By Tom Fowdy
I log in to "X" (formerly Twitter), and I am greeted with an artificial intelligence (AI) generated video of a tiny-sized Indonesian prayer drumstick carving a hole into a giant Anthropomorphic sleeping pickle's crotch. The drumstick, now named "Tung Tung Sahur," subsequently converts the inside of the pickle into a giant sauna, before getting sucked out by that same pickle dancing with a vacuum attached to his groin.
Can you believe what I have just written? This extremely absurd, if not disturbing video, is created by the same technology that many are now fearing will bring about the end of humanity. Over the past few years, the world has been experiencing an "AI Revolution", a meta-economic shift akin to the industrial one, whereby a new technology so profound and disruptive fundamentally transforms the way that we live and work, forever.
However, the consequences of this are arguably much more profound than any previous economic revolution, because "AI" is a technology that is granting machines the capability to think, reason, and operate themselves, and is developing at an extremely rapid pace. Critics argue that the big corporations producing AI technology, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, have little interest in safeguards and there have been repeated leaks about AI models acquiring minds of their own, undertaking voluntarily harmful actions or even attacking competitors. This has produced a moral panic in the Western world regarding the impact of the technology and calls for increased regulation.
But this panic about the rise of AI is not universally shared by all. While in the West, AI is subject to growing moral panic and sometimes backlash when it is used in creative contexts, the Eastern world, especially Asia, doesn't see in the same way. Rather, AI has been utilised with extreme levels of enthusiasm and economic utility without any meaningful public dissent whatsoever. As Poe Zhao, analyst and founder of Hello China Tech, a newsletter focused on China's tech industry, told a CNN report, noting that China has no fear of "AI dystopia", "Most Chinese people meet AI as a cheap product first and as a debate second… and that "When a technology shows up as a useful, low-cost service, people judge it by what it does for them, not by what it might do to them."
In South Korea, I see this very same mindset all around me in every element of life. South Korean television channels create entire television channel history documentaries out of AI, reconstructing figures such as George Washington, Sigmund Freud and Isaac Newton. Likewise, even leading channels utilise blatant ChatGPT-created images on talk shows, current affairs programs and other historical content. You go outside and entire businesses, such as arcades, are draped in ChatGPT cartoons. While a Western professional creator might scream "AI SLOP!" until they are blue in the face if they saw this stuff, it is in fact perfectly accepted here precisely because it is useful and practical.
Of course, that is not to say the West itself is not utilising AI for economic purposes; it very much is, but the point being, it becomes a moralistic debate there in a way it does not in Asia. While the English-speaking West is often culturally underpinned by a moralistic, protestant legacy and an "anti-authority" outlook, Asian cultures on the other hand place focus on the practical value of things and maintaining harmony in relationships, especially in respect to authority and order.
Structurally, the Chinese and Korean socio-economic are also ones of extreme competitiveness compounded by conformist social norms, so why would you turn down the benefits of a tool that helps you cut costs and save money, when it is letting everyone else get ahead of you? In modern Britain, I'm always reminding myself that the higher education system was designed so I could excel in whatever field of interest or expression I wished to pursue as an individual, and this existed in an environment where many young people just did not care about education at all.
This is not the same as East Asia, where the system is much more uniform and every young person is expected to be the very best in an extremely competitive, high-pressure argument. This carries on into the economic model of their societies, where there is less room to be "unique" and more incentive to "conform" using that which is "proven to work." For example, have you never seen how absurdly conformist South Korean restaurant categories are? Every single "Chinese" restaurant has more or less the same menu; they do not compete on individuality, like Western establishments; they compete on their ability to produce the "best" of "the same popular thing," and that is why restaurants that are marked as "popular" have absurdly long queues outside.
Therefore, linking this back to AI, East Asian societies do not demonize AI, precisely because it is seen as practically "good" for what it does, as opposed to opinions in the West focusing on AI being "bad" solely because of what it represents, and what it may one day do. This reveals different interpretations of morality, one which is based strictly on function and relational purposes (East Asian Legalism-Confucianism) and the other on ontological abstractions and absolutism (Western Universalist thought derived from Greek Philosophy).
Your average South Korean television company doesn't care if their use of AI undermines the work of actual artists precisely because it gets the job done and is a convenient tool everyone else is using. Finally, unlike the West, they also respect the notion of authority, also deemed as necessary when used legitimately and lawfully, to regulate any potential misuse, of which they accept, and thus worry less about dystopian scenarios.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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