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AI and The Mirror of Erised
You might be familiar with the magical mirror in the Harry Potter series called The Mirror of Erised. When Harry stumbles upon it he ends up spending the entire night untiredly staring at it. Dumbledore magically appears behind Harry to tell him about the mirror and it's dangers. The mirror shows one's most desperate desires as long as one's attention is hypnotically devoted to it's images.
Men have wasted away before it, not knowing if what they have seen is real, or even possible.
The Mirror was addicting and those who were caught by it's grip went dellusional. Gratefully, Erised's Mirror was the only one it's kind, and it certainly wasn't mass produced and distributed across the wizarding world or else Harry Potter would be a very different story.
But yet, our current world, in my eyes, is moving towards creating such mirror. Trained neural networks are already capable of generating images indistinguishible from photos and human-made art. Currently it is also capable of creating short, very low resolution videos. But then, of course, it's a matter of time until AI can produce coherent audio-visual media automatically.
We are already making a stride towards this future with the massive consumption of content such as the ones in TikTok and on Instagram Reels. TikTok and Instagram will automatically learn what you like and it will show you that content on endless uninterrupted scrolling pages. And even worst, this content is fast paced, often thoughtless and tailored to grab attention.
What is holding back these platforms from completly consuming it's audience is the fact that the content is not perfect, it's made by humans and not exactly customized to each user. But with AI this will be possible, I believe soon everyone will be streaming videos generated by AI that will shape itself according to user likes and dislikes. This content will be extremely addicting and it will dumb down itself according to user satisfaction.
My prediction on how The Mirror of Erised will be made:
- Have an AI model capable of generating coherent image and audio in real time.
- Make the AI model capable of changing itself in real time.
- Create an easy to use app where the user can interact with the AI generation.
- Train the AI model according to user's likes, dislikes and app time usage.
- Stream the video output from the AI directly onto the app.
I ask you reader, what would your Mirror of Erised look like? Would you resist it?