The 1960s were a time of great change in technology, culture and politics. Television was radically altering the media environment, and nobody was quite sure how to think about it.
As the world struggles with the impact of another new high-tech medium – generative artificial intelligence (AI) – two thinkers from that era have acquired new relevance for understanding what is happening and where we’re heading.
Investors are sinking billions of dollars into AI companies and data centres in the belief that AI will change the world. But how should we think about AI? Is it a powerful tool we should embrace to avoid becoming Luddites? A type of intelligence we should be collaborating with?
A different view is to consider the likes of ChatGPT and Claude as new mediums that are reshaping our communicative environment. This is where our 1960s thinkers can help: Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan and French theorist Guy Debord both offered key lessons in how media work and how they affect society.
AI as a medium
In the early days of the printing press, it was used to produce copies of the Bible. TV relied on theatre and radio for much of its early content. The internet was first mostly used for sending electronic “mail” and exchanging “files”.
McLuhan noticed the pattern here. New media are initially used to recreate content from old media. But then we see novel kinds of content appear that are native to the new media. Television, for example, led to the advent of reality TV, 24-hour news coverage, and other forms that are uniquely suited to the medium.
We’re still in the early days with generative AI. People use it to produce old content in a new medium: writing essays, generating pop songs, spawning web pages, and so on.
Hints of genuinely new forms of AI-enabled communication are starting to emerge. Google’s Project Genie generates explorable worlds in real time on demand. In academia, we are seeing experiments with books as linked modules with embedded prompts.
This matters because, in McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message”. Whether you’re watching live-streaming influencers or nature documentaries, you’re still staring at a screen. If you’re interfacing with AI systems instead of humans over a long period of time, it will change how you experience the world.
Living inside the spectacle
What kinds of technologies get developed in our society? Debord argued that capitalist societies proliferate media technologies that turn our lives into a sequence of engagements with commodified representations.
In his 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle, Debord predicted that much of what was simply experienced would become mediated by technologies. At that time, TV was the dominant new medium.
In the mobile era, that trend went further. People started to keep in touch with friends through social media, to meet romantic partners online, to conduct political activity through clicks, and to entertain themselves with “content” anywhere, anytime.
Things that used to be spontaneous were now happening through a medium, and could hence be monetised. AI has expanded what can be mediated and commodified even further.
There is no conspiracy here. But companies have an enormous incentive to invest in developing and using new technologies to hack the human psyche.
Anything that can capture our attention and shape our behaviour is worth serious money. Whoever invents the next Facebook or TikTok will reap a huge payout.
Debord would suggest the way to predict AI’s trajectory is to consider what’s left in a human life that’s outside the economy and then ask, “how might some kind of AI-infused medium take this over?” Entertainment, exercise, sleep, friendships, romance, food and so on.
AI will take technological mediation of our lives even further. As Debord wrote in 1967:
When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings – dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behaviour.
Media technologies will continue to make us more alienated from one another. They will divert our attention from the sensory experiences of our lives towards consuming content and goods. All of which is great for GDP, but dubious with regard to the quality of human lives or the environment.
Cutting through the narratives
Humans are a social species. Our lives are built on communication through media, whether that be with friends and family through speech, dead authors through print, or an AI girlfriend through a large language model.
Thinking about AI as media, rather than as a tool or an intelligence, lets us ask the right questions. Instead of asking “what can AI do?” we should be asking “how does AI change our media environment?”
AI could change the media environment in a positive way. It could lead to less time responding to emails, filling in administrative forms, doing menial work tasks or conducting performative assessments in schools. Less time in front of a computer screen and more time in the park with friends.
Debord’s idea suggests this is not the future we will get unless we radically change course. The current huge investment of capital in AI can be read as a bet on a future media environment that ensnares more human attention and mediates our lives in new and invasive ways.
Things don’t have to go this way. As McLuhan wrote almost 60 years ago:
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
- is an Associate Professor in Interaction Design, Queensland University of Technology
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
