telling us it’s new, but actually maybe keeping us stuck in the past.
…we’re surrounded by images, dreams, music, films of the past. What AI is doing is taking it much further. It’s actually going back to our own past. It’s going back to our own images, our language, the words we wrote, our own emotions because they’re out there in the server farms. Our feelings written down in fragmentary form, little images, little moments, little intense moments of fear and love. And it’s scraping it all, putting it all together in some strange, almost like cubist form and playing back to us a world built out of that.
And if I was going to write a ghost story of now [it’s] that we are haunted… It’s the haunting which makes me suspect – for which I have no evidence at all – that AI is not the future. It’s the final end of the past…
It’s the moment at which the past came for us [and] we will have to escape from it.”
The ghost of our time haunting us. Wow.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.