Turns out, Jeff Beck was lying to me. How did I miss the vital clue?

I was listening to Jeff Beck on YouTube as he discussed and analysed the world’s best guitarists. His reaction on first hearing Hendrix, his thoughts on the thickness of Stevie Ray’s strings and the strength of his hands and the unique blue language they begot. The sad thing was Stevie Ray didn’t want to get on the helicopter, his friends urged him to fly that night, Beck said.

I was so absorbed in the great man’s take on the various virtuosos of the rock revolution it wasn’t until the video ended and I began to read the comment trail that I realised the whole thing was AI. Jeff Beck died in 2023. This video was recorded last year. Cannier cats than I had picked up the fakery, but if they hadn’t, I’d still believe these were the thoughts and words of Jeff Beck. It was his voice.

No big deal, I guess. But it might have been Xi Jinping, Anthony Albanese, Donald Trump, or the Pope. They’re all as replicable and malleable now as Wile E. Coyote and might be dragooned into any caustic cause.

It occurred to me that we’re becoming completely defenceless against the construction of lies as real as reality and vision and voice that was never filmed or spoken. Fresh ghosts are abroad, and we’ll soon be totally unable to tell who’s real and who was got up by this new tool that easily usurps reality for marketable or political ends.

I’ve lived long enough to believe a politician is always lying. But from now on I won’t know if the politician is telling their own, self-serving lies, which I can generally interpret, or someone else is telling theirs, to further their own cause, using an AI simulacrum of the politician. Imagine a world where there are legion Trumps on every platform, all masquerading as the real Trump and all telling different lies. I guess if one accidentally misspoke, briefly telling the truth, you could discount him as the 47th president, but barring that how would you know?

It won’t be long before we see grainy footage of a deathbed Charles Darwin denouncing natural selection and endorsing God. This will be repudiated by a subsequent recording where, long-whiskered, gaunt-faced, he condemns God and evolution and beseeches you to follow Allah.

OK, you might be able to defend yourself from these bespoke mirages with a little research, but the storm of AI-conjured irreality that blows into your dumbfounded face will soon be too numerous, too ostensibly valid, too all-encompassing to investigate. Time doesn’t stand still, so you can’t fact-check life to make sure it’s real.

I expect any day now to see a grinning Albanese whipping palsied orphans with fencing wire; Jacinta Nampijinpa Price luring ponies off cliffs with sugar cubes; St Paul sooling stoats onto Noah’s doves – it’s all doable. And unnatural not to believe what you see … also, too wearying to be wary of every online experience.

Alternately, if it becomes necessary, and easy, to disbelieve things you see with your own eyes, then you will disbelieve truth as readily as fakery … Pauline Hanson will be captured in an outrage for the ages, and we will scroll past it as banal clickbait, news as fake as yesterday’s, when we saw Buddha happily playing chess with Hitler.

Worse, AI will know you better than your mother does, pandering deftly to your appetites and beliefs to get you to pander to its own. It will tell you and show you things you want to hear and see so you will stay switched on and behave as its masters want you to. Thus, our various realities will become so bespoke, so singular, each of us will appear mad to the other.

For what is this wanderer we call “madman” if not some person unable to see the world with the approximate consistency most of us do, someone who knows existence in an entirely different light – purple and loud and neighboured with zombies speaking in rhyming couplets while cops wear lizard faces and hags ride brooms through the malls? There are thousands of people living rough on our streets, kings and queens of their own mad worlds. We will all soon be monarchs of similarly unique kingdoms if AI is curating our input of “reality”.

All of this is alarmism, of course, dystopian hyperbole, Hanrahanism in accents most forlorn … but I have recently heard guitar gods speak from beyond the grave, and no future seems improbable now.

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