AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event

It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager--Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida--has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model's speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I'm losing my mind watching it. Jim Acosta, the former CNN personality who's conducting the interview, appears fully bought-in to the premise, adding to the surreality: He's playing it straight, even though the interactions are so bizarre. Acosta asks simple questions about Oliver's interests and how the teenager died.