Underwire

A few weeks ago, I published a deeply personal, sentimental piece about old men I find hot. One of the men I mentioned was the mischievous and elven-eyed Tony Shaloub. In the course of my research, I spent hours gazing longingly into the eyes of ultra high definition Getty Images red carpet portraits. In between Tonys in 4k, I would also visit the cesspool of Google Images. There I would first encounter my sleep paralysis demon: AI-generated Tony Shalhoub¹.

Unfurl to read a needlessly long description of nightmarish AI-generated Tony Shalhoubs

First, we need to establish what we are seeing. This is so we can agree on certain truths later, and also in case you are reading this blog post out loud to a friend while you gals are drinking cocktails on a couch and you’re telling her about this hilarious thing you read. Preferably there is an expensive two-wick candle burning just cause. 

I would say one of Tony Shalhoub’s most identifiable characteristics is that he is not half-Tommy Lee Jones. I mean, come on, show the man some respect. Tony Shalhoub, importantly, is an incredibly smooth man. I mean physically: his forehead skin is very taut for some reason. Usually it reflects light no problem, there is nary a wrinkle on it! 

Also of importance are Tony’s seductive, perma-smized eyes. While hooded eyes have a raw sexuality about them, especially on medium-heighted blonde women of Northern European stock, they are no match for the sparkle of a determined puppy dog’s droopy but courageous gaze. 

This is critical, because this is a quick way to determine why you hate an AI-generated portrait of someone, beloved character actor or otherwise. Do their eyes have a normal amount of flesh around them? Do they have the correct amount of flesh around them? In the case of this knock-off Mr. Monk, neither condition is satisfied. His sunken features skew downwards, pushing flesh upwards into an overcrowded forehead that looks more like the dorsal view of a loaf of white bread than Tony’s smooth thought-container. 

Another obvious point of failure is the jaw. False Tony has a pronounced chin cleft. True Tony has not one large cleft but two smaller ones. He also does not have a head that grows wider at the top. The whole thing is off. I mean obviously it is AI-generated, that’s why we’re here, but there is something especially troubling about the skin. Aside from its lack of texture, the AI akin is, again, like a series of baked crusts or cookie bottoms. It’s not the color of human skin, unless that human has eaten nothing but carrots for three weeks straight.

(Which happened to me. I ate so many sweet potatoes as an undergrad that I had a slight orange hue about me at all times. Someone reported me to my RA suspecting I was seriously ill, but it turns out, no, just a tuber fan.) 

And another thing! This thing’s hair is as thin as a [thing that is like thin hair]. While Tony Shalhoub is no Adrien Grenier circa The Devil Wears Prada (2006) – and who is? Aside from Adrien Grenier in 2006 of course – he has rather tight and dark curls when properly conditioned. The Fake Tony also sports upsettingly curved ears and a countenance of an aging sheriff asking for the fearless antihero cowboys to think about staying in town a while, at least until the roving bands of other fearless antihero cowboys are out beyond the horizon. Please, the Real Tony would never play a western sheriff. He would be the swaggering cowboy.

My “Favorite” Content Slop Farm

So that is this AI-generated image… caricature… travesty of a representation of Tony Shalhoub. It, to my dismay, is not the only one. No, if you go into the enticing, siren-call of a headline titled “Tony Shalhoub’s Iconic Acting Roles Explored” webpage on Motion Picture Magazine you will be greeted with even more nightmare Shalhoubs. 

None of these look like Tony Shalhoub. They don’t even look like a caricature or child’s drawing of Tony Shalhoub. They look like one-episode-cameo attorneys on a low-tier Law & Order season, one of the ones they don’t even syndicate. They don’t even resemble each other. 

Motion Picture Magazine is in the business SEO optimization. That is: creating brain-rottingly miserable substanceless prose:

Tony Shalhoub, a name that resonates with the harmonic chimes of versatility and charisma in Hollywood. Renowned for etching characters that dance off the pages and onto the screen, his journey has been nothing short of cinematic wonder. Today, we delve into the tapestry of his career, one that has been meticulously woven with threads of talent, perseverance, and the extraordinary ability to transform.

One thing I am interested in as a writer, not a very good one, but a writer nonetheless, is saying things. Accuracy is the goal, but I’ll settle for “fair enough.” I don’t know if even I, Tony Shalhoub super fan, would describe Tony Shalhoub’s career as “cinematic wonder” or “meticulously woven.” No offense. You would also expect an article, even an AI-generated one (I really cannot emphasize this enough; I don’t think a human is involved in the creation and maintenance of that website at all) that mentions “perseverance” to show some acute or chronic hardship the subject of the article overcame on the road to success. The slop does not have internal logics.

Whatever this monstrosity is, it popped up in 2022. There are two possibilities for why this thing even exists: the first is it is just some bullshit coding school project someone forgot to kill. But it does “post” new articles, so that directive has to be coming from somewhere. 

The other possibility is that this site exists to generate passive ad revenue. Imagine: someone looking up Tony Shalhoub and stumbling upon a cursed article, or by feeding into those horrific clickbait grids at the bottom of celebrity news articles, promising even more titillating celebrity news. Through a combination of accidental click-throughs and bots that probably open thousands of new tabs an hour to trigger AdSense views, this thing is still up and running. No need to pay writers, no need to license photos, no need for your social media accounts to have any followers; just an endless loop of robots writing for robots.

Did the internet died?²

Depending on who you ask, anywhere from 30% to 47% to (say this one emphatically) 73% of internet traffic is bots. Fake accounts, dummy shares, spammy replies (P U S S Y I N B I O), account takeovers, data scraping, the list goes on. Most of these phantom interactions were hidden from mortal view by spam filters or buried on deep web pages. But that 73% estimate is starting to feel rosy. Across social media (the parts of the internet design to facilitate human-to-human interaction), bot interactions have leaked from their containment zones. 

(Then, innocent grandmas who have never been Goatse’d ³in their lives repost these “wonderful images”, expressing admiration for the photographer, unable to spot obvious signs of fabrication in the darling “photo” of birds and babies. Come on lady! )

As these bot-to-bot interactions have become increasingly public, people have named the phenomenon, settling on “Dead Internet Theory.” This theory is composed of two main claims:

• That bots have displaced humans on the internet; and
• That a shadowy “they” has done this with the intent of manipulating human behavior 

The first half of the theory seems true; look at the bot figures from a few paragraphs ago. The internet was always full of bots, or at least automated actions. With the proliferation of generative AI, we have been forced to see new ways bots have displaced humans online. There is a centuries-old adage to never read the comments section. That they are now full of automated replies and pussy viruses is punishment for our hubris. Who were we to break the first commandment?

Writing for AI & Society Curmudgeon Corner, Yoshija Walter summarizes the uneasiness a “dead” internet engenders:  

“creating highly realistic yet fabricated content, pose[s] a significant threat to the integrity of information online, propelling misinformation and eroding the foundation of trust essential for healthy digital interactions.” 

The erosion of trust and truth generates nonfactual facts (misinformation) and then people believe the nonfacts are facts (threat to integrity of information), get into arguments, and then use those nonfacts to vote or whatever (eroding the foundation of trust). . 

So who is “they” and what are they manipulating you to do? They are not shady uber-state world government imposing a new order; nor are they Russians/Chinese/Deep State actors casting shadows over Democracy in a hospital room waiting to suffocate it to death with a pillow. They is something far, far worse: advertisers. 

Generative AI has gentrified fun on the computer because some Don Draper-wannabe in a deodorant-stained white tee, raw denim, and Onitsuka Tigers told Big Tech that they need to sell more and more ads. There was a golden age of internet community, when new memes cropped up once a month. Now every fast food social media manager has a viral-post-per-week quota, with a half-life so fast it makes hydrogen seem stable. 

The promise of unrestricted creativity and connection (more of a marketing slogan than an actual promise) was stolen from us by this common enemy of all mankind (advertisers, in case you forgot). The cheapest way to move product is to spend as little money as possible on internet ads, which unlike television or radio ads, are is not taxed. (Though Maryland is trying to change that.)  Socializing has become secondary to printing infinite money on subsidized ads. As Austrian sociologist Christian Fuchs put it: “In economic terms, it is thus inaccurate to refer to Google and Facebook as communications companies. Rather, they are two of the world’s largest advertising businesses.” 

A plurality of TikTok videos (with royalty-free creepy music) “proving” that the internet is dead lead with Facebook screenshots, like the popular Crab Jesus and Turtle Swift. The same is happening on Google, where the Bela Lugosi info panel serves up schlock from DeviantArt rather than any of the dozens of iconic photos of him as the Count. An image of the goth band Bauhaus could be forgiven, but completely-fabricated imagery should never be. 

But what is AI-generated Bela Lugosi selling? Commercials on television, print ads in magazines and newspapers (lol), or YouTube pre-roll advertise things you can own and hold, but as social media allows companies to forgo advertising for social media and influencer marketing, Facebook and Google find themselves having to compete on their own platforms with the methods they have enabled. Because they

1. are effectively subsidized,
2. own the channels they broadcast on, and
3. have made themselves necessary components of daily human interaction and information sharing,

they run experiments like pushing AI-generated Bela Lugosi to the knowledge panel. 

Because Facebook’s social algorithm prioritizes comments, automating them is a no-brainer. Generated comments are agnostic of the content, but that doesn’t matter; all starving six-legged half-drowned orphans will get their “Happy Birthday!” wishes in the thousands. It’s like peering into a small town stricken with mass psychotic dance hysteria in the Middle Ages.

Facebook is overrun with ghosts, but who do you call? Facebook and Twitter are in no rush to clean up automated replies and users – not when they inflate engagement rates for quarterly reports. Despite heavy posturing from Twitter leadership that the bot problem will go away, it’s not going to. Maybe the porn bots will be exorcised, but there are still enough people getting scammed by blue-check monkey NFT accounts that they have secured their niche for the time being. When you are selling impressions, you ask ChatGPT to game SEO to put you at the top of search results – something also ruined by advertising – so people accidentally click on your “is justin bieber dead” article instead of the other one, get you an Adsense view, and make you money.

Haunted by the Ghost in the Machine

The dead internet theory is creepy because it reveals an internet that happens without us. The ways we connect to one another on mass social media platforms are not uniquely human. More than relatable engagement bait posts go on without us; whole economies of ads and views don’t require actual human input anywhere in the chain.  

Just a few days ago, Forbes reported on April job numbers: “800 lost jobs were blamed on AI, the highest number of layoffs citing the reason since May of 2023.” That number is shockingly low compared to both the number of anxious Twitter posts and the number of jobs estimated “to be exposed to some degree of automation by AI.” Investors are cooling on AI to the tune of a 20% drop in total investment from 2022 to 2023, so pitchmen need to make big claims about their products to get investment. To most, those sales pitches sound like threats. 

AI is not yet automating you out of a job (well, except those 800 people, sorry!), but it is automating you out of society. Chatbots have tried displacing human priests, girlfriends, and suicide hotline volunteers. Working and hobbyist artists alike compete against freaks with Midjourney keywords for authorship of their work. Arguing on the internet is less fun when human replies are suppressed because paid spam is prioritized. Music, memes, fan art, fanfiction, everything fun about sharing the internet with people has been spoiled, because that is where AI has been deployed.

1. I tried to cut out the entire Tony Shalhoub section but I didn’t want to wait another 3 months to publish. If you are a true Shalhoub head please read it. If not, move on. ↩︎
2. What episode did he died? And when did he cut is hair? ↩︎
3. NSFW meme ↩︎