When I look back over my life, a decade or two from now, when I finally succumb to the strontium smog, I’ll at least be able to pinpoint the moment when I first knew human civilisation was doomed. Ah yes, I’ll think, as I hear scavengers scuttling towards my body across the trashscape, grunting and hooting for meat: that was the moment. That Friday evening, way back in the middle of 2023, when I was spooning out the usual overcooked pasta for the usual undercooked children and I asked them what they’d been up to.

‘We found this hilarious thing on YouTube,’ my oldest said. ‘It was, like, this AI-generated video of Boris Johnson eating raw onions.’ Was, like, what? ‘Yes,’ chipped in the second oldest. ‘WHOLE raw onions. It’s hilarious!’

Not only is AI producing an infinite sludge of meaningless sort-of-art, it’s using algorithms to serve it up

It turned out they’d been watching this one on repeat – as well as the decontextualised clip from some interview (a real interview) in which he claimed to have cooked steak and oven chips the previous night and done so with an explosive enthusiasm that the kids seemed to find extremely funny. This had been their evening’s cultural diet. Now YouTube, their preferences thus revealed, was presumably filling up with microtargeted Boris Johnson/onion content.

Muse on that, for a moment. It’s not just the inanity of the piece of content described. Well, it is in part the inanity of the content described. They showed it to me. It was inane. It was about fifteen seconds long, and it really leaned into its basic premise. There was Boris – a twitchy, blotchy, ravenous caricature from the depths of uncanny valley, but recognisably Boris – and he was cramming raw onions into his gob with the ferocity of a starving man – or at least, a man who really, really likes gobbling up huge raw onions in no more than a couple of bites per onion.

In the first scene, he held a vast green onion in his left hand while the right pushed a red onion urgently into the old pie-hole. Jump cut, and he’s making short work of another red onion, just shredding it. Jump-cut, there’s a green one getting the treatment. Jump cut: he’s sitting at a table, gazing for a moment with wild surmise at one of those giant mild Spanish onions, held at arm’s length like Yorick’s skull, then, whoomph, down the hatch.

What could bring such an artefact into the world? Well, whimsy, I guess. Someone, somewhere –perhaps someone with the sort of kink that is best left uninvestigated – decided to type ‘Boris Johnson eating raw onions’ as the prompt for some sort of AI video-generator, and watched the result, and saw that it was good. And they duly stuck it up on YouTube because, duh, where else are you going to put a fifteen-second video of Boris Johnson eating raw onions whole?

What concerns and bewilders me a bit more is that somehow, this piece of random whimsy found its way to the eyes of my children. There’s no moral panic here, I should say. Not like the moral panic when we noticed that my browser search history contained ‘lady taking off brar [sic]’, and after, I’d satisfied my wife that I know how to spell ‘bra’, we had to retool all our safesearch settings at the router. But I will confess to dismay.

YouTube, as any readers with youngish children will know, is what the young now do instead of watching television. Watching telly – a whole show, that may go on for as long as half an hour, in front of which you sit patiently – is very much not the thing these days. Either you’re jumpily processing the unending algorithmic burble of TikTok, or, if you prefer long-form entertainment or your spoilsport parents won’t let you have TikTok, you’re watching YouTube, moving jumpily from one shaky and amateurish video to another.

My children, perhaps because it’s more like TikTok, seem to prefer ‘YouTube shorts’, which last a few seconds instead of a few minutes. (I know we like to complain about dwindling attention spans, but they can, oddly, watch YouTube shorts for hours.) YouTube really does serve an unending stream of what Philip K Dick called ‘kipple’: aka mindless rubbish. And as Dick noted, the first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple: ‘The entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization’. The internet has accelerated this process.

A caveat. We are all, as a species, given to what psychologists call ‘rosy recollection’. Our own parents’ generation liked to chide us with their memories of a golden age in which you made your own entertainment instead of sitting square-eyed in front of the gogglebox; a time when nobody locked their front doors because there was no such thing as crime, and childhood was a paradise of hoops on sticks, apple-scrumping, orange-box karties and green-shield stamps. No doubt their parents in turn looked down with disgust on green-shield stamps and the brain-rotting effects of hoops and sticks, and remembered how as children they spent hours engrossed in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury or the improving works of Dr Arnold.

But I think that, in this generation, there’s a difference. However inane the content we consumed was – and we all watched The Clangers and The Magic Roundabout, so we can’t completely take the high ground here – it was selected and arranged and programmed by a human hand, as all culture since the dawn of time hitherto has been. The canon was formed by human taste.

Now, not only is AI producing an infinite sludge of meaningless sort-of-art, it’s using algorithms to serve it up. The canon itself, when it comes to books on Amazon and movies on Netflix, is being shaped by a statistical if-you-liked-that-you’re-sure-to-like-this machine, which generates ever smaller feedback loops. YouTube shorts is simply a very stark example – because it evolves in fruit-fly rather than mammal generations – of how dementedly the kippleization process proceeds.

I got a glimpse of the future on Friday night. A computer-generated simulacrum of Boris Johnson eating a computer-generated simulacrum of raw onions – for ever. Ay me. The lone and level sands stretch far away. I tried to explain these concerns to my kids, incidentally, and it was hard to tell for sure, because of the mouthful of pasta, but I think one of them may have said: ‘OK Boomer.’