my_animal_heart ovenbird A video of an interview between CBC reporter Adrienne Arsenault and Galen Weston Jr, former CEO of Loblaws, has been circulating widely on the internet. In the interview he talks about using an AI investment app to dramatically increase his fortune. Arsenault suggests that Canadian families struggling to get by could benefit from using this same app. The entire interview was an AI generated fake, meant to convince people to deposit money into the investment app. The app itself is a scam. Footage from an interview between Arsenault and Prime Minister Mark Carney was used to generate the video. This is not an isolated incident. Another fake CBC article used AI altered pictures of Ontario Premier Doug Ford to promote yet another scam investment platform. On a smaller scale people are using AI to generate pretty much everything from blog posts, to vacation pictures, to videos of capybaras being cute. It’s beginning to feel like there’s more AI slop on the Internet than authentic, transparent human created media and I don’t want to ride this ride anymore. I’ve never wanted to lean into my animal heart more desperately. I want to know the world through the calloused pads of arthritic fingers. I want to feel the ache of a swing’s curved seat biting into my hips and then I want to go so high that my toes feel the fire of the sun. I want to hear the crack of a rhubarb stalk breaking from the root and then dip it in sugar and eat it warm from the summer’s relentless incubator. I want to point and say: “There’s a tiger swallowtail, and there’s a garter snake, and there’s a rufous hummingbird, and there’s the tide going out, and there’s the night coming on.” The only way to avoid being subsumed into an AI generated hallucination seems to be to grab hold of embodied experience as if your life depends on it, and I would argue that it does. More and more the online world is a trash heap of steaming AI garbage. The digital wilderness is shrinking, online spaces that are human, organic, driven by creativity and curiosity are endangered. Having turned the planet into a wasteland we seem intent on doing the same to the online world. The Internet was never an Eden, but it was once more alive than it is today. I hope people rebel. I hope they go outside and blink their eyes into the shock of the afternoon light and wonder why they stayed away so long. I hope they sing and kiss and have bonfires on the beach. I hope they write poems. I hope they see how much there is to lose and claw it back from the abyss of a deep-fake world. I want to wade into the depths of the real. Give me intentional sensory immersion. I want to hold hands with everything. I want sweat to pool between our palms. 260706 what's it to you? who go blather from