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Social’s Next Wave
“How paid subscriptions, political polarization, and AI are changing the social media landscape. […] The empires of attention [Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snap, and TikTok] are beginning to show signs of decline. Industry incumbents face business model uncertainty, fiercer competitive dynamics, mounting political pressure, and managerial instability. Suddenly, disrupting these giants seems merely difficult rather than impossible. A new wave is emerging to meet this opportunity. Upstarts like BeReal, Poparazzi, Mastodon, Post News, and others seek to win by promising a better use of our most valuable resource: time. These companies don’t aim to dominate every second of our day or every one of our relationships. They position themselves as productive alternatives to the controversy and chaos of old platforms, escapes from the fiefdoms of Zuckerberg and Musk”
Whoever Controls Language Models Controls Politics
“Thus, in the future, language models themselves may take on the status of a surrogate public sphere. As more and more texts are generated by AI systems – and it is very likely that they will be – the proportion of discourse produced by humans will steadily decline. And because language models, once trained, are difficult to change, and because they infer the future from the past, what Emily Bender et al. has called a “value lock” looms. It means that values become fixed in place due to the system’s inability to change, so that no amount of discussion can lead to a change of opinion; a technologically produced political stagnation is the result.”
ChatGPT Is an Ideology Machine
“AI is a culture machine. […] However the next phase of technological capitalism plays out, the new AI is intervening directly in the social process of making meaning at all. GPT systems are ideology machines.”
The Age Of Cringe
“The deep nihilism that defined the internet from 2018 to 2022 has been replaced with outright optimism. And rather than shy away, Gen Z creators are embracing it — and amassing millions of fans in the process.”
AI Has Hacked The Operating System Of Human Civilisation
“Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our dna. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures. […] What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? […] Through its mastery of language, ai could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews.”
IMHO a must read by Yuval Harari.
AI Spam Is Flooding The Internet
“Generative AI tools like chatbots further lower the cost for bad actors to generate false but credible content at scale, defeating the (already weak) moderation defenses of social media platforms,. Therefore these tools can easily be weaponized not just for spam but also for dangerous content, from malware to financial fraud and from hate speech to threats to democracy and health.”
Artificial Intimacy
Welcome To The Age Of Automated Dating
“Rizz, which is meant to function as a digital wingman, helps users come up with killer opening lines and responses to potential matches. […] It is just one of many start-ups trying to transform romance through artificial intelligence by optimizing and automating online dating, now one of the primary ways by which people find romantic connections.”
I Challenged My AI Clone To Replace Me For 24 Hours
Read the whole article here.
