During our conversation, my friend made a kind of statement that I wasn’t at all expecting to come out from his mouth. Although he’s not highly educated, I know that he reads a lot. He said, “Interacting face to face is a hormone altering experience.” Indeed, a face-to-face interaction is capable of altering hormones of the persons involved in it. His educational statement has partially inspired this article.
While most of us are very busy in our occupations, professions, enterprises and daily activities throughout the day, frequency and duration of face-to-face interactions have decreased. Now, most of our interpersonal interaction and communication takes place electronically i. e. phone calls, video calls, text chats or emails. Being social animals, we’re losing a lot and it might do more damage to us in future.
A face-to-face interaction is the default mode of our communication. A face-to-face interaction goes beyond exchanging or listening to words by staying close to each other. We do silently exchange a broad range of nonverbal cues, along with the spoken words if any. Over the millions of years, we’ve communicated with each other face-to-face, even while facing some limitations.
"In this AI era, it’s not only about reading the body language of a person that you’re interacting with face-to-face but also ensuring that you’re interacting electronically with a real or living person..."
Electronic communication has undoubtedly helped us in bridging the huge time and space gaps. However, it brings the greatest nonverbal disadvantage in the human interactions. Especially, text messaging or chatting has completely robbed us off the richness of nonverbal cues that can be exchanged during a face-to-face interaction, a video call or an audio call. Aren’t we utterly deprived?
Although a video call allows us to see each other, it doesn’t allow us to touch each other as we can do during a face-to-face interaction. Also, we mostly can see the face and the upper body of the other person. Additionally, a lot of physical, nonverbal and environmental cues are absent during electronic communication. For example, we can’t detect each other’s body smell.
As most of us are getting more and more involved in audio calling, text chatting and writing emails with each passing days, it clearly appears that most of us are rapidly losing the natural ability to quickly recognize and accurately decode the variety of nonverbal cues, even in a regular and normal face-to-face interaction. Silently, we’re heading towards a greater crisis.
Today, having an account on different social media platforms is very common in all age groups across the globe. There’re several applications installed on our smartphones to fulfil the need to connect and communicate with thousands or millions of people at the same time. One can chat in real time with a person who is living a thousand miles away.
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| A need of the time or an addiction? |
With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, we’re most likely entering an unprecedented phase of interactions in which separating reality from illusion could become harder or even impossible. Most of us already have an unimaginable amount of personal data uploaded on the internet and various social media platforms. It has already made us vulnerable to huge social damage by tailor-made deepfakes images and videos.
Due to large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots, knowing if someone you are text chatting with privately for days is a real human being will be harder or even impossible in near future. Even there’re a great chance that an AI chatbot would perfectly mimic the words, phrases and syntaxes of somebody you know very well for many years. Such level of deepfaking has an unimaginable deceptive, manipulative and persuasive influence.
Deception, manipulation and persuasion by deepfaking or perfectly mimicking somebody is extremely dangerous for us as a society that is being divided by many factors. The worst side of deepfaking is that we simply can’t catch and punish a digital being for the crime it has committed or manipulated us to commit. Hence, we simply can’t imagine the amount of damage that could be done to us by digitally deepfaking entities.
"We need to create stronger social bonds within our families, relatives, friends, colleagues, neighbors and communities by spending more time in face-to-face interactions than ever before."
Many researchers and experts are trying to tame the AI systems to prevent them from working against us. As of now, it’s not 100 % certain that it can be done in the first place while witnessing the wild growth of the AI systems. Nevertheless, the great possibility of deepfaking for deception, manipulation and persuasion can’t be denied because anti-socials would certainly take an advantage of it.
Especially, if a person feels socially disliked, deprived, unheard or undervalued then there’s a great possibility that such person could easily fall prey to the silent anti-social brainwashing. After developing a strong rapport, the person can be easily convinced, disinformed or manipulated by an extremely persuasive deepfake entity to do anything against the society.
Perhaps, it’s the need of this socially challenging era that we avoid electronic interactions without any serious necessity and engage more and more in regular face-to-face interactions, discussions or conversations as much as possible. It would certainly give us back the real social benefits and people reading ability that most of us have been strongly lacking for years.
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| Are you interacting with a deepfake entity? |
While exchanging and detecting various nonverbal clues (subconsciously or consciously), greeting, smiling, laughing, touching, mirroring, gesturing at, making eye contact with, sitting/standing along and reciprocating each other during a face-to-face interaction leaves deeper effects on our brains and minds. Indeed, it can't be achieved through electronic interactions.
In this AI era, it’s not only about reading the body language of a person that you’re interacting with face-to-face but also ensuring that you’re interacting electronically with a real or living person and not a digital deepfake, an invisible or an intangible entity that you simply can’t catch, question and/or punish for its damaging deception, manipulation or persuasion.
We need to create stronger social bonds within our families, relatives, friends, colleagues, neighbors and communities by spending more time in face-to-face interactions than ever before. Are we going to achieve the same? This greatest question will persist if Artificial Intelligence wouldn't enslave and/or destroy us.
Potentially damaging DeepFake relations can be greatly avoided, only by creating close, functional, trustworthy, constructive, empathetic and DeepReal relations.
[#RED ALERT Under the growing influence of Artificial Intelligence, the continuation of democracy can only be guaranteed by getting involved in discussions or conversations with real or living people.]
Related Articles:
1) Importance of Touch 2) Social Footsteps 3) Face to Face 4) Can body language reveal thoughts? 5) Nonverbal Advantage in Investigation 6) Artificial Intelligence and Body Language
