Personalized Media for All?

In the ether is the idea that AI will usher in an era of ‘custom’ entertainment for each of us. Want to listen to music? Tell us your vibe and we’ll cook up a pop song for you by the latest digital industry plant about the city you live in. Movie night? Give us a few plot beats and before you know it we’ll have a 2 hour feature for you with leads who look suspiciously similar to Tom Holland and Zendaya.

One of the impacts of this seems like it will be a deterioration of shared human culture through art. One of the cool things about watching the movie Fight Club (as I did ashamedly for the first time recently at age 26) is that it connects you to everyone else who’s seen it, weaving a common thread through your life and a bunch of strangers’ lives. One of the fun things about hanging out with friends and family is being able to talk about shared cultural artifacts, and through them to reflect on how you see the world the same and differently.

The book I’m reading now, Lonesome Dove, has been read by millions of people since its release in 1985. When I read a passage about Gus wistfully recalling his lost love, Clara, I wonder how all these millions of readers might have mapped their experience onto Gus’. Or the earnest but closed off Captain Call. Or the adventurous young Joe braving the West Texas prairie with his preoccupied and in-denial stepfather. I have to think everyone who read the book saw parts of themselves in one of the characters. It’s part of the tapestry of humanity to be able to see parts of ourselves in each other, which shared art and culture enable.

When indulging my lesser urges one day watching YouTube Shorts,¹ I saw a clip of Cillian Murphy talking about Claire Keegan’s book Small Things Like These before he had been cast in the movie version. He mentioned it being one of his favorites in the contemporary sphere, along with some Irish classics like James Joyce’s Dubliners. I read the book and really liked it, but unlike some things I read I didn’t see myself in any of the characters. Makes sense I guess, the book takes place many years ago through the eyes of a small-town coal merchant, in and around the town as well as with his young family. Hearing Cillian Murphy talk about the book, I could tell that he saw some of himself or at least his personal cultural history in it, and I better understood him by a percent of a percent through that.

Not to mention, the plot crux of the book (spoilers) is the existence of a Magdalen laundry facility in the town, essentially a widespread network of abusive work and residence facilities for young women who’d fallen on hard times.² I hadn’t even known about the topic at all, a widespread social scourge in the 18th through 20th centuries in Ireland. In my own AI-generated book, how would that have ever been a part of a plot?

Only consuming art stemming from our own sense of the world could be a poison and a prison, something we’re already trending towards through algorithmic media but which will likely be made worse by generative AI if used for these purposes. We should keep creating things, in fact we should all create more things, and we certainly need to keep engaging with the things other humans create.

I had to delete Instagram from my phone entirely to prevent my brain from withering away, though YouTube is no better ↩
In 1993, the development of one former Magdalen Laundry site in Dublin led to the discovery of 155 women buried in unmarked graves (The Irish Times) ↩

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