As I scroll through the feeds of online platforms, I come across images of appetizing food, an attractive-looking woman, or scenes of a tiger devouring a rabbit—or vice versa. And if I don’t look closely, if I don’t engage my brain during those few seconds of viewing, I cannot tell whether what I’m seeing is real or created by artificial intelligence. It turns out that being human—with physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual characteristics—is no longer necessary at all. It is enough to be an artificially generated image, an avatar, a simulacrum.
Of course, with artificial intelligence one can create anything, and political propagandists are already making wide use of it—tomorrow they will use it a hundred times more. I open TikTok, and immediately Pashinyan “jumps” into my face, consuming yet another portion of food. And I no longer know whether it is real or fabricated, and if fabricated, whether by those who support him or those who oppose him. In any case, I did not “invite” him to my feed; I have never searched for such scenes—displays of poor taste, as well as manifestations of gaps in upbringing, are absolutely not to my liking. What can one do—perhaps this is simply how social media algorithms work.
On Saturday, in much the same way, an elderly man “jumped” at me—a figure embodying the image of “the people” as imagined by the Civil Contract party—and began speaking about how right Pashinyan is when he says that “the people of Artsakh fled.” It was a miserable, dirty, shameless speech which, had we had a properly functioning law enforcement system, would have received an appropriate response as the dissemination of hate speech. Shortly afterward, reports spread that the video had been created by artificial intelligence. I can understand that assumption to some extent—such statements fall outside any conceivable notion of humanity. Later, however, it turned out that no—it was a real person.
But that is not particularly important, because those—perhaps real—people live in a false, social-media-driven reality and are ready to believe any monstrous absurdity. For example, that 18-year-old Davit Minasyan wanted to “stage an October 27,” that the Catholicos intended to smuggle away the treasures of Etchmiadzin, or that the people of Artsakh, left alone without political and military support, could have resisted the Turkish-Azerbaijani army. Or perhaps those who think this way would have preferred that tens of thousands of people also be killed?
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Aram ABRAHAMYAN
