I honestly first understood the purpose of close reading fiction just last year (something most people probably don’t know), in part because I started writing more but also because I had an excellent teacher that inspired me to explore literature deeply. People create stories to show their perspectives on the human condition, every book you’ve read, movie you’ve watched, and song you’ve listened to follows this trend. And this is also the reason we enjoy these forms of media, we get either relatable or unique ways to understand how the world around us works. I think this is a known idea that has been documented before, but there’s some subtle nuance that can decide whether interactions with media are overstimulating or transformational, and that lesson extends into almost every aspect of our lives, including in the ongoing ‘fight’ against AI.
It goes without saying that we are heavily influenced by the media we consume, and this media potentially has a lot of power over us. When we start viewing the lives of fictional characters as parallels to actual society, we overstimulate and rewire the reward pathways in our head to reflect what we’re watching instead of what we’ve learned from experience. An effective example can be seen with characters frequently abusing substances in movies, even occasionally with positive consequences. But these ideas can exist more subtly too. Media is inherently meant to elicit deep emotions and a feeling of connection, and through this relationship it serves to overstimulate our brains and even addict us.
But surely media consumption isn’t always a bad thing— we serve to gain a lot from how other people view the world. I think when we start seeing these fictional stories as potential insights into our lives rather than alternate versions of them, we value our own opinions and personality over the feelings aroused by the content. The more focused we are, the more effectively media helps shape our values instead of completely rewriting them. By internalizing who we are and what we want, we are less critical to ourselves and more to what's going on around us. And when done in balance, this serves to take us very far.
Valuing your own beliefs is a generally applicable skill, and has positive implications way outside the scope of this blog post. The most successful people are those that can maintain their beliefs under the constant duress of the rest of society. For now, I wanted to briefly talk about how this idea is relevant to the AI-driven world we’re living in (I’ll hopefully write a longer post about this in the future). With more and more realistic media being artificially created, it's becoming easier to evoke deep emotions and manipulate entire populations with them. But, and I think this works against most AI-takeover arguments, when we start to value our own individual thinking (fine-tuned over a lifetime of human-to-human interactions), we are less prone to being manipulated, and even replaced, by artificial intelligence. I’m not saying there isn’t a threat posed by AI, but just that we’ll have to adapt to become both immune and superior to it. We just have to do what humans do best: think.
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