The Realists May 2024 Roundup: the great AI plunder, eating rocks and the Zombie internet
Fascinating articles and memorable social media takes you may have missed this month
Dear Realists,
I'd like to try a new kind of post – end of the month roundups of the biggest Realists-adjacent news, unearthing for you fascinating content you may have missed. Since early May, I've been bookmarking posts for this very purpose.
So here we go: a Realists article you may have missed... as well as four pieces by other authors and interesting social media takes.
ICYMI: Realists edition
Earlier this month I wrote about a bold new initiative by the French government to curb children's screen time. The first phase: a long, well-researched report about the risks of excessive screen time, followed by recommendations and a tangible action plan. You can read it here:
Elena Rossini
The report was handed in on April 30th and the government's plan is expected to be announced any day now. I will definitely write about it once it's unveiled.
In the News: AI's Brazen Stealing and You Call This a "Superintelligence"?
The two biggest news items that rocked the technology world this month? The controversy over OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o and its "Sky" voice that was eerily similar to Scarlett Johansson's (who famously voiced an AI assistant in Spike Jonze's superb movie Her)... as well as the integration of Generative AI in Google search results, which produced some shocking, troubling - and hilariously inaccurate - responses.
Charlie Warzel wrote about OpenAI's controversy in The Atlantic:
Charlie Warzel
An excerpt:
On its own, this seems to be yet another example of a tech company blowing past ethical concerns and operating with impunity. But the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data. At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.
I'm glad that mainstream media is finally putting the focus on the lack of consent and the brazen stealing of content when discussing AI.
AI may be hyped as a "superintelligence" but large language models are prone to error. Sometimes with hilarious consequences - as it was made apparent after the integration of AI Overviews in Google search results.
Casey Newton wrote about this in Platformer:
Casey Newton
An excerpt:
Over the weekend, the AI Overviews that Google announced at its developer conference made international headlines — but not for the reasons the company hoped for.
Across Threads, Bluesky, and X, users encountering the company’s AI-generated summaries atop search results found over and over again that Google was hallucinating or worse.
Most famously, there was the result that suggested putting nontoxic glue in your pizza. But AI overviews also suggested putting gasoline in your spaghetti. And its sense of American history appeared deeply broken; it reported that just 17 American presidents were white, and that one was Muslim.
I was able to confirm that AI overviews were suggesting that people eat one to three rocks per day, an idea that turns out to have come from … The Onion.
All this may sound dispiriting but! There is a way to use Google Search without any AI nonsense popping up in results. Introducing: udm14.org the search engine Konami code. You can try it out here:
The Shocking Deterioration of Facebook into a Zombie Internet
Jason Koebler from 404 Media wrote a fantastic article about the deterioration of Meta’s Facebook, which is now swamped with AI-generated content:
Jason Koebler
An excerpt:
Over the last few months, many have proposed that the AI spam taking over Facebook is a great example of the “Dead Internet Theory,” which posits that large portions of the internet are made up of bots talking to bots, filtered through the lens of recommendation and engagement algorithms. Facebook is undeniably cooked, a decaying, depressing hall of horrors full of viral AI-generated content that seemingly gets worse every day.
But I do not think Facebook is the dead internet. Instead, I think it is something worse. Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.
To read the full article you can sign up - for free! - for 404 Media. They are smartly putting their posts behind a soft paywall in order to avoid having their content mined by AI / LLMs.
Ethical Issues: The Effects of Social Media on Our Personalities
Freya India wrote in “What’s Become of Us?” about how social media may be making us worse people:
Freya India
An excerpt:
Most of the time when we talk about social media being bad for us we mean for our mental health. These platforms make us anxious, depressed, and insecure, and for many reasons: the constant social comparison; the superficiality and inauthenticity of it all; being ranked and rated by strangers. All this seems to make us miserable.
But I don’t just think it makes us miserable. I’ve written before about how it makes us bitchy. And self-absorbed. And over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.
May 2024 Social Media Roundup: My Favorite Takes
A sharp critique
From user @artologica on Threads (quoting Kevin Gannon on Bluesky)
Lack of Consent
From Liesel Reinhart on Threads:
Remember When?
From nixCraft on Mastodon:
As always, thanks for being here!
Elena
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