My brother and I were sat in my cousin’s bedroom, on our biennial visit to their house, when I first encountered DOOM. It was an old, characterful brick house, and an airy room with high ceilings and a large sash window. They were those cousins who always had the good gear - consoles and BB guns, iPods and speakers. After a long and punishing (for me) session of Bomberman on an old N64, one of my cousins put on a hip-hop artist that he’d been listening to.
I heard that loud, stuttering, brassy sound.
“Ayo, yo, y’all can’t stand right here
In his right hand was your man’s worst nightmare”
What the hell is this?
“Loud enough to burst his eardrum close range,
The game is not only dangerous but it’s most strange.
I sell rhymes like dimes,
The one who mostly keep cash but brag about the broker times”
He said it was MF DOOM - “Rhymes Like Dimes”. Next up was “Rapp Snitch Knishes”, MF DOOM featuring Mr. Fantastik. My favourite song up to that point in my life had been “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy, and everything else that I liked could be found on Now That’s What I Call Music! 48. My world was homogeneous; everything fit with everything else. DOOM was electrifying. When I saw pictures of him in his metal mask, my confusion grew.
To encounter somebody – an artist, a friend or a foe – whose mind processes the world entirely differently from your own is arresting and enriching. Every time it occurs, you gain something – you can use their position to locate yourself a bit better on the uncertain plane of reality, like a bat echolocating its way through a cave system. DOOM was no different - his delivery, his character, his alter egos, everything about him was unusual and shifted the boundaries of my mind.
These encounters happen infrequently, maybe once or twice a year – and in honour of the metal face villain, I’d like to designate the likelihood of it happening as P(DOOM). The diffusion of the internet in the ’00s and ’10s increased P(DOOM). It laid new pipelines through which people could pump cultural substrate far and wide. Forums and message boards became isolated mixing tanks, as did subreddits and SoundCloud. You could come across somebody completely weird and different every day of the week.
I think AI has reversed that trend and P(DOOM) is now plummeting. It’s the great homogeniser – it’s trying to destroy all those separate mixing tanks, blow up the pipelines that people had painstakingly laid. It has funnelled the entire substrate of human culture and knowledge into one big tank which spews forth a uniform and flavourless mixture. You see it in how people communicate and write, you hear it in the music, you see it in academic work. You read it in the monolithic output of Silicon Valley losers and their admirers, who perceive the entire world as “directionally” [insert adjective], are worried into a catatonic state about their “moats” and are locked in a Sisyphean cycle of “solving” or “optimising” for [insert jargon].
I use AI a lot. I used it to structure my thoughts before I wrote this post. I think it’s unbelievably powerful and I’m worried about how it’s affecting my mind. I find myself reaching for it instinctively to help me understand what I think. Every idea that I have is pumped into the tank, stirred up with everything else inside, before being sprayed back at me in a way which convinces me that the idea is still mine, whilst also being changed beyond recognition.
What’s more alarming to me is that every AI model feels culturally identical. The models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google talk in the same platitudes and produce the same visual output. Maybe that’s what the human hive mind is? Maybe all of the unique cultures and ideas that have formed in DOOM-like minds over the past 3,000 years always produce the same personality when mixed. It’s like mixing colours - I’m always surprised when green paint emerges from the mixture of blue and yellow, but it does so without fail. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. I hope that as the technology matures and diffuses, new models will think in different ways. I hope that they’ll use different words, that they’ll talk with attitude, that they’ll like things and dislike other things.
However, even if they don’t, I am hopeful. I think the only thing which has been constant in the history of human society is diversity of thought. People see things differently and they act differently given the same information (if I were from Silicon Valley I’d be unnecessarily calling this “training data”). Just like the man in the metal mask, I think people will continue to be weird, to do unexpected things and react against things which they perceive as pathetic, and I think we will keep finding them. So, while it may be true that AI has drastically lowered P(DOOM) over the past few years, that risk will never be eliminated.