We consume, more and more, synthetic content and interact with entities that are not human. Bots, artificial profiles, automatically generated texts, videos produced by artificial intelligence. This environment is gradually making us cold, cynical, emotionally numbed, almost without empathy for anything or anyone.
Take a look at today’s digital ecosystem: news websites and social media are flooded with fake news; algorithms decide what we see, when we see it, and for how long; texts no longer exist to inform, clarify, or deepen understanding — they exist to generate clicks, quick reactions, and compulsive consumption. Truth has become secondary to performance.
YouTube is saturated with AI-generated videos. Some are curious or amusing, but the overwhelming majority — easily 90% — is pure noise: empty, repetitive, soulless content. The comments follow the same pattern: many do not belong to real people; they are bought, automated, simulacra of human interaction.
Amazon is beginning to fill up with low-quality books, superficial and inaccurate, written by AI and released en masse. Disposable products, without depth, without human experience behind them. Editorial garbage disguised as knowledge.
A large portion of the content we consume may still have had a real human behind it — someone writing prompts — but the final result is artificial. It lacks emotion, intention, empathy, lived experience. Writing is no longer meant to communicate with people; it is meant to influence behaviour. Information gives way to manipulation. We have fully entered a memetic war.
Today, when you read a piece of news or watch a video, what is your immediate reaction?
“I don’t believe this.”
“This must be fake.”
“It was generated by AI.”
Little by little, we start believing in nothing. And when we believe in nothing, we also stop feeling. Empathy dissolves. Emotion empties out. Everything feels fake, staged, disposable.
We interact with people without knowing if they are people.
We converse without knowing whether on the other side there is a human or a bot.
Even on dating apps, a large proportion of profiles are artificial, created to sustain the illusion of choice, attention, and validation.
And while this happens, our data circulates freely. Our preferences, habits, consumption patterns, and emotional reactions are collected, analysed, and sold. On social networks, we are not the customer — we are the product. A tradable statistical asset.
In the physical, supposedly “real” world, the situation is not much different.
On the streets, in cafés, at family dinners, at Christmas, or at any social gathering, people speak less and less. Each individual is focused on their own screen, their personalised feed, their algorithmic bubble. We are together, but isolated. Close, yet disconnected.
Technology promised to bring us closer.
It ended up fragmenting us.
Trust is disappearing.
Attention is being exploited.
Empathy is being eroded.
In the face of all this, the question imposes itself, inevitable and uncomfortable:
Where is society heading?
Silvio Guerrinha
