Inversions and Vectors
David M. Berry In an earlier article I introduced the concept of the Inversion to describe the moment at which AI-generated culture overwhelms human cultural production (Berry 2025). The argument is that AI is restructuring how meaning and experience are produced and circulated in societies. The term draws on a technical moment first identified by YouTube engineers in 2013, when bot traffic reached parity with human traffic and employees feared that their internal fraud detection system would flip, treating algorithmic behaviour as "real" and human behaviour as "fake" (Read 2018). That revealed the way in which the Inversion is a kind of "threshold" phenomenon, a point at which the system's own categories of authenticity reverse polarity. However, the concept, as I used it there, conflated what I think are three distinct moments into a single term. In this short piece, I want to unpack them, because each one is differently useful for theorising vector ...
