I recently saw a video of a baby penguin, and quickly shared it with others, claiming “how adorable” the animal was. But very soon I realized I’d made a mistake: the baby penguin was, in fact, not real. It was AI-gen.

Artificial intelligence—AI—seems here to stay, for better or for worse. With the rise of both evaluative and generative AI, the integrated use of technology in our works of ‘creation’ is already more or less accepted as a given as our society continues along these trends.

What I wonder, though, is not so much the use and abuse of AI, but the shedding of technology. More and more—at least within my own algorithmically-shaped feeds (which are themselves an issue, creating parallel realities for different users)—do I see content creators proclaiming to rid themselves of ‘smart’ technology and going back to analog, or at least to ‘dumb’ phones and such.

As more AI-gen videos flood the internet and reality becomes harder to discern, I believe that people are going to rely more on either older content, or on books and other printed material, for verifiable truth. What better way to feel confident that what you are engaging with is based on direct human creation rather than artificial duplication, than something published years before the first current-form AI videos dropped. We will turn our attention more to provenance, seeking a known and verified chain of authorship, labor, and historical context. We will be searching for what is real.

I’m seeing the idea of brain-rot circulating through the internet, even in my limited and simplified use of social media, and the narrative that to read much (books, it seems) is to be ‘ungovernable.’ Even younger people are embracing being bored. What this reads as to me is the recognition that technology has hit its everyday usage limits in our lives and, at least for a segment of our society, we desire simplicity and a reclamation of our human intelligence. It feels more like a quiet revolution, an unwinding of what our modern technology has wrought, reverting to less integrated and more simplified routines.

AI feels like it is taking over without our consent. From the Gemini overviews of documents in my Google Drive, Google gmail summaries of email chains, to even WordPress, where I am writing this post, AI is interruptive, disruptive, and inescapable. As AI is shoved further down our throats, it won’t be a wonder when we reach our choking point and turn our backs on it.

I also wonder whether all of this is in part related to the in-built distancing between user and technology. With the loss of haptic sensations, like buttons that depress when pressed, the clicking of dials fiddled with, the weight of mechanical feedback, I think our brains are begging to be able to interact with the world again. Our minds do not like disconnecting from the things our bodies, especially our hands, interact with, and we do not, in fact, enjoy outsourcing our thinking. Perhaps our brains are not only tired of constant and sensory-deprived stimulation, but are longing to (literally) feel the world push back again.

All this to say: as our ennui and distrust of technology increase, I do think we will shed it and return to more analog-based sources of information. Books, archival catalogs, and the ‘old internet’ will be where we search for our truths, rather than the ‘new’ internet, where origins are unknown, and even content itself cannot be trusted to be real.

By: Rania Hanna