The Automata Chronicles: The Age of Ghostwriters

MacDonaldStrand

Info: For a couple of decades now, we have all been pouring our thoughts, ideas, memories and records into a machine, both as text and images. Our home lives, work lives, secret lives and love lives are all stored there: our likes, dislikes; our financial histories, our debts and our purchases all build up a picture of who we are. We all routinely accept this when we check accept on the terms and conditions statements that pop up on our screens. We agreed and continued to agree, in order to use online services and social media platforms. We were offered a simple choice – join in, feed in, or slip out of the conversation and know less than others, have less control than others, be less in the world than others. In retrospect, with social media at least, it wasn’t much of a choice. More recently, this legacy of data, the texts and images we have amassed in the machine, have begun to be harvested by generative AI. Every great work of literature, every historic speech, every note to a loved one or gripe about politics; everything written and shared online.