There’s little respect attributed to mediocre racing talents in Formula 1. Their lack of performances would be scrutinised, at the most turned into memes even; but they won’t be followed off the track.
But things take a completely different turn when you’re a talent to note, a force to reckon with.
It’s not about your race wins, pole positions or fastest laps alone; on the contrary, the moment you become a Formula 1 world champion, you tread the tightrope between a lack of personal freedom and overriding media scrutiny.
From being someone who wanted access to fame resulting from success to being in a zone where success permits not just paparazzi but unrelenting media focus; your life changes drastically upon turning an F1 world champion.
Then, whether you’re the great Lewis or the majestic Alonso, the Iceman Kimi or the phenomenal Sebastian Vettel, wherever you go, whatever you do, the shutterbugs will follow you very minutely and as often as they can.
But things took a nasty turn more recently where it came to a certain Michael Schumacher.
This isn’t just any F1 world champion; this is a 7-time world champion, a winner of 91 race wins, a superstar of a decade where the sport wasn’t as evolved in safety measures, which is why the thrill for wheel to wheel racing and subsequent successes turned Schumi into a real legend.
Moreover, as on date, Schumacher is the only former world champion whose scary accident albeit outside an F1 track made him and his life succumb to a standstill; most of the others who suffered a crash on a race track either died immediately or afterward.
Think Gilles Villeneuve. Think Jules Bianchi.
It’s been a decade since the harrowing skiing incident in the European Alps receded a great legend of the sport into a more or less lifeless situation.
Any specific details to Schumacher’s current state of well being or health status are merely gimmicky and completely contrived of reality. M
They’re hearsay.
The Schumacher family and friends including former Ferrari team boss Jean Todt (a close friend of the German driver) have maintained tight silence over a condition that does after all deserve privacy.
Which is why when a recent interview of Michael Schumacher was published in a German magazine with specific answers to how the former Ferrari great was feeling and what current condition was he in, it left much of the F1 world in shock and the world off it, stunned.
Die Aktuelle, the German “Gossip” Magazine did actually run a story widely billed as the world’s first ever interview of Michael Schumacher post his 250-day long medically-induced coma (owing to the skiing accident).
Bold headlines, ultimately attention-grabbing, revealed “How my life and my family’s life changed post the incident!”
But it didn’t end there; there was another detailed quote that elaborated Schumi’s travesty.
It would read, “I was so badly injured that I lay for months in a kind of artificial coma, because otherwise my body couldn’t have dealt with it all. I’ve had a tough time but the hospital team has managed to bring me back to my family.”
In the end, the hearts of thousands may have instantly sunk in deep despair upon the disclosure that the so called F1 driver behind the revelatory messages and content wasn’t Michael Schumacher at all; and that it was, in fact, AI-generated text that was digitally achieved thanks to softwares easily accessible nowadays on a plenty of websites supporting AI.
All of which brings us fans and critics of Formula 1 to a very rational question.
That while surely the concern surrounding one of F1’s greats is, but genuine, just how far does one have to plunge in a bit to satisfy our craving for celeb culture in this AI-dependant age?
It’s common knowledge that several websites use AI chat boxes that allow the common man to converse with celebrities.
But does that mean that we get into an overdrive of AI usage to an extent that we deliberately blur the boundaries between what’s acceptable and what is, in fact, completely unacceptable human behaviour?
In the end, it isn’t really AI that is to be blamed even if it’s cutting edge solutions can certainly enable one to achieve nefarious objectives such as the Michael Schumacher incident, which may certainly have helped sales of that particular edition of the German magazine.
It’s our own conscience that must be questioned and deserves to be placed under greater scrutiny than is done.
Surely, advances in AI will only lead to more operational efficiency and at multiple levels regardless of what sector does one operate in.
But now that we have the necessary evil of our times- should it be called so- in our hands, should we, humans ultimately not dictate the extent to which this technology must be exercised or brought into play?
If tomorrow Schumacher recovers to full normality and one hopes it happens for real, how gutted might he feel that a magazine hailing from his own Deutschland depended on AI to sell something that was nothing more than sensationalism?
Lastly, if the readers of the magazine who parted with common sense thinking Michael Schumacher was himself answering the questions, are they even real Grand Prix racing fans or thoughtless beings operating in the skin of humans?
Just what does this tell us about our present state of being?