Not everything that can be said should be told. Not everything that can be thought of should be written. Not everything that is possible should be done.
A dancer positions his phone to shoot himself, jumps in the air, picks up his phone, drags himself a couple of extra feet higher in the air.
A group poses for the camera, picks up the phone, finds their expressions didn’t look as expected, edits their expressions.
A father gets clicked tossing his baby in the air, gets the phone, and drags the baby a foot higher on the screen.
That’s how the latest Pixel 8 from Google is trying to woo its potential customers. I happened to watch this ad video recently and it got me immediately thinking about a few other things.
It’s already too late as well as cliched to say that AI is fast changing how we perceive reality but as we keep moving ahead, we will be time and again faced with the question whether its pervasiveness in our lives and the unhinged applications being employed by businesses to lure customers is taking things too far. If we just talk about photography, what was originally a magical tool to capture and relive real moments in life, has shape-shifted with the new AI powered magic erasers and magic editors, creating moments that you haven’t lived, actions you haven’t performed, emotions you haven’t felt, expressions that you haven’t expressed. Of course, this hasn’t begun now or here. What started with seemingly simple filters, has ushered a new world of alternate reality for the consumers, or put more honestly, a parallel universe of falsehood and deceit.
My team at work went for a day excursion last week and one of the chief attractions there was the ATV bike riding. While a few folks rode amazingly well with lots of slo-mo worthy moments, a few who were doing it for the first or the second time, understandably, struggled to complete the circuit. I’m sure they will do better as they try it a few more times. That is, if they don’t have a magic editor on their phone. With it, they don’t have to try again at all. Get yourself clicked, drag the ATV a couple of feet higher in the air on your magic editor, and you end up being on par or even better than the other riders in the group or outside. Well, you know you aren’t really there and that you have completely tragically deprived yourself of the thrill of traversing the circuit of continuous learning and improvement, but who has time for the old-world self-reflection stuff when you have already convinced the world that you’re the best!
While you can think about this from a purely advertisement or brand positioning point of view and that will perhaps also remind you of how the conventional or the mainstream ad-world is based on lies and deceit (remember the popular cosmetics brand that promised to bleach you white?), I would like to approach it from the perspective of a consumer. I checked how viewers had responded to the ad from the Pixel makers on YouTube and no surprises there, people are excited about the new features that authenticate their perceived insecurities and help them create an alternate reality for themselves. When the smartest brains of our time are working to get us dopamine addicted, one doesn’t really need to be as smart as them to foresee that this is not going to end well for a whole generation and a few more in the future.
This is not a one-way street. Our need to portray what we are not, is fuelling the latest tech features on our mobile devices, in the cosmetics world, on the fashion scene, etc. with fake photography, social media, and other AI applications playing the facilitator’s role to perfection. At the same time, the increasing consumption of such make-believe world, and the availability of options that were once limited to perhaps only movie stars (where we knew we were watching a make-believe world), has created an Olympics of deception around us where almost everything needs an edit or enhancement or a magic trick before going to the outside world. It does beg the question then — have we stopped (at least most of us) living our own life the way it came to us and are caught for most part of our days, months, and years of life living for the beholder(s)? All of this, while we have come to forget the fragrance of flowers because we were too busy using them as background. All of this, while our children grow up not knowing what ‘skinned knees (ghutna chhil gaya)’ means. All of this, while we forgot to meet all the new people in all the new places we visited because we wanted to pour photo-dumps on Instagram later, all the taste that we were unable to imprint on our tongue and soul because we wanted to show to the world what we ate last night. All of this, while we no longer know what success drawn from blood and sweat looks like because we are too busy camouflaging our failures. All of this, while the life that was given to us sans all those artificial filters, airbrushes, and magic editors keeps slipping out of our hands! Pixel 8 and the ilk might bring more clarity to your pictures but I’m sure they will further pixelate the lines between the life that’s real and rushing under a fast-forward button and the life that’s nothing more than a collage of self-congratulatory lies created to turn us into digital zombies.
Note: This write-up is not against Google/Pixel 8 but rather an appeal to creators to prioritise better. With all the computing power in the world under their fingers, it is embarrassing to see what businesses choose to solve with every iteration of their products.
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