Idolatry is an age-old and well-warned danger. And it involves a dissolution of humanity that is obvious in artificial intelligence, but is present also in TikTok.
The controversial social media platform is up for a Supreme Court decision on whether to ban it in the United States. But TikTok regulation is more than just an antidote to pornography access and screen time: The app has the singular goal of convincing users to idolize fictional realities.
One could say that all social media have this goal, and that would be correct. The many mental and social harms of these platforms are by now common knowledge, but TikTok stands out as perhaps the most addictive and exploitative. It is by far more threatening and intentionally subversive of human control than Instagram or YouTube.
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That is, it has a similar effect on reality as does artificial intelligence. Considering the latter as a reality-altering tool is no stretch: We have already seen rises in openness to AI friendship and romance. From Her, the prescient 2013 film, to AI bots replacing customer service and drive-thru attendants, to a boy’s chatbot-induced suicide, the notion of inserting artificial humans into day-to-day life is nothing new. At least in the realm of the common consumer, artificial intelligence has a dim trajectory.
Besides that aspect, AI is widely regarded as a frontier to broach given the billionaires who back its expansion: Computer engineering, financial trading, and medical advances are a few of the opportunities proponents cite as reasons the U.S. must lead in AI.
One venture capitalist, however, has brought even the best of high-level AI advancement back onto a more sinister course. Bryan Johnson, Kernel founder known for his “Don’t Die” campaign, said of AI on a podcast with The Free Press’s Bari Weiss, “We are creating God in a form of superintelligence.” Even more: “We are the creators of God, and we will create God in our own image.”
Those ideas really are outlandish. At the same time, Johnson’s outlook is good, old-fashioned idolatry. An unending effort to create powerful, superhuman AI, though, does ring of a God-creating project. And TikTok is not too dissimilar on that front — not just because its paid users are called “creators.”
The short videos aimed at either inspiration or commiseration all represent an ideal of connection and a bounty of resources for TikTok’s mostly — but unfortunately not entirely — young audience. Combined with the addictive nature of TikTok, there seems to be no end to the platform other than an idealized, yet inaccessible form of reality.
For “content creators,” work becomes their god. After a while, the false TikTok versions of themselves become the creators’ own and others’ gods. It is sort of a similar phenomenon as that of the actor’s fame, except not: Movie and television actors are far less bound to their image and are not trapped in a phone, and the art they create is just that: Art.
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Thus the near-perfect, everlasting ideal of Johnson’s recounting shows through as TikTok’s algorithms subvert users’ control. Sure, there are such benefits to the app as political campaigning and evangelism, but are they worth the altered social fabric?
That reality is even more a problem than TikTok’s Chinese ownership, the main motivation for the ban. Both AI and TikTok concern themselves with unapproachable, eternally online heights. They create interactive gods of entrapment, which draw the user in with promises of excellence and relationship. It is worth keeping in mind the close natures of the two technologies.