I don’t feel particularly affected by synthetic media in my daily life as I do not use social media on a regular basis and I like to think I am deliberate about the things I am a consumer of. One example I can think where synthetic media affects my daily life is during interactions with companies’ customer service centers and being directed to a ‘smart’ chatbot.
These chatbots may vary in degree of ‘smartness,’ some seem to be able to form cohesive conversations given just a few keywords, while others are pre-programmed with a list of static choices that the user must pick from.
Based on my personal experience, it seems that chatbots are often based off of popular questions asked by customers, and sometimes the more high-powered ones (that can even provide empathetic responses) are probably pulling from a database trained on past conversations between real customer service reps and customers.
Every time I dial a customer service center to have an issue resolved and am immediately greeted with a robotic voice it frustrates me, and makes me think of my grandparents or even my parents. I think for younger generations it may be more convenient to listen, and accordingly press numbers on their phones in order to resolve an issue.
However, I know my parents and their parents prefer live interaction with a real person. I also think chatbots can be more confusing to older generations than to us especially when I find myself needing to explain to my mom for example, why she must say exactly a few keywords to the bot and that it is not smart enough to interpret her question if she asked it as if she were talking to me. In this context, it does feel to me as if we’ve lost something in our social lives, though these companies gained the ability to help an increasing number of customers in less time.