Former CNN talkinghead and now independent mouth breather Jim Acosta recently conducted a so-called interview with an Artificial Intelligence avatar of a dead teenager, Joaquin Oliver, who was killed during the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. This counterfeit version of the boy was introduced to the public last year by his grieving parents to push for gun control. The Acosta-Oliver dialogue was manufactured for the exact same ploy.

One could go on at length about the eerie wrongness of the interview, and Acosta should be ashamed for taking advantage of grieving parents to pull off such a stunt. “Acosta’s ‘interview’ wasn’t a conversation at all,” observes Shooting News Weekly contributor Jennifer Sensiba. “It was just a machine trying to impersonate a (dead) person. All the machine can do is what the parents, the programmers, and others involved told it to do.”

Acosta should have drawn the line at using an AI to impersonate and exploit an image of a deceased person. Are we so lacking in news and social media content that we have to use AI to manufacture it now? Hardly. Rather, this speaks to a new societal value. We are turning into a culture that esteems not being contradicted over decency and goodness.

AI bots standing in for real people take away the authenticity of human responses and interactions. A perfectly disturbing example of this new cultural value is using AI for pornographic and/or companion purposes — i.e., Elon Musk’s new risqué anime bot via Grok. These AI companions tell you anything you want to hear. They are ostensibly perfect, compliant, and sterile.

Earlier this summer, a man made headlines for his love affair with an AI chatbot on ChatGPT. The man has a girlfriend and a child, but proposed to the chatbot. Besides the inherent narcissism of falling in love with a bot you programmed yourself, the utter selfishness of this man is astonishing. He would rather have this fake relationship than invest in a real-life one.

Finally, right-wing political pundit Dave Rubin made an AI avatar of himself to host his show for the month of August. Rubin built his audience based on his own political evolution, which is why Free Press reporter River Page was unnerved by his interaction with the AI version of Dave. Page writes:

People like Dave Rubin because he changes his mind. Whether you take these various reinventions to mean that Rubin is an intellectually curious and open-minded truth seeker, or a cynical operator with the intelligence to see which way the wind is blowing, his ideological fluidity is at the core of what makes him interesting. Dave Rubin has made himself the main character of a show, and all good shows have character development. AI can’t develop; it can just tread water. And maybe that’s fine for the summer if real Rubin wants to go to the beach in August, although it wouldn’t have been hard for him to book a guest host. But the highest achievement of an AI clone is to give people a slightly different version of the thing they saw yesterday. And we’ll only watch reruns for so long.

As for the premise that AI represents a new set of values — i.e., not being contradicted — this Dave Rubin application follows the same supposition that his views are replicable and predictable, that AI could do what he does. However, AI may parrot his mannerisms and most recent views, but God forbid something crazy comes up and Rubin hasn’t yet stated his opinion. The AI can’t spit out anything better than generic and unsatisfactory takes. This whole experiment puts a great deal of trust in Artificial Intelligence, but it also marginalizes Rubin.

The AI genie might be granting wishes for now, but it’s not human, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be making this world a better place culturally. AI is flattering people’s worst fleshly instincts. The world is crazy enough without adding this nonsense to the mix.

We here at The Patriot Post do not use AI for any of our analysis. What you read are the genuine thoughts of our human staff, painstakingly typed out for your edification. And we will always keep it that way.