The Dark Side of AI

Are We Sick of Ourselves?

William Essex
2 min readDec 28, 2024
Under a grey sky, a concrete pier going out into the sea. Various signs, a figure standing at the end of it.
A walk. It’ll rain soon. Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

Fyi, surveillance state, I’ve been looking for this so I can write about it. No other reason. Get your “mind” out of the gutter.

And now I’ve found it.

The Internet Watch Foundation has updated its report saying that AI is being used to generate child-sex imagery. The pictures are nastier, and some include likenesses of well-known individuals.

Yuk. This is bad. My first reaction, listening to my radio this morning, was to think that at least real children are being given a break. It’s not cost-effective to (ab)use them.

My second reaction: of course this is happening!

In the earliest days of digital-image manipulation, there was outrage that well-kmown heads were being pasted onto naked bodies — but those pictures were so obviously fake, like last year’s state-of-the-art special effects — that everybody soon lost interest.

Then I thought: why are criminals doing this?

Obvious. Because people will pay to look at these pictures.

Then I thought: do we know ourselves?

Deep-down, do we really know ourselves?

Maybe we do.

Maybe that’s why birth rates are falling and wars aren’t ending. Maybe that’s why the best defence we can muster against climate change is speech-making and posturing and burning aviation fuel to get to conferences about how bad it is.

Maybe that’s why we don’t stop causing climate change.

Then I turned everything off and went for a walk in the rain.

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William Essex
William Essex

Written by William Essex

Former everything. I still write books, I still write stories. Author of The Book of Fake Futures, The Journey from Heaven, Escape Mutation.

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