Redefining Real in the AI Era

The disruptive potential of Generative AI’s for all corners of business and investing is clear. Here’s the bigger disruption: knowing if something is real or not.

I think Morpheus from the Matrix film said it best when he challenged us to define real in the first instance.

“What is "real"? How do you define ‘real’? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...”

It’s going to become an important question when we consider the number of synthetic digital realities we can now create.

To be sure, these AI tools have been around for quite a while. I wrote about Deep Fakes and Investing on the Eureka Report way back in 2020. But the difference is that AI tools have been democratised for the first time. It’s when a tool gets in the hands of the public that the world goes through step changes: the internet in the mid-1990s, social media in the early 2000’s, the smart phone in 2008 and, now, AI for all.

We need to consider the implications of the tools. We can start with this image of random people below. They all have one thing in common. See if you can guess what that is.

None of these people actually exist.

They are computer-generated photos of imagined people. Well, at least that’s what www.thisxdoesnotexist.com will have me believe. For all I know they took a phone to a BBQ and took some happy snaps. This particular site can generate so many realistic images it’s uncanny. You can see rental properties, cities, food shots, artworks, resumes, memes, cars, beaches, maps… all of them AI generated.

But you could argue they do exist — I mean it’s right there, on the screen. It just doesn’t exist in the physical sense. And as far as corporations and customers are concerned, it probably doesn’t matter — what matters is the image itself, and how it could be used to the company’s benefit, to maybe advertise or communicate something. We are going to have to grapple with this ‘reality’, like now.

You Won’t Even Know

That’s one of the key issues we’ll face in the next few years — knowing if something is real or AI generated. Just think of all the synthetic versions of reality we can already create. Voices, videos, pictures, songs, in fact, anything we can create a digital version of, we can now create a fake version of. And it is now often with what we might call “no noticeable difference”. And this is the term we are about to hear a lot more of. It’s already part of the corporate lexicon in the dark corners of consumer goods marketing.

For decades, famous consumer brands have been replacing natural ingredients with artificial fillers, colours and flavours, sometimes to improve health benefits, but more often to cut product costs. After a new formula is developed, consumer testing is done to ensure consumers can’t tell the difference. They literally call it a No Noticeable Difference (NND) test. Today, much of the vanilla we consume comes out of a lab. It is ‘Nature Identical’ at a molecular level, but it wasn’t made by nature. As you guessed, it’s a lot cheaper to produce. And this is what AI is about to do — allow us to create digital ‘everything’ far cheaper. It will look and act like humans, but it won’t be human, or even created by a human.

Within a decade or so we’ll be able to buy soft robots of ourselves which look and sound exactly like us. In fact, this has already happened. Hiroshi Ishiguro is a roboticist who makes life-like robots, including one of himself, seen below.

While this is incredibly ego-centric, it opens up a strange new reality. We’ll be able to be in two places at once. Once the intellectual blueprint of our minds and experience is uploaded to the cloud (which we are all currently doing without realising every single day) all we need to do is have a soft exoskeleton robot of ourselves to put the mind into. All of a sudden, we could have self-replicants. A V2 of Steve Sammartino. Alan Kohler may be able to send his robot to do his ABC finance spot.

Redefining Real

This is coming, quicker than we think. We may need an entirely new definition of what is real.

So, what should real mean? The original. There is only one. The first. Organic. Not made by machine or software. There is no substitute. Found in nature. Not an imitation. Not made in a factory. All natural ingredients… and who gets to decide?

Or maybe, it’s natural that AI has arrived, because it was created by biological beings. It might just be just a fork in the inevitable evolutionary path we must follow. I’m not exactly sure.

But here is what I know for sure. The only way we’ll be able to tell if something is real or ‘fake’ is if we are forced to outline it legally. It’s time for lawmakers to get busy, fast. And while I’m very positive about what emergent AI’s can do to help humanity, I also think humanity deserves to know when they are interacting with each other, or something other.

No AI’s have been used in the creation of this post. Of course, you can’t really be sure of that. You just have to take my word for it.