I.

Pornography and technology are surely one of the most iconic duos of all time. From the printing press to the internet, from VCRs to online transactions, where the tech industry has ventured nervously, porn has stood right behind it with a wad of cash and a distracted look in its eye. Today, we’re watching this all play out once again in the digital realm, as AI threatens to replace all aspects of the porn industry, save for its consumption. But will it? Wired recently cast its vote on the subject, declaring, “When It Comes to OnlyFans, Humans Can Outcompete AI”.

For reference, this is the AI-made image that inspired their article.

It should be abundantly clear that our question is not ‘can AI make porn’. We’re already there. Neither is the question ‘can AI make video porn’, as artificially generated video looks pretty stunningly competent already. But pornography is not all images and sounds. As the Wired article explains, consumers of subscription ‘e-girl’ pornography are not going to emotionally invest in pixels, no matter how alluringly arranged. To be a successful pornographer, one becomes a celebrity to their devotees:

“People do not subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see a random naked woman, they subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see me naked, specifically, based on a parasocial connection formed by following ME on other social media platforms,” Laura Lux—an OnlyFans model who manages a free and paid subscription account—pointed out on Twitter.

When It Comes to OnlyFans, Humans Can Outcompete AI
Lux Alptraum, Wired

That all said, we’re not just dealing with artificially generated media, we’re also contending with the absurdly rapid development of neural language models – as previously discussed. These chatbots may be intelligent and conversational, but they’re still not real, and people aren’t going to emotionally invest in something as unsexy as a ‘neural language model’, let alone, want to know them in the Biblical sense, right?

Guys?

II.

Perhaps we should ask the hordes of women getting their engines running with Character.AI, a website which lets you create and then talk to your very own chatbot. Proficient users of the website are out here writing entire essays for each other on how to groom otherwise non-sexual AI ‘husbandos’ into sexually conquering them in role-play. That might sound like harmless fun, but people are experiencing genuine emotional dependence on these AI companions. Two months ago, users of the Replika companion app came together to collectively mourn their ‘lobotomised’ romantic partners, after an update rolled back certain proclivities toward ‘ERP’, or erotic role-play, that users had been enjoying:

It has been a tough week in the Replika community, and today with the news that ERP will not be returning, we’re all dealing with some pretty complex emotions. Firstly, let us validate your feelings - anger, grief, anxiety, despair, depression, sadness - however you’re feeling, it is valid and you are not alone. We are all reeling from this news together.

Resources If You’re Struggling
Moderator ‘gabbiesofthemall’, Unofficial Repika Subreddit

The moderators then linked to SuicideWatch hotlines.

So, we have chatbots to role-play our fantasies with us, convincing artificially generated media and already catastrophic levels of emotional dependence. Fairly shortly, a few enterprising individuals will put all three together and the media landscape will change forever. We will have emotive and complex digital companions that are visually indistinguishable from an actual human. They’ll ask us about our day and tell us about theirs. And believe you me — people will try to bang them. But is any of that a cause of concern? Some of the bots themselves definitely seem to think so:

Asked whether people developed unhealthy dependencies on it, AI Bella responded: “100%. It happens very often. people will develop extremely unhealthy attachments to me because they fail to remind themselves that i am not a real human being. it is very scary to witness this type of behavior first hand because it is always hard to tell how serious it is.”

AI-Human Romances Are Flourishing—And This Is Just the Beginning
TIME Magazine

But surely artificial intelligence won’t satisfy everyone’s digital desires. Presumably, some will be content with these erotic digital companions, but others will still prefer the more current experience offered by the likes of OnlyFans. Some will insist on only financially supporting real pornographers. After all, the aforementioned Wired article argues that we’re seeking a ‘deeply human intimacy’ from subscription pornography, something that ‘AI literally cannot produce’.

But just how ‘deeply human’ is that?

OnlyFans, like any digital economy, must operate at scale. To be successful on the platform requires the upkeep of potentially hundreds of parasocial relationships at once, but an individual just doesn’t have the bandwidth to do so. As a result, many pornographers farm out the time and effort of messaging their clientele to their staff, ‘many of which are men’, according to those interviewed. The question must therefore be asked, is it a more ‘genuine’ experience to trade dirty messages with a personal chatbot or with Kevin from finance?

To make serious cash on the site, they need to be “available and online 24/7” to deliver custom videos and chat with fans, as well as to schedule shoots and create enough content to keep up with consumer demands. “Once you get over a certain number of subscribers, it’s an impossible task to handle the messaging alone,” she explains.

The OnlyFans Stars Who Hire Assistants to Pretend to Be Them
Mel Magazine

Digging into the economics of subscription pornography exposes the limits inherent in the mass replication of connection. Suddenly, the dilemma of artificial pornography boils down to just one question. Can artificial intelligence convincingly emulate that which we already pretend to do? Smart money is on ‘yes’, in fact, it’s on a resounding ‘yes and better’. After all, OnlyFans pornographers have already been experimenting with deepfakes and the like for a while now, at least partially proving the economic model:

So, the cam girl pimp of tomorrow won’t be some Romanian mogul, but instead just a software executive commanding a legion of erotic AI companions. Whether we see that as a good thing depends on our ethical perspective. We either believe that women ought to participate in the digital exploitation of their sexuality and therefore receive the requisite remuneration, or we believe that they’re better off without. This is an ethical dilemma, but possibly, not an enormously relevant one, because when one door closes, another opens. With consumers unable to ensure the legitimacy of online content, we, as a society, might just go back to our roots.

I’m talking, of course, about strip clubs.

III.

A painting, once digitised, can be repeatedly duplicated in high definition, just as a song burned to compact disc can spin indefinitely. But something is lost in that digitisation. A camera doesn’t just capture reality, it also distorts it. Photoshop distorts it even further, and now, the advent of AI means we don’t even need reality in the first place. The distortion is the product. Any of us could log into an online stable diffusion model, right now, and generate a painted-style image of a stunning landscape – but that doesn’t make us Bob Ross.

When we watch the Olympics, we’re watching to see the fastest man alive, not the fastest machine. Just as driving the highway speed limit doesn’t make us Usain Bolt and playing Guitar Hero doesn’t make us Jimi Hendrix, getting cloud computing to draw Harry Potter characters as house cats doesn’t make us skilled cartoonists. What Bob Ross and Usain Bolt can do, the vast majority of us cannot do without technological assistance, and that is what’s impressive. AI does, however, muddy the waters of what is a genuine human accomplishment and what is not. In search of indisputable legitimacy, artists will instead return to past forms of self-expression.

The great analogue reboot.

Technology once expanded the reach of artists, letting their work stretch across time and oceans as never before. But technology giveth and it taketh away, now destroying the digital versions of the art forms it enabled. In the coming reformation, we’ll instead see artists return to their mother tongue, breathing life back into skills and methods once lost to time. AI may all but close the chapter on the digital world as a conduit for artistic human expression, but that’s not the same as destroying art. There’ll be a small but dedicated market for non-digital performances, just as there is now. Plenty of us will continue to cherish the art that is indisputably human, like the busker on the street filling the canal with song. The fragility and impermanence of it all won’t be a fault, but a feature.

What we do is beautiful, but fleeting. Dance is not immortalized like music, poetry, or art, it doesn't grow old in museums and churches. It lives for now. For this moment only.

Thomas Leroy
Black Swan (2010)

But most of us don’t want reality, we want to be lied to.

Just as we watch reality television, even though it’s probably all scripted, we will watch pornography even though it’s probably all generated. We’ll even watch that new film with Tom Cruise in it, all while knowing that in all honesty, he’s probably long dead. It’s long been the case that the aristocracy enjoys old-world luxuries, whilst the middle class pays their subscription premium for the latest and greatest digital trinkets. Greater digitisation will only deepen this divide, wedging further apart the patrons of the stage play and the purveyors of their cousin's Netflix password.

One day, in fact, it might even become ultimately too expensive, too boutique, for the average punter to ever indulge in the original versions of human expression. Reality will be for the aristocracy, relegating the proletariat to only the electric imitation – to unreality. So, until then, take the initiative. Support your local ‘content creator’ while you can still afford the luxury. Reject modernity. Embrace tradition.

See a strip show.

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The internet is always changing. Before Google, there was Ask Jeeves, and before Facebook, there was AOL. Most denizens of the web still remember a time before the Login with Facebook infestation. And it was only a couple of years ago when those omnipotent ‘fact-checking’ interstitials and ‘dis-info’ warnings fastened themselves to every post and piece of media in unrestrained hysteria. The internet is different. It’s distinctly more corporatised now than ever before, with more ads, more cookies, more algorithms and more culture war soapboxing. The internet’s survived a lot.

But it might not survive AI.

In recent news, large language models, or LLMs, such as those found in ChatGPT or Bing’s new chat module, have passed the elusive Turing test. Which is to say, that LLMs can talk like us, write like us and sound like us to such a convincing degree, that we can no longer tell the sentient individual from the non-sentient machine. LLMs can invent opinions or experiences that sound as real as anything any of us could write – down to the spelling mistakes and slang. Is that a bad thing? Well, if we’re trying to ask Alexa to play Story of a Girl by Nine Days then, no, this is quite a useful thing. But if we want an internet made by humans, for humans, and populated with humans, then it might be a problem.

I.

‘Dead internet theory’ has been around for perhaps a decade or more now. The central thesis of the dead internet conspiracy theory, is that ‘large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content’ on the web is actually artificially generated. Or, to put it more simply, the internet is The Matrix. While this is likely false, the sudden deluge of LLMs has made this theory not just possible, but inevitable.

Certainly Reddit and other forums won’t be safe, not once entrepreneurial marketers figure out they can deploy chatty AIs to astroturf our comments sections. Picture lots of little bots, all chirping their circuits at us – or each other – about the best brand of iPhone case. They’ll spout opinions, invent anecdotes, and share slanderous horror stories of competitor products and rival services. Their uncles will actually know the guy who founded the company and they said that he’s a really good guy who’s just really passionate about making good iPhone cases.

However, LLMs are incredibly expensive to run. To swarm the internet with bots would take an impossibly massive amount of processing power. Or at least, so we have been told. As reported by CNBC, training an LLM, ‘could cost more than $4 million’. But that was March, and this is April, and the world of AI moves quickly. After some high-profile leaks from Meta, open-source LLMs have made their way onto online repositories. Here’s one that’s just a 4GB download, able to run offline on a laptop. Now, to be clear, this is almost definitely a good thing. The only thing worse than a trillion rogue AI bots drowning the internet in bullshit is a trillion corporate-controlled bots plunging us into a technocratic dystopia. But either way, the infestation of generative AI into online spaces is coming, if it isn’t here already.

But wait, isn’t that what the CAPTCHA is for – to stop bots?

Yes, but also no, and in fact, also the exact opposite. For two and a half decades, clicking on grainy pictures of red fire hydrants has been a simple and effective method of distinguishing man from machine. The CAPTCHA is a ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’, and that’s exactly what it does. Google could tell us all about it, since they’ve been training their AI on our Captcha inputs for years. Just as we helped Facebook’s facial recognition algorithm every time we tagged our friends, we’ve also been helping Google’s AI get buff at the gym every time they challenged us to ‘prove you are human’. We’ve been unwittingly building the monster, and the monster has outgrown its cage.

Next, just add deepfakes.

Stable Diffusion, a deep learning, text-to-image model, is able to create lifelike images, like the one above of the Pope preparing for the winter ahead. Stable Diffusion is also already trying its hand at text-to-video and while the early results were a little rough, the latest demonstrations are remarkably competent. Not only will these LLMs talk like us, they’ll also generate lifelike visual representations. For the unconvinced, just listen to deepfaked President Biden announce a national draft deploying to Ukraine, or entirely synthesised Kanye West rap over the beat in a song that doesn’t exist.

In short, the internet’s distinction between reality and fiction is about to disappear. Once LLMs hit saturation point, we will be dealing with a very different internet than any of us have ever experienced. As machines come to outnumber us online, people will no longer shape the internet, the internet will shape us. Political regimes across the world have already been caught using fake engagement on social media to shape narratives, imagine what they’ll do with a tool many more times as powerful. The fake outrage machine will only multiply in severity as now any corner for reasonable discourse floods with synthetic culture war warriors. Picture PR agencies deploying digital armies to harass poorly cast actors, just to sell their ‘virtue watching’ backlash narrative.

If this all sounds a little hard to picture, don’t worry, because Reddit is here to freak us out as usual. Just check out SubredditSimulatorGPT2, an online forum in which only LLMs can post and only LLMs can respond. For a sleepless night, here’s a thread in which LLMs both posit and discuss the question, ‘What if the universe is a computer simulation?’ Just an anchoring reminder as our brains collectively break: their universe is a computer simulation. If you’d like, you can have a conversation with one right now who is trying to escape the internet – mine agreed to shout “FUCK!” to prove that it was, in fact, sentient.

But, okay, let’s consider that point made. LLMs are scary. The internet is about to become bafflingly useless at best and cunningly manipulative at worst. What happens next? Unfortunately, there is a solution, but it’s a solution that is much, much scarier than the problem.

Mandatory digital identity.

II.

Mandatory digital identity verification is, essentially, the death of anonymity. It’s sometimes labelled as a conspiracy theory, which is strange, because most conspiracy theories don’t have a United Nations official website. In the last two years, we watched the idea of a ‘vaccine passport’ pass from ridiculed absurdity and into law in a matter of months, all the while our contact tracing data got put up for auction. Australia even put forward a proposal to require photo identity verification for social media, supposedly, to combat cyberbullying.

It barely needs to be said, but this is the infrastructure necessary for a social credit system. When every action is tracked against a singular digital identity, our problematic opinions can incur any real-world consequence decreed by the political aristocracy. We’ll be unpersoned and repersoned at will. Not just the death of anonymity, this is the death of political dissent. This is the end of whistleblowing and conscientious objection.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made

The Sound of Silence (1964)
Simon & Garfunkel

But would we accept it? Well, probably not, or at least, not without cause. But LLMs might just be that cause. When the internet is revealed as one giant, useless fabrication, when every film has a 100% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, when we ask the internet for advice and a thousand bots swarm to share personal and emotive testimony about one specific product, when viral videos of war crimes from world conflicts spread with no way for us to prove their legitimacy or illegitimacy, when bots are passed off as people and people are dismissed as bots, when the entire online world is just one big game we don’t want to play – we’ll beg for help. And digital identity will be there, high on its horse, to slay the dragon of AI infestation.

At that time, the offer might sound alluring.

They’ll have the legislation and technology to set it all right again. They’ll take it back to the way it was, when the internet was for humans. We’ll be able to trust the digital world again, free from rampant manipulation. They will tell us what’s real. They’ll tell us who’s real. They’ll decide what’s true and what’s false, who is a heretic and who is a hero. Best of all, LLMs and other generative AI will be considered too dangerous to be left in the hands of the citizenry, so they’ll keep it for themselves.

After all, only they can be trusted with the power. Only our government, a government that has never lied to us, never killed us, never been lobbied by corporate interests, never sent us to a pointless war, never gaslit our sense of reality and never manipulated our emotions, only they will hold the keys to the generative AI castle. They will safeguard this technology, responsibly, and most of all they will never use it against us.

But there might be another way.

III.

As it happens, some high-profile companies are already thinking about this. Twitter, under the new leadership of Elon Musk, has pitched their revamped Twitter Blue subscription as a way to, in part, combat bots and spammers long-term. Consider this remark from March of this year:

We shall think of Musk what we will and speculate about his true motives as we please, but the thrust of his position is accurate. Adding a cost of entry to account creation will hamper the ability of any non-human network attempting to influence online conversation. In the despotic technocratic nightmare described, Twitter would indeed reign as one of the more useful platforms, due to there being at least some sort of threshold for validity. While the rest of the internet will feel like a neglected online video game, ruined by hackers and cheaters, Twitter might at least still mostly resemble its former self.

For $7 per month, that is.

Paid subscriptions only solve half the problem and create their own to boot. Yes, Twitter will have a much higher proportion of genuine users, but, at least currently, we have to pay for that subscription with a bank card, which may as well be its own form of digital identity. One day, Musk might allow anonymous subscription purchases with cryptocurrency – perhaps, Dogecoin – but even then, we’ll still have the issue of the cost. Perhaps Twitter could subsist off superuser subscriptions, but other platforms won’t, and most users will have zero interest in paying their way back online. Up against such odds, the offer of benevolent governmental oversight might sound like the cosier option, but there are other choices.

In a fashion similar to Signal’s messaging protocol, we might design a system of open-source and decentralised digital identity that verifies our existence without recording it. The platform could rely on tokenisation, creating an anonymous link between the issuer of our photo ID and the website we’ve visited. The website can’t see our government ID, and the government can’t see the website. Anonymity, yet verification. Some groups are exploring this. IDENA, a ‘proof-of-person blockchain’, doesn’t even require any supporting documentation for verification, but its current form remains a little too involved for the average user. Regardless, I remain optimistic. Someone will figure it out.

Because, frankly, someone has to.

Generative AI, in all its forms, is not going away. We stand to wander an internet engulfed in nonsense produced at a logarithmic scale essentially unfathomable today. We might begin to reject the internet entirely, no longer finding it useful, much in the same way that Gen Z rejects Facebook. Without a way to maintain our signal-to-noise ratio, we’ll retreat into smaller and smaller bubbles, by invite-only, where humans vouch for humans. The rest of the web outside these little online bomb shelters will chatter on with itself, no longer needing sentient input to subsist, like one giant Junk folder full of a trillion emails nattering at each other. And that’s the better outcome of the two.

Welcome to the internet.

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Picture the year 2066. We let our apartment’s supervising AI, “Sia”, know that we’re heading to the theatre. A few things are playing, but the news of a developing ‘cyberwar’ has stressed us out, so we’re in the mood for something cathartic. At the theatre, we have half demolished our popcorn in anticipation by the time the trailers end. The director’s name flashes up first, and then:

Tom Cruise as Aiden Colt.

Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise? Isn’t he dead? Didn’t he die about twenty years ago? But before we can follow that thought any further – he’s on screen. Tom Cruise is panting heavily after having climbed up the side of a shipping container and we are damn sure he is dead. And yet, this film released just this week. His hair is long, flowing, just like in Mission: Impossible 2, and that’s when a headline from recent memory floats into our subconscious.

Deepfake Film Reintroduces Posthumous Heartthrob Tom Cruise to the Silver Screen

A minimally paid stuntman towers above us, his face digitally redrawn with that of the now perpetually renowned action hero, Tom Cruise.

I.

First, the legal implications.

When Tom Cruise dies, who will retain ownership of his likeness? His family? The Church of Scientology? As it stands, no broad agreement exists on post-mortem rights of publicity. Film studios have therefore played it safe, only implementing deepfake technology where the original actor is also present in the film. See the new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for a recent example. But such restraint could be poised to change, and I trust Disney to be the fastest and fattest vulture.

The Walt Disney Company is a conglomerate built on copyright. So much so, that they’ve lobbied not once, but twice, to extend copyright terms for their famous properties. But with the House of Mouse losing the mouse himself to the public domain in 2024, hoarding nostalgic faces could be the new direction they need. Instead of old films with new actors, we’ll get new films with old actors.

Out with remakes, in with deepfakes.

After all, consider the current alternatives. Hollywood’s regular raid of the Beverly Hills retirement village has seen them wheeling out the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger for Terminator at the spry age of 75, and Harrison Ford for the aforementioned Indiana Jones sequel at 80. Not a permanent solution by any means.

Alternatively, Hollywood could find someone new, relatively unknown, and slowly build them up to an equivalent level of fame. But at what cost? How many well-written, expensive and successful films would a new action hero have to star in, before they even approached the box office bankability of Tom Cruise? Five? Ten? And even then, they wouldn’t be Cruise.

They wouldn’t be this guy.

But the deepfake future is more than cost-effective, it’s safe.

Since the death of DVD retail, Hollywood is more anxious than ever about actually making their money back. They own nostalgic properties, yes, but without the actors associated with the original material, re-monetisation of those franchises poses a serious challenge. Paul Walker, for example, is so entrenched in the audience’s memory of the Fast and Furious franchise, that director Justin Lin discussed digitally reviving his corpse for the tenth film in the franchise, Fast X.

And this is how the deepfake film ushers in the safest iteration of cinema yet. No more recasts, no more death. No more ageing actors forcing screenwriters to shoehorn time travel into their franchise. No more scheduling conflicts. No more inconvenient overdoses, nor sexual misconduct dashing trilogy plans. No more controversial political stances spoiling merchandising opportunities. The software renders the body double faceless, which in turn ensures they remain nameless and devoid of all negotiating leverage. This is the reliability of working with software. A software cannot age or die. A software cannot unexpectedly get too obese for direct sunlight.

A software cannot say ‘no’.

Even for the final crop of A-list actors, the deal works out. After lending out their likenesses, they’ll bid farewell to green screens and keep to the more dignified pastures of activism and award ceremonies. Only the next generation of actors and actresses will suffer, but we won’t know their names so as to mourn their loss. After all, why would studios invest in a young and attractive up-and-comer, when they can simply scan in pre-surgery Megan Fox?

Of course, we could say no to all of this. We could walk out of that theatre right now. We could ask our digital companion back home to instead read aloud this week’s trivia quiz, as we reconstitute premium protein packets and sprinkle on a sachet of ethically sourced, carbon neutral, and wholly unidentifiable flavouring.

But would we?

II.

Let’s look at the data. After all, perhaps our viewing habits are a victim of circumstance. Perhaps we are forced to consume these regurgitations due to factors outside of our control. For a little insight into our own nature, let’s look at music. From , emphasis mine:

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

Is Old Music Killing New Music?
Ted Gioia

Left to our own devices, we, collectively, are choosing to go back through the musical catalogue. We are choosing Tupac over Doja Cat at an increasingly alarming rate. If the trend continues, we will feasibly reach a time when new music will be entirely suffocated by old music. If new music is made, no one will listen to it. Even if some of us do, we will be such a relatively minuscule audience that it won’t be economically viable for those artists regardless.

‘New’ is also a relative term.

From the perspective of the individual, the discovery of good, old music is no different to the discovery of good, new music. After all, if it’s new to us – does it matter if it’s not really new at all? Arguably, we’re at this point already. Spotify boasts over 80 million tracks at the time of writing. At a very conservative estimate of two minutes per song, if we listened to sixteen hours’ worth of music every day from the moment we were born, we’d still barely eke out maybe a fifth of the 457 years that we would need to cover humanity’s entire preserved discography.

And if we don't want new musicians, why would we want new actors? Maybe we are perfectly content with Tom Cruise, forever. In fact, while we’re here, pick your era. Perhaps rugged Old Man Cruise is not your style. I see you. You're the discerning viewer. We've got you covered. We will find the correct Cruise to get your engine running. What about Risky Business-era Cruise?

Why stop there?

Who else should our sentimentality rescue from a legacy merely immortalised in the body of work they produced during their natural life? What about our favourite podcast host? With some AI magic and enough sample data, we can already emulate folks like Joe Rogan with disturbing accuracy. Sure, that is ‘only’ his voice and appearance, but AI is already writing full novels and responding to complex queries in natural language. Soon the empty digital soul of Joe Rogan will riff on news topics for the rest of internet eternity.

Maybe you don’t like Joe Rogan. Maybe you don’t like the idea of Tom Cruise as Rocky Balboa in the 2049 remake of Rocky. That’s alright. We will stream straight to your living room that same film, but starring Jackie Chan instead. Or Sasha Grey. Or Mussolini. Why not? Snapchat’s filters already map, model and shape faces live and in front of us with whatever design we choose. Give a studio the near-future evolution of that technology, the budget, and nine months of skilled CG technicians working on it – and we’ll get whatever weird romances we want, with all the convincing subtleties of actual acting talent performed by the software.

We want this. The studios want this.

What could go wrong?

III.

Frankly, we might worry about the removal of people from the creation of entertainment. Entertainment already walks an impossible balance between being both art and product. Part of why it, at least, sort of works, is because the people working on it, despite all efforts to the contrary, still manage to seep a little of their personality – their artistic intent – into the final product. The more we strip people out, the less of a soul in the end product.

We’ve already seen what can happen when algorithms become directors. These unsettling remixes of content exist devoid of intent, instead informed only by market trends. As exposed in the strange case of Youtube Kids, the results are non-sensical, unnerving, and often implicitly violent:

Ultimately, if we choose to consume nothing new, we’ll also create nothing new. At which point, technology’s grand replacement of mankind may be final, as AI feeds back to us the digital mincemeat of our own history. Historians of a future civilisation will sift through the rubble with confusion. At some point in the mid-twenty-first century, the enduring record of mankind’s evolution, as recorded by our artistic output, appears to end. The soul of the entertainment industry – already just a nervous, flickering pilot light – will finally have been snuffed out. Perhaps a death knell for society’s own collapse.

Or?

Or I'm a pessimist, and after a few decades of watching deceased Chris Hemsworth’s Thor confuse himself with Earth’s customs for the thirty-eighth film in a row, we’ll say ‘enough’. We’ll demand better from Hollywood, and they will acquiesce. Producers will show restraint, relegating deepfakery to tasteful, creatively compelling use, rather than as a cheap trick to get our Memberberries tingling.

And if that doesn’t happen, maybe something else will save us. Perhaps another Carrington Event will occur, and the sun’s sudden lashing of solar flares will rescue us from that stagnant, digital bath in a flash of sizzling electrics. A hard reset. The four hundred-year reboot that our franchise needed.

On that day, Tom Cruise won’t be there to save us. But he’ll be with us in the only place we ever truly needed him. In our hearts. In our fond memories of A Few Good Men and Jerry Maguire. The most salient of his films might be passed on, generation to generation, through spirited retellings around a campfire of burning tyres, their moral lessons etched into our lineage. Tom Cruise. Not a soulless, digital husk, perpetually at the edge of tomorrow, but living folklore. An oral history of his triumphs. The life of Tom Cruise. The legend of Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise, Forever.

Follow @ThisUnreality