On the Saturation of Things
The Cultural Consequences of AI and the Advent of our Artificial Age
Thank you for reading the True Leveller. This article is the culmination of some critical reflections, some observations — mainly from recurring adverts on YouTube — and some extrapolations outward, from systemic analysis of our current economic conditions. It is also the result of some research into conspicuous online businesses, what they supposedly ‘offer’ you, and what their consequences are for us all.
Some Tricky Questions
Anybody like me, born this side of the twenty-first century, will be well familiar with artificiality. Sure enough, anybody born in the last century or so could say the same.
It’s often the food we eat and the clothes we wear. It’s the materials that surround us, those we live within, and which sometimes live inside of us too. It’s the technology we’ve grown up with, or maybe grown accustomed to. For many, it’s the substance of most of our waking lives and, perhaps, of our subconscious ones too.
We probably like to think we know artificiality when we see it. It’s the non-organic, mass-produced food in the supermarket; it’s the synthetic polyester t-shirts; it’s the fake marble worktops. It’s too much time spent in cyberspace, not enough spent ‘touching grass’. Sure enough, many of us take active steps to avoid it.
Try to define ‘artificiality’, though, and you’ll run into some problems. Of course, Oxford have their take, or rather takes: firstly, “the quality of being made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally”; secondly, “the quality of being contrived or false”; and, thirdly, an “insincerity or affectedness”. It’s an abstract noun, a quality.
But then, what is natural? What is its opposite, if it nonetheless arises out of the natural world, albeit through humans’ natural capacities for intelligent creativity and expansive advancements in science and technology? And were those not themselves mere consequences of discovering and mastering the laws of nature? Where do we draw the line between us humans and nature? Are we not natural beings? (You could argue not, today, in fairness — but that’s another story…)
Moving forward becomes even more confounding. We must ask, what are ‘truth’ and ‘sincerity’? (I address these questions elsewhere.) Is there something more ‘false’ about humans than about nature? Have we somehow fallen from nature, in all her supposed sincerity? Without crossing wires among multiple definitions, these are not, apparently, exclusive of one another. Rather, they seem to feed into one another.
Is artificiality, therefore, merely a human projection, a mental creation, an ‘artificial barrier’ obstructed between us and something else? It must be; all abstractions are. Is its connection to truth and sincerity therefore only as much a part of reality as our conceptions of reality itself? Seemingly so. But, then, how do we establish it in reality?
Which brings us closer to the present point. How has our present age now come to be dominated by talk of a new ‘artificiality’, which posits humans as True and Sincere, against an untrue and/or insincere Artificial Intelligence? Are we now returned to our rightful, natural status? Clearly, those above definitions need some revision.
Which brings us ultimately to the question: why, now, obstruct this new barrier between us and it, AI, when it is merely the product of us?
Some Troubling Answers
Well, clearly, for many reasons. One reason, often invoked in political debates, is that our online, virtual, or artificial realities are becoming inundated with artificial actors, spreading artificial (or mis-)information, amplified by artificial algorithms. Given that these were always artificial media — certainly far from ‘natural’, at least before my generation — we appear somewhat slack for only now reacting surprisedly. Still, some reestablishment of political sincerity, if not quite truth, would be welcome.
Another reason (which we might collectively wish to address sooner rather than later) is our natural fragility and dependence on planetary ecosystems, which the mass-data-centres powering global AI increasingly threaten. The stark disjuncture between our natural reality and AI’s data-driven, artificial reality becomes clear when we witness the devastating effects that ever-expanding, energy-intensive AI use, among other things, is unleashing on our natural world. Suddenly the former seems quite artificial, and — as those battling the climate frontlines know already — the latter all too real.
And then we are grimly compelled to note the brutalising, beyond-dystopian reality being inflicted on children and families trapped amidst Gaza’s obliterated social, built, and natural environments by what is now being called Artificial Genocidal Intelligence. This includes Israel’s ‘Lavender’ and ‘Gospel’ AI technologies, and the sadistically named ‘Where’s Daddy?’, which tracks Palestinian militants (often false positives) and murders them and their families in their homes. This horrifying reality — brought about by our new, commanding artificiality — leaves us topsy-turvy, harking back to a time when only real people were responsible for genocides. (Deeper, more considered analysis of this harrowing affair must follow anon.)
Another reason — and a very convincing one, it must be said — is the fact that many peoples’ livelihoods, nay their lives, depend on doing us being able to fruitfully draw some distinction between us and AI. These people, who together constitute entire industries (and among whom many Substack writers number), are witnessing their crafts and means dwarfed by a massified artificiality industry, whose only imperative is an upwards cycle of wealth accumulation towards its owners.
As the son of an author, whose decades-spanning career required deep commitment, sincerity, and truth (in the profound sense of truth-telling that fictional work alone often permits), I was already made well-aware of the rapid upheavals and undoings being wrought by AI upon the creative world. Then I started to observe some quite astonishing YouTube adverts boldly displaying this new, crushing system, saturating our intellectual world. So, I decided that the matter urgently needed looking into.
This is our present confrontation: the advent of our artificial age.
The AIC and the Passivity-Profitability Motive
What is the lifestyle dream in 2025? Apparently, it’s freedom from working for anyone, being rooted in one place, or really having to think. Sounds…mixed.
At least, that’s the vision being sold to us by an array of online business promoters, which collectively make up what might be worth labelling the ‘artificial industrial complex’ (AIC), here at least. They also sell ideals like ‘getting published’, ‘hosting webinars’, or owning your ‘own business’, which many people surely strive for.
But here’s the thing: these projects and businesses themselves are the business. Restated: the businesses are not what they sell or do, or how they operate, not really; rather, the businesses themselves are the products.
This is not exactly new: many no doubt recall the spectre of ‘pyramid schemes’ from early this century. Arguably, all of capitalism is one big pyramid — a.k.a. ‘multi-level marketing’ system — just too big to regulate. So, these new AIC business-products sit within the grander, pyramid-shaped structures of capitalism generally, but they also depend specifically on AIC-laden content platforms, which are similarly pyramid-shaped. Yanis Varoufakis has aptly labelled these platforms ‘techno-fiefdoms’.
Take the first AI ‘opportunity’ advert I can remember grabbing my attention, maybe a year ago, which sparked the inspiration for this article. (Unfortunately I didn’t grab the name or URL, but I did take notes.) Convincingly sold at you, the gig was basically to become published on Amazon’s bookstore — without having to write a thing.
This website promised you a kushty book-sales job, where all the books were ‘ghost-written’ for you (read: AI-generated), leaving you free to spend your time how you please. It leaned into the digital-nomadic lifestyle we’ve likely all had pitched to us one way or another, telling you that this business venture requires merely 3–4 hours of your precious time each day. Best of all, the books would all be in your name, presumably to proudly tell people you meet, and the sales would allegedly deliver upwards of four figures (£) each month. You would be forgiven for any intrigue.
Here’s a similar such website, Designrr, again discovered via YouTube adverts. One advert features a woman speaking to camera, saying that she “just made a $27 e-book using AI in under two minutes, and you can do too”. Viewers are then taken to their “clean” website, where she clicks on ‘Word Genie’, picks a topic from a long drop-down list: she chooses “social media marketing tips for small businesses”, hits enter, “and boom! in seconds Designrr has crafted a complete e-book outline”. It comes with “fully fleshed-out chapters and subheadings…but Designrr isn’t just about speed, it’s about quality and customisation too”, featuring so-called ‘professional’ templates.
That advert finishes with the easy-and-done, no-questions publication of this e-book in a matter of minutes. Why bother even reading through ‘your’ book? If you go to their website, you too can “Create, Design & Launch Stunning eBooks and Reports In 2 Minutes Without Writing A Word”. How damn convenient! Designrr also urges you to “Transform Your Knowledge And Experience Into Profitable eBooks” — the emphasis of which must be on profitability, since it’s offering the diametrical opposite of anything actually related to ‘your’ specific knowledge or experience.
The writing and design formatting are all taken care of, as advertised in smaller print at the top of their website homepage: “Stunning ebooks with ChatGPT”. This is apparently the future of creativity, for writing and for the wider arts. (Can we even call it art any longer with a straight face, at this point?)
Then there’s the lifestyle pitches again: “Become an Author / Establish Yourself As An Expert / Create Information Products You Can Sell For Passive Profits”. The former two are exciting aspirations which, until recently, very few people would ever achieve in the span of their lives (apart from Icelanders, anyway). Who wouldn’t want to be an author and/or established expert, without having to do any of the work? Hopefully anybody with any sense of what being either of those things actually means.
At the fundamental level, these sites operate by offering what we might call an ideal of the passivity-profitability motive, which appears as the crux of the AIC. Do little; earn loads. Is that not the thumping logic of capitalist aspiration?
Here’s another website, Ghostwriters & Co., which offers much the same:
“writing a book is hard work and time-consuming. Thankfully you don’t need to do it yourself…get a ghostwriter to do all the work for you while still getting all the benefits. We make your book publishing dreams come true.”
So again, we’re shown the lifestyle dream, without us having to do any of the work. This site also lists far more emphases on winning clients and driving profits:
The Postmodern Death of the Author
In the world of academia, there has been lofty debate about modernity or modernism and its aftermath, especially with regard to arts and culture, but also politics broadly. The typical narrative goes like this: modernity and industrial capitalism brought forth novel forms of mass-produced cultural artefacts, especially the printed novel, which stood against historic plays and Greek dramas as an individualised method of world-making, story-telling, and adventure. This gave way somewhat with late modernity, to radio, cinema, and later television, which reopened collective cultural experiences but with interesting and unexpected forms of presentation, narrative, perspective, etc.
That was, essentially, peak modernity. Two distinct but tightly related phenomena are then said to have transpired: postmodernity, and the ‘death of the author’. Postmodern culture was said to be epistemologically relativistic and more self-aware than classical narratives in modern culture. Perspectives became more ironic and unstable across a breadth of literary, cinematic, and artistic scenes — cultural critic Alan Kirby lists If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Slaughterhouse 5 as classic examples of postmodern literature. Related to this was the purported ‘death of the author’, hailed by Roland Barthes in 1967, which emphasised the interpretive capacities of readers or viewers of literature or art, against modernist fixations on the biographies and intentions of the author, director, sculptor, etc. themselves.
Relevant also in bringing about the so-called death of the author, I would add (and many others doubtless have too), was the ensuing massified commercialisation of effectively every cultural artefact and media output. In other words, the author’s or director’s or sculptor’s work became less relevant in and of itself, and rather was taken over by the marketability of the artefact. We might add to Barthes that, alongside the interpretive capacities of the beholders, was their financial means to purchase tickets, films, books, etc., which made the arts world the domain predominantly of a culturally omnivorous middle class. But clearly, alongside the interpretive capacities of people interacting with artefacts, art required agents’ interpretation to market them well.
What, then, came afterwards? Are we still in postmodernity? In a sense, yes, since we’ve not gone back to or before modernity, and you can no doubt find intentionally self-aware, playful, ironic, and shape-shifting art-forms today, perhaps especially in cinema (see much of Nicolas Cage’s oeuvre). But others have suggested that we’ve since trundled collectively into some version of post-postmodernity. Alan Kirby suggested that we’d entered an era of ‘digimodernity’, in which computers played an outsized role in the creation of, for example, CGI-heavy films, from Toy Story and Finding Nemo to the Narnia Trilogy and Lord of the Rings. The internet was the ultimate digimodern artefact, producing boundless computer-generated worlds and spheres.
But more importantly, the aspect which I took from Kirby’s work in my undergraduate dissertation on political memes, is his emphasis on the (re?-)introduction of the viewer, user, or ‘viewser’ into the production of contemporary cultural artefacts. From multiplying phone-in radio stations and vote-from-your-sofa TV programmes, to internet blogs and comment sections, to video-games (particularly with an emphasis on customisability) and perhaps especially our social media era (which had only just begun when Kirby was theorising this), authorship becomes diffuse and interactive. It is no longer only, as Barthes suggested, that media reception is variable and open, but now that media creation and reception are interspersed and fully interactive.
There are alternative hypotheses about what version of post-postmodernity we’re living in, but I certainly found Kirby’s pretty convincing, capturing much of this century. One apparently parallel account of this version of events comes from Hans-Georg Moeller, who takes the academic perspective more towards phenomenology or representations of the self. He argues that the modernist age of authenticity has been supplanted by our age of ‘profilicity’, which refers to the outward, public projections of ourselves and our lives, increasingly encouraged and monetised by social media. Others have suggested that we are now in metamodernism, which oscillates between the playful irony of postmodernism and the serious sincerity of modernism.
The Artificial Death (Again) of the Artist
That was, however, until the AI moment. Now, I’ve had to consider that we might have moved even past digimodernity, or that we might be beginning to move past it anyway. Now, with the advent of the AIC and its passivity-profitability motive, it’s not really clear even what role authors and/or viewers have to play in our over-saturated cultural and political economy. (As a Guardian journalist noted recently, it’s perfectly conceivable that many job applications are now being written by AI, saving applicants the time-consuming effort of writing potentially hundreds manually, but are also being reviewed and processed by AI bots, bringing us “to the point where AI is in effect talking to AI”. The same is conceivable across the publishing world, and with reports that educators are using AI for marking, so too for kids’ schoolwork.)
It seems today, at this advent of our properly artificial age, that the author and artist have died again, but this time died a new death. Our technological overloads and the unceasing march of AI that they’re promoting has probably killed them. And with it, as Mark Zuckerberg clearly has his sights on inserting us all, with time, into a Meta-branded artificial reality, where our entire audio-visual sensory experience will be false, an unreality à la Metaverse, and so too will all of our ‘friends’ become bots. Suddenly the term ‘Metamodernism’ takes on a new, very worrying meaning.
This brings us back to cases of AI-led ‘creativity’ platforms. Another website named Artistly.ai offers everything from children’s books to t-shirts to advertising. It is so purportedly advanced that you don’t even need to go to the effort of writing prompts. In an unbelievably disconcerting feat of what can only be called laziness-baiting or imagination-destroying technology, you can now forgo even the meagre effort of having to tell the AI what it is you’re after. According to one example from an Artistly advert I saw on YouTube, just write ‘toucan’ and the AI will come up with a more detailed, extensive, and creative-sounding prompt for you. This is where AI bots meet the auto-completing sentences we’re now all used to, and the rest is done for you.
That, to me, signifies something really sinister and perhaps all-encompassing about where AI generation is ‘inevitably’ taking us. Not only can it now help you where you lack technical skills — when creating the True Leveller, for example, I lacked the means or ability to do convincing graphic design myself, so I prompted what I wanted to an AI photo-generator for my two graphics (not something I do habitually, given that photo generation is extra energy-intensive, compared even to text). But AI now takes even that minor exertion off your hands, so that you don’t even have to think about what you want it to do for you. Where can this end? What is art today? Sadly, I do not have many solid answers or hopes in this direction.
It’s not only written and visual production, either. Another AI music-production website, named Bass Dragon, claims to “Instantly generate fire baselines and 808s in over 30 genres of music” (again, in a YouTube advert). Their slogan: “Doors Are Open” — but to what exactly? To the death of creativity, apparently. The absence of some sort of proposition to their motto suggests to me that it too might have been AI-generated. I’ve watched my old housemate work tirelessly over years to build himself an impressive array of tracks — first on Soundcloud, then on Spotify — and master the nuances of music production, and sound itself (shout-out, Vusi). Gone are the days of hard graft behind the keyboard or in the music studio, apparently, and the written page, and basically every digital art. How long until robots master analogue, too?
This leaves us with the question: what kind of music market is my mate Vusi entering into today, never-mind our wider job-market or political economy more broadly? It was bad enough that he was already competing with algorithm-driven sound-clips and ‘catchy’ tunes blowing up from TikTok and Instagram reels. Now he’s got to compete, in all likelihood, with robots who will be getting better and better by the day, while it’s taken him years to master his craft, his passion, his life’s goal. This is clearly a miserable state of affairs for all young and even established artists.
The same goes for my mum, an author who thankfully managed to make a name for herself long before all of this (she’s publishing novel No. 40 this year — big congrats!). But now she’s got a presence such that, if you asked an AI bot to produce a book ‘in the style of’ her, you’d probably get a pretty convincing impression of her work, cost-free. It would lack the intricacies and cleverness of her work, sure, but it would at least mimic it. One of philosopher Alain Badiou’s (somewhat vaguely) anti-imperialist ‘Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art’ is that “Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn’t exist”.
While some other Theses are potentially undermined by AI, there’s perhaps some regained truth to this idea today. The point is that true art should bring forth what is otherwise made unsayable, or at least obscured, by the reality presented to us in the cultural media of Empire (which I understand to mean centralised, totalising, globally managed networks of extractivist capital flows in the sense of Hardt and Negri’s Empire). While AI largely mimics human intelligence (for now) and is unquestionably aligned with — if not entirely designed for the streamlined promotion of — Empire, real artistry and creativity brings forth the unspoken, the unimagined, the un-apprehended. But it’s unclear how long this state of affairs can really last, as we enter an age of over-saturation across all domains of social, cultural, and political life.
The Politics of Over-saturation
I think there’s a good chance that this cannot last for a long time at all. Not only will AI bots train themselves, we’re likely to reach the point (if we’re not there already) where the AI music bots, for example, will learn exactly what type of tune, rhythm, pitch, mood, etc. are most favoured by algorithms. They might develop, or be given, direct access to the narrow, virality-driven algorithms of TikTok, Spotify, and the like, and then produce musical impressions accordingly. They’ll be able to access data into whichever musical sounds are trending and recreate similar songs accordingly. The hard-going labour and talent of musical artists, sticking to this one example, will go on exploited. And we’ll continue feeding the algorithms with our thumbs and ears, because the tech giants’ platforms have crowded out all feasible alternatives.
This is just one facet of a warped political economy. It’s the outgrowth of a trend which has been booming for decades now, in the shape of mass-produced culture and especially media.
See Alain Badiou on Inaesthetics for critique of art that is not immanent in inception