The One Percent Rule

There’s a point in The Medium is the Massage, when you realize McLuhan isn’t merely writing about media; he’s performing it. He doesn’t describe the revolution; he hijacks your senses into it. This isn’t just a theoretical idea. Remember the Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, who claimed an AI was sentient? This was no succubus, Lemoine was fully awake. Two new studies from OpenAI, in partnership with MIT Media Lab, found that users are turning to AI to help cope with difficult situations because they say that the AI is able to display human-like sensitivity. Some users indicated:

“Positive attitudes toward AI technology and feeling as though the chatbot experiences the same emotions as them.”

The studies found that ChatGPT power users are likely to consider AI as a “friend,” have “higher levels of emotional dependence on AI” and find it more comfortable to interact with AI than with people.

The experience of Lemoine and others from the two studies highlight McLuhan’s case: we are increasingly intertwined with and shaped by the media we create, sometimes in ways we don’t fully understand. What has become clear is that AI is “a cultural and social technology which will have profound, transformative effects on societies, for good and ill.”