my theory about artificial intelligence
So basically, my friend and I were up late talking about random theories, and i suddenly thought of one, especially as a student. And whilst im sure it exists already i want to provide my personal take on it.
We all know AI blew up fast over the past few years, but I genuinely believe we’ve actually had highly advanced AI for decades. The average person had no clue, not neighbors, politicians, or celebrities. Only a tiny group at the very top had access to it, and has been feeding it to us unknowingly.
If you really think about it, we’ve probably been fed fake information and fabricated media for a long time. Because nobody knew AI existed back then, we had zero reason to question the "proof" of major events. We just accepted it all as reality.
The only reason we even know about AI now is because the people in control accidentally leaked it. To cover their tracks, they let public tech companies "invent" it from scratch so they could stay quiet about using it beforehand.
That’s why the current rollout feels so unnatural and untrustworthy. When we see a deepfake today, our brains immediately recognize that creepy, uncanny feeling, one that we label as "uncanny valley". That's because our eyes have already seen those exact patterns throughout our lives, we just didn't know it was technologically possible.
Honestly, it could explain why older generations struggle so much to spot AI images that look glaringly obvious to Gen Z.
If you show your mother or anyone older in your family an AI photo and point out, "Look, she has six fingers," she’ll see it and say, "Ohhhh, i get it!" But if you face her with a different AI picture a minute later, she still won't be able to distinguish it on her own. To her, those weird, slightly unnatural digital anomalies look completely normal because the media she grew up watching has always had those exact same hidden flaws. They’ve been seeing it their whole lives, so their brains are programmed to just gloss over it. The reason why anyone can look at an image of a person with their eyes too far apart and think its creepy, is because its not realistic, anyone can do that, but someone who's been unknowingly fed thousands of deepfakes, has no ability to distinguish between the real and false now.
I mean how many times have you looked at a hidden optical illusion and just seen a normal background. But, the second someone points out the hidden shape, you see it, and can never unsee it for that specific image, but you still have to actively search for it on the next one. The pattern was always right there in front of us, we just finally have a name for it.