Our kids aren’t allowed to just look things up online themselves. Like many parents, we guide them through trying to find something trustworthy, so as to avoid online sludge. We have an especially draconian approach to YouTube. We search through multiple layers of proxies, private browsers, and peer sites, so that Google can’t infer who we are or our preferences. So when my husband typed in a few search terms and scrubbed through several clips before settling on one, we had some confidence in our due diligence. It certainly looked like a comprehensive introduction to kung fu.
At first, a male voice droned over a flurry of images. Thirty seconds in, my husband whispered, “I think this text is AI generated.” Fifteen seconds later, I whispered back, puzzled, “I think the voice is AI generated too.” Then, in the foreground, we spotted six fingers on a character. As we rushed to the controls, a picture filled the screen; it looked to all the world like a painting of a temple (just like the one in Kung Fu Panda). But this temple was going up in flames, while monastic fighters paraded unperturbed before the inferno. “Why is the building on fire?” our youngest panicked.
“Because,” my husband said calmly as he turned the machine off, “it’s not a real building. It’s something a computer made up, what it thought we wanted to see.”
I shook my head. This was a deep game. There was, as of yet, no single button to AI-generate an entire video. We had hoped the length and variation of our selection might offer some respite. Instead, somebody assembled the pieces, generating each in turn and stitching them together by hand, aware of their ruse as they chased clicks. I drew a long breath.
“That’s it,” I announced. “We’re getting an encyclopedia.”