I pass on two striking examples from today’s New York Times, with few clips of text from each:
A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture:
(You really should read the whole article...I've given up on trying to assemble clips of text that get across the whole message, and pass on these bits towards the end of the article:)
....we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. And so far, major A.I. companies are refusing to pursue advanced ways to identify A.I.’s handiwork — which they could do by adding subtle statistical patterns hidden in word use or in the pixels of images.
To deal with this corporate refusal to act we need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to legislatively force advanced watermarking intrinsic to generated outputs, like patterns not easily removable. Just as the 20th century required extensive interventions to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require extensive interventions to protect a different, but equally critical, common resource, one we haven’t noticed up until now since it was never under threat: our shared human culture.Is Threads the Good Place?:
Once upon a time on social media, the nicest app of them all, Instagram, home to animal bloopers and filtered selfies, established a land called Threads, a hospitable alternative to the cursed X,..Threads would provide a new refuge. It would be Twitter But Nice, a Good Place where X’s liberal exiles could gather around for a free exchange of ideas and maybe even a bit of that 2012 Twitter magic — the goofy memes, the insider riffing, the meeting of new online friends
...And now, after a mere 10 months, we can see exactly what we built: a full-on bizarro-world X, handcrafted for the left end of the political spectrum, complete with what one user astutely labeled “a cult type vibe.” If progressives and liberals were provoked by Trumpers and Breitbart types on Twitter, on Threads they have the opportunity to be wounded by their own kind...Threads’ algorithm seems precision-tweaked to confront the user with posts devoted to whichever progressive position is slightly lefter-than-thou....There’s some kind of algorithm that’s dusting up the same kind of outrage that Twitter had.Threads feels like it’s splintering the left.
The fragmentation of social media may have been as inevitable as the fragmentation of broadcast media. Perhaps also inevitable, any social media app aiming to succeed financially must capitalize on the worst aspects of social behavior. And it may be that Hobbes, history’s cheery optimist, was right: “The condition of man is a condition of war of every one against every one.” Threads, it turns out, is just another battlefield.
