2025-01-08
I feel this agonizing disgust about online posts that have this malicious goodness around them. For example, a social media post about a perfectly rational idea about self-improvement without any hint of human error. It often falls without malice, accepted at face-value because there is no counterargument against it. At the same time, it makes me feel that I am forcefully being backed into a corner to agree with its sentiment, it almost eclipses the truth that it holds by this feeling that I am being socially-engineered to not question the post. It feels like when I find a good product inside a mall and the salesman is just too good at selling the product that it makes me consider buying it even if I don't need it.
When this happens in social media, I know it is harmless. I know that it is possible that it is a bot, regurgitating every hit tweet it can find and posting it on its own account for clout and engagement farming (since these platforms can now be used for monetization). I know I'm developing mistrust on users that I see online because I'm wary that I am being fooled into thinking that I am engaging with a person when it is a bot on the back end. My immediate emotional response to this is that it feels as if something evil is lurking behind it. Or that I am just encountering a fear that I am still yet to understand, making me feel this irrational repulsion. But whenever I think that it is a visceral feeling of mine, I cannot brush off that there is something real sinister about it.
I still use Twitter daily. I log in and check what people are discussing about. It is essentially, a trend posting machine. Whenever I see a post that I like, I look at the replies to see what others think about it or if there are good counterarguments about it. Fair enough, a lot of them have good points but then if you scroll further, you will have a good chance that someone will quote an exact word-for-word tweet that was posted earlier than the one I just recently liked.
It makes it more suspicious if you have this combo:
- An account that has a lot of followers and receive a constant number of engagements.
- Posts about various topics that has a wide reach (i.e., relatable topics such as, self-improvement and life lessons).
- Subscribed to X Premium.
It's an instant block when I find accounts like this. The truth value to what they are posting, even if I downright agree to them lose all meaning. It is easy to infer that accounts like this are engagement farms that aims to earn money with clout.
There is no truth in the pursuit of money. Only the reflection of being. Paradoxically, that in itself is a kind of truth. But it is a truth that is only necessary, and is an inevitability for people who stray away from the truth of their own self. It is a truth that should not present itself as your destination because when it happens, it will be too late to turn back. It is a type of regression, entirely opposite from the path of growth because it does not lead to virtue. It is the path that makes suffering its own end. This is probably the reason why I'm developing a certain anxiety towards the exponential growth of LLMs. I have a natural repugnance to the inauthenticity of (emerging, at this point in time) artificial personalities.
It seems like the world is headed towards a direction where it creates its own simulation. In a foreseeable future, we might just be okay with talking to a bot because we have developed language models so advanced, it can couple with the way we think. And that's how our mind likes it. To interact with an other that (seems to) understand you to your core. After all, social media is an online remote party of narcissists. Seeking external validation has always been a sign of existential loneliness. We become entrenched into our own online bubbles where similar-minds congregate. It is not difficult to imagine why a large number of people pay a large sum of money to use language models. There will be no legislation or form of left-wing ideas that will stop people from using it because it answers to our deepest desires. What are those deepest desires, you ask? Everything. Its limits will only be based on the user's imagination.
Soon enough we will live inside our own echo chambers where the only real human being is the one who created it.