The Hollowing

How AI makes culture from inside a perfect immunity

An early attempt at a deep fake

I’m worried about what AI is doing to me, not so much to my economic and social circumstances as to my mind. Psychology hasn’t advanced far enough to be much help here. Still, we do know that AI is rooted in electronic processes while our minds evolved to help us survive. These are different foundations. One runs on algorithms. The other runs on hunger and fear.

AI-generated music, video, and text saturate our media spaces and will likely soon colonize every space where people make meaning. These creations work much like ultra-processed foods, offering engineered versions of what evolution shaped us to want.

AI-made videos lead TikTok’s most-liked charts; ultra-processed cookies outsell natural brands. The damage begins when we can no longer distinguish one from the other. In 2017, Spotify quietly populated dozens of its most-streamed ambient playlists with music generated under fake artist names. The tracks performed well. Listeners couldn’t tell the difference.

The difference in processed cookies is baked into the ingredients. The difference in cultures is harder to see. It lies in the needs and fears of the people who made them. AIs were built by neither.

What the Mind Carries and Dreads

Your partner says, “We need to talk.”

You keep hearing these words even as their physical traces disappear. Your chest tightens. Your ears fill with pressure. Then memory rushes in unbidden, what you confessed last night, the look just now on your partner’s face before they spoke. You’re frantic to find clues about what they want and try to remember the last time they asked to talk. Memories from the past weeks flash by, then from the past year, as their voice saying “We need to talk” echoes in your mind.

At the same time, your are leaning toward what comes next. You feel the dread of one day being alone and sense a spiral of sorrow has begun.

None of this was chosen. A sense of vulnerability is driving your mind because your relationship may be at stake. The experience would have been much quieter had your partner instead said, “Pass the salt.” Even then the backward and forward feeling would have been there, smaller but present. It runs beneath every moment.

This bidirectional structure was first independently identified by William James and Edmund Husserl, and more recently confirmed by research in neuroscience. When vulnerability is triggered, the amygdala fires and working memory activates. Unbidden, memory sweeps through what has been lost and what might be. Without bidirectional processing we wouldn’t have any experiences at all. We would live in a sequence of disconnected instants.

If we had nothing to gain or lose, perpetually experiencing only a sequence of disconnected instants would be enough. But our vulnerability drives the mind backward and forward at once.

What Civilizations Fear Losing

What AI threatens in our cultures depends on what cultures are.

We make culture even as it makes us. It is a sedimentation, to adopt Husserl’s wonderful term. Our actions leave deposits, first as habits, then as institutions.

Because they are human-made, cultures carry the same patterns that science finds in individual minds. They rely on retentions from the past, anticipations of the future, and a weighing of vulnerabilities. A melody shows the structure. You cannot hear a tune without holding what just played while leaning toward what comes next.

A culture’s retentions are easy to see. Language is the most pervasive. It carries what generations needed to name. Popular songs encode what a generation felt at a particular moment and replay it decades later with undiminished force. Religions survive less in their texts than in practice, in the fixed hours of prayer and the rituals governing death.

These cultural memories enable communities to pass forward not just what they find beautiful or wise but what people need to survive. Cultures that fail to retain their best practices are likely to disappear.

But what once worked may not work in the future. Cultures continuously anticipate how circumstances are changing. They weigh what they risk losing and what they need next.

Hospice care emerged when people recognized that others were dying badly in hospitals and organized to build a different way forward. People feared losing the chance to die at home, known and attended, rather than alone in a hospital wired to machines. The individuals who built it chose to act but the pressure that makes such action necessary is not chosen by anyone. It is driven by the felt weight that opportunities to have a good death could vanish.

The propagandist and the songwriter churning out tracks for money remain bound by a similar vulnerability, however suppressed. Their mortality leaves a trace in what they make, a residue of genuine human need that shapes even the most mercenary cultural object.

This feedback loop runs through our bodies. It is how cultures stay accountable to human need.

We do not need to trust our cultures consciously. We are inside them whether we choose them or not, and we build them with every choice we make. This is how vulnerability travels through a culture. AIs are immune to these costs. They are now colonizing our cultures.

The Living Present

What Husserl called the living present requires something be at stake. AI has no stake. It was trained on so much human vulnerability that we feel its simulated stake as real. We can often no longer tell the difference. We will be less and less able to tell. When simulations make culture, the feedback loop that has always kept cultures attuned to human needs quietly breaks.

An immune maker can introduce a sudden rupture, an unintelligible shift in what gets amplified or suppressed, with no warning and no felt sense that anything has gone wrong. We won’t know if a correction is coming or if the rupture is now the new normal.

We should be afraid. Robert Johnson recorded “Love in Vain” in 1937 in a San Antonio hotel room as a man who had actually watched someone he loved board a train and leave. When AI produces a song, it follows a pattern because the pattern performed. The result is love songs without love, grief poetry without grief. AI makes meaning about things that can hurt us from inside a perfect immunity.

What AI makes would still be a kind of hollowing even if we could distinguish its songs from ours. Increasingly we cannot. Humanoid robots will soon extend this into bodies that simulate a vulnerability they do not have.

AI is already making culture. We are inside it. We don’t feel the damage, any more than we feel the harm from ultra-processed food. What we are losing does not feel like loss. It feels like culture.