When Seeing Isn’t Believing: The Psychological and Social Impact of Virtual Reality and AI

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There is an old saying that goes, “Seeing is believing”. Well, that isn’t the case anymore. 

At this point in the 21st Century, our culture is being challenged by computer-generated images that are difficult to tell are manufactured and not real. This is especially problematic for images of places or objects that are unfamiliar, since you don’t have a mental image for comparison. You can’t tell if an image is fake without knowing what it should look like. 

As a result, when we see images of something like an aurora borealis, which is almost unreal-looking when it is real, it becomes virtually impossible to tell a virtual image from the real. Are the bright colors photoshopped or a creation of AI? The answer is more unclear than ever.

This is especially true of artwork, which is already unreal. Is the artwork a product of human imagination, or AI imagination? 

Sometimes, it’s still easy to tell the difference. AI images are often overdone, just as AI written responses are. But sometimes, AI-derived images can be almost impossible to differentiate from human-derived images, or from reality. 

This means that we can’t trust what we see in images anymore. A picture may tell a 1000 words, but they could all be lies, and what we see may not be what we get. 

For creatures who have evolved to rely on their sense of sight to make informed decisions, this is a problem. We can no longer trust our eyes. What we are seeing as real may be fake. And we can no longer trust that we can tell the difference. 

This crisis of trust in our senses is made worse by the imitation of speech using AI. Specific human voices can be copied with frightening accuracy, which means you can’t trust what you hear, as well as what you see. You can receive a phone call from someone who sounds like someone you know, with an image of that person, and it could all be fake. 

The use of this technology for fooling people and committing various identity scams is destabilizing of our entire culture. We need to trust our eyes and ears, as nature intended, but doing so may result in some major security breach or worse. And identity theft doesn’t have to stop at stealing your credentials. It can now steal your voice and looks, too. 

This creates a huge mental health problem. People who cannot tell reality from fantasy are living in an uncertain, frightening world. Many are called schizophrenics, who have difficulty distinguishing what is real from what is not. Some are suffering from dissociative disorders, such as depersonalization/derealization disorder, which cause detachment from reality or a sense that the world is unreal. 

The problem is that the world we are all seeing, and hearing, is becoming increasingly unreal, for real. AI is making the world virtual. Virtual reality is replacing reality.

We evolved to use our senses to navigate the world. Now, our senses can deceive us about the world. We can no longer trust our senses. Reality is becoming derealized.

Losing trust in your senses is a great way to lose trust in your mind, and eventually, of losing your mind. 

When we can no longer trust our senses and mind, we are helpless in navigating our way through life. We can’t trust anything we see or hear, especially from the media. This is  not sustainable for any culture. 

In response to this uncertainty in what we hear and see, we tend to retreat into our pre-conceived world views, unwilling to accept questionable news or information that challenges our way of thinking. This increases divisions between people with different views, who tend to agree with information that confirms their biases. 

For a healthy culture to survive, it needs to have some sense of shared reality for its members. We need to agree on the facts of life, on what is real and fantasy. If we cannot agree on that, then there is little we can agree on, and society fractures into opinionated factions with their own facts, images, and sound bites. 

This further polarizes our already polarized society, as we all struggle with our uncertainty of what is real and what is virtual/fantasy. 

Since we live in a culture where opinion matters at the polling booth, there will be intense media effort to push a particular view of reality, using all the AI tools available, from fake images to fake sound bites. Since apparent reality is now a product of AI virtualization of reality, the money is on finding better ways to alter minds through AI manipulation. 

All this leaves our sense of reality in the dust. We are becoming a schizophrenic, derealized culture, where reality is virtually real, and not really real. 

How can we psychologically deal with this assault on our senses? How will the human brain, evolved to use our senses to inform our reasoning, manage reasoning in a virtual world? Will we all lose our minds?

Of course, the interest these days is on expanding AI, further distorting our ability to sense the world. Once we lose trust in our senses, we lose trust in our minds, and look for someone or something to show us the way. We will then learn to believe what we see and hear, and will accept the reality given to us by our virtual overlords. 

It seems that the best way to defend ourselves from being absorbed into the fantasy of the AI age is to stop using AI, stop using the media, and retreat into a real world that makes sense to the senses. We need to return to nature, where what you see is what you get, and what you hear is what has been truly said. We need to return to sanity, where we can trust our minds. 

The current trend is not sustainable. People losing trust in their sense of reality are either mentally ill, or on their way to becoming mentally ill. It will take a real leader to take us out of this spiral towards derealization and insanity. And it won’t be Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos. 

Anyway, that’s the way I see it. Of course, I’m basing this assessment on information I have seen on the internet, so who knows. “Garbage in, garbage out” applies to human thought as well as to computers. So let’s hope I’m wrong, and we will all awaken from this spell of artificial images, sounds, and reality that is making our world a virtual nightmare. 

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