If only there were a phrase for it
If only there were a phrase for it
Meanwhile, the AI tsunami grows closer, and now we can draw/write/etc it
Write a book about 'em, Dano!
Tweet of the week goes to Amy Charlotte Kean:
Tweet of the week (runner-up) goes to Niels:
It seems as this question—how social media affects us—is something that people are really thinking about. Max Fisher, a New York Times journalist, has a new book out called “The Chaos Machine”, subtitled “The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World”. There’s a review at the New York Times, which says
he repeatedly invokes Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1968 movie, in which a supercomputer coldly kills astronauts on a ship bound for Jupiter, was in Fisher’s thoughts as he researched the book. Its stark, ambiguous aesthetic is perfectly poised between the utopian and the dystopian. And as a story about trying to fix a wayward technology as it hurtles out of control, it is beautifully apt.
There’s a sort of blurb over at the Harvard Book Store, which reads in part:
Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies’ founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.
If you’ve read (my book) Social Warming, you’ll know that a lot of what Fisher seems to be writing about sounds very much like my project. I’m absolutely not suggesting any hint of plagiarism; when I was researching my book, articles written or co-authored by Fisher kept turning up, because he was covering precisely the topics describing the problems that I was trying to capture and analyse. I tried to get in touch with him a few times, without success; I’d imagine it was because he was either busy—he always seemed to be reporting from somewhere exotic—or working on this project. I did have one other writer who I spoke to who declined to talk to me because they were working on something that, to them, sounded too similar to mine.
It’s no surprise, though, that multiple people are writing about the broader effects of social media. It’s become so embedded in our culture—in politics, sport, news—that there are people turning up for university today who never knew a time before Facebook. They were two years old when Twitter was invented. They were three when Tumblr came online. This is about the time when you would expect to see the effects of these networks being pervasive in our culture starting to come into view. I called it social warming; Fisher likens it to HAL 9000 running amok and killing the astronauts in its charge. I’m sure there’ll be another along presently.
For the same reason, that’s why politicians are more and more concerned about what’s going on. They can see the effects on their constituents, for good or ill.
It’s even starting to seep into presidential diatribes. Though his predecessor would never have wanted to get rid of Twitter, Joe Biden has railed against social media companies, and on Thursday gave a speech at the “United We Stand” event. The “check against delivery” version is pretty anodyne, but tweets from reporters on the ground suggest that he went further, calling for social media platforms to be held accountable for spreading hate-fuelled violence, and “to get rid of special immunity for social media companies and impose much stronger transparency requirements”. (Apparently this got a standing ovation.) That sounds like a desire to revoke, or weaken, Section 230, which presently gives platforms the freedom to remove or leave content that users post (excepting flagrantly illegal content) without legal liability. That’s been one of Biden’s bugbears for a long time, but the problem is, how do you weaken it without leaving the platforms open to every lawsuit under the sun? Suggestions that you’ll only make them liable if “an algorithm was involved in amplifying the content” is pretty hopeless; all the platforms run on algorithms, beginning from the point where you try to log in and your details are checked to see if the login is suspicious (from an unusual place, completely different machine, different keystrokes). I doubt this is going to get anywhere. Or if it does get somewhere, the place it gets to won’t be a good one.
Royals note:
Step 1: couple holds hands.
Step 2: people get performatively angry at couple holding hands.
Step 3: people try to goad people who are getting performatively angry at couple holding hands to get angry so they can laugh at them
Step 4: people are annoyed at new bunch of people, plus whoever they were annoyed at in the first place. Social warming, by royal appointment.
Glimpses of the tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• At the end of August, Stable Diffusion was an open source project which you could install on your Mac, but you’d need various command-line magic skills. Now, less than two weeks later, there’s Diffusion Bee, which is a simple downloadable app for M1 and M2 Macs (16GB RAM or more recommended). Once installed, on the first run it downloads 4.7GB of data. It can’t yet do Stable Diffusion’s img2img function (which I think “improves” images you give it), but the txt2img—text to image—function works fine.
What’s clear is that it’s still bad at hands and complete animals. Here’s what it produced for “roger federer holds the trophy for winning the tennis title at Wimbledon”:
• You can find out whether you (or someone, or something, else) has been used to train an AI model: Have I Been Trained is here for you, which lets you search the 5.8 billion images used to train popular AI art models. Here’s what it finds has gone in to generate things like the Roger Federer picture.
• AI-generated photos of historical figures, based on pictures and/or statues. Julius Caesar, Mona Lisa, Caligula, Henry VIII, Napoleon, Anne of Cleves, Mary Tudor, Nefertiti, Alexander the Great. They’re all very impressive (Nefertiti is stunning). Caesar looks like a vicious hedge fund manager; Alexander, like a precocious racing driver; Napoleon seems to be the bloke who serves you steak frites in that Paris restaurant you like.
• If there are any journalists reading, the LSE has a blogpost about “Ten things you should know about AI in journalism”. A lot of it feels like the sort of article you might have read 15 (and certainly 10) years ago about “Ten things you should know about data in journalism”, which in turn implies that in ten years this stuff is going to be absolutely everywhere in newsrooms. Something to ponder.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.