The imitation instinct is turning people into photocopies

"Oi, the foreigner doesn't know how to make a heart shape with his finger? Why does he keep giving the thumbs up?" the photographer pointed me out. All eyes and frowns turned, waiting for me to pose with a finger-thumb-heart combination, but I just kept my thumb up. The person standing closest to me even pushed her heart-shaped fingers right into my face, but I deliberately played dumb with that face. In that moment, I felt like a cow; people were trying to drag this cow somewhere, and it dug in with its hind legs, refusing to move. If I don't like something, I simply don't do it. A cow that refuses to get on the truck is an eccentric cow. Everyone else is moving in the same direction, so naturally the one standing still becomes the problem.

Of course, humans have always chased trends, so I'm not going to pretend this is some brand new disease invented by TikTok. Someone does something, and immediately a little urge appears in other people's heads; maybe I should try that too, because someone else already tried it and, after all, they survived. That's how fashion works, and it's how slang and jokes spread too. Someone decides goat-style hair looks good, and someone else thinks, "Huh, maybe that haircut is worth trying," and suddenly it's the goat.

Great minds have always been masters at standing on the shoulders of others. They take what already exists, reshape it, get jiggy with it and create something new. That is how human culture and civilization actually work; step by step, we borrow, we transform, and occasionally, very rarely, we make something better. Then somebody hits photocopy and copying becomes the entire creative process. The instinct to imitate no longer produces variations, but produces identical photocopies, and that sameness has spread into language itself.

People make a heart shape with their hands at a dance. Illustration photo by Pexels

All over the internet, people are choosing to automatize their thoughts, and language is quietly becoming mechanized. We look up at a rectangular robot towering over us, its screen booming out in an analog voice, telling us what to think, how to write, and what opinions to have, giving us our software update... which flattens people, giving them all the same voice. And so, artificial intelligence is certainly a useful new tool for providing us with our opinions, coming out of the printer supply ready-made. And we beep boop in the end, people surrender to it and it's called living with technology.

That kind of coexisting reminded me of something my aunts said yesterday. I went out and forgot my phone, and they immediately shrieked, brows furrowed, "Oh my God! Are you all right? You left your phone behind. What if something happens?" I asked layered in schmarmelade, "You mean what if something happens online?"

AI is producing a mountain of writing while human spelling and grammar mistakes disappear. Numerical tendrilled algorithms tentacles are already reading the way you write and feeding it back to you. You think you're looking at the screen, but the screen is looking at you, turning you into one more well-behaved member of the herd. They want all of us to buy the same things, sit together, stare at the same shopping screens, spend our money in the same way, and then keep staring.

In the olden days, the herd was important because anyone who strayed became easy prey, and although we may have moved on from worrying about being eaten by whatever was lurking beyond the firelight, the instinct still seems to prevail, sitting somewhere deep in the human machinery where difference can still feel dangerous, as though some ancient part of the brain is quietly whispering that the strange thing over there might eat us. Without that adjustment in understanding, we can easily forget that creativity does not need to appear out of thin air, because there is no need to invent a whole new language to get to the bottom of the best new idea. You only need to take something that already exists and put enough of yourself into it that it becomes yours. That is creativity and not at all a photocopy.

Crawling through a desert of broken TVs with Wi-Fi antennas, searching among the static for some strange signal, for a voice that wears cool sunglasses and says things I haven't heard before, whose opinion is spelled wrong and not downloaded, no hands to their head, incoming transmission, this is what I've downloaded!

Going out of the way to deliberately do something different still matters, reading a book that was never recommended to you because otherwise the mind becomes a stagnant pond. The water never flows anywhere. It just sits there until green algae and those primordial-looking half-frog, half-fish creatures that lurch themselves onto the bank and belch AI writing. A brain that lets AI do all the thinking ends up the same, a green, frog-filled pond.

I don't think we need to destroy the machines, but there is also no reason to surrender, form neat little groups, and stare only at whatever is fed to us. To many people, I probably seem difficult, won't just make that heart-finger concoction, won't go with the downloaded flow, or seem to be lacking in herd instinct. I say, better that than we just get another photocopy, lining those hearts up in a Care Bear stare-down. Crom, I hate it.