Generative AI Is Forcing People To Rethink What It Means To Be Authentic

“With text, image, audio and video all becoming easier for anyone to produce through new generative AI tools, I believe people are going to need to reexamine and recalibrate how authenticity is judged in the first place.”

Interesting article where the author distinguishes several dimensions of authenticity:

1. historical authenticity – whether an object is truly from the time, place and person someone claims it to be.
2. categorical authenticity – the kind that plays out when, say, a restaurant in Japan offers exceptional and authentic Neapolitan pizza.
3. And finally, there is the authenticity that comes from our values and beliefs.

TikTok Feeds Teens a Diet of Darkness

“A recent study found that when researchers created accounts belonging to fictitious 13-year-olds, they were quickly inundated with videos about eating disorders, body image, self-harm and suicide. […] Videos about body image and mental health popped up on the accounts’ For You pages every 39 seconds.”

Spotify Ejects Thousands Of AI-Made Songs In purge Of Fake Streams

“In recent months the music industry has been confronting the rise of AI-generated songs and, more broadly, the growing number of tracks inundating streaming platforms daily. The largest audio streaming business, Spotify recently took down about 7 per cent of the tracks that had been uploaded by Boomy, the equivalent of “tens of thousands” of songs, according to a person familiar with the matter.”

As long as legislation is not in place, it’s a race that can’t be won.

Google Wants To Take Over The Web

“At its I/O event this week, Google gave us our most comprehensive preview so far of how it intends to reshape its search engine in response to the wave of hype surrounding generative AI and chatbots. What they demonstrated was not only a very different vision for how we get information online, but also an ambitious and worrying push to further move the open web onto the company’s platform. […] We need to be aware of how companies are using this moment to further centralize power and increase their control over our experience of the web and everything we’ve ever contributed to it.”

RIP Metaverse

“The Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world, has died after being abandoned by the business world. It was three years old. […] Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his quixotic obsession, and then killed it the second that another idea started to interest Wall Street. There is no reason that a man who has overseen the layoffs of tens of thousands of people should run a major company. There is no future for Meta with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm: It will stagnate, and then it will die and follow the Metaverse into the proverbial grave.”

Yes, The Metaverse Is Still Happening

“There’s still much hype around the metaverse. And although no one knows how things will shape out, the metaverse is happening and companies need to develop a strategy. Currently, large enterprises such as NVIDIA and Unity are investing heavily to lay the foundational infrastructure, while Roblox, Decentraland, and Sandbox are jockeying to be the preferred portal, and Web3 studios such as Touchcast and TerraZero are working with leading brands to expand their market share. Now is the time to discover the metaverse and its power to drive deeper connections, more effective collaboration, and enhanced personal productivity and fulfillment.”