AI could flood society with pseudo-culture that distorts shared reality

Evidence

The fear of AI went further than just taking jobs: It could perhaps seize the entire production of human symbols. In March 2023, Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari, with Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, warned in The New York Times that “A.I. could rapidly eat the whole of human culture—everything we have produced over thousands of years—digest it and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artifacts. Not just school essays but also political speeches, ideological manifestos, holy books for new cults.” If culture shapes how we perceive reality, they argued, AI’s flood of pseudo-culture might distort our collective understanding and push civilization toward collapse. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 694

Categorization

• XREF: This is the strongest mechanistic statement yet of how unmoored AI-generated output feeds the omnivore monoculture — culture becomes self-referential garbage, defeating status differentiation. — connects to: A reality system collapses when private knowledge outstrips what the big Other credibly allows — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1941
• SEED: The claim that AI can generate ‘holy books for new cults’ is an essay hook on synthetic religion and where authority for meaning goes when creation is outsourced.