We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time.
* I suppose the GPT-4o sycophancy/AI psychosis crisis was a preview, but that was just blunt “engagement” tuning.
Don’t count out Zuckerberg, he’s very good at being a villain.
We tend to forget that both, the social and the media part, input and output, are interpersonal, first.
Ad targeting doesn't need improvement. The incentives offered to people with an adverse attitude towards Ads are shit. Think of incentives as having effects and side effects. It's about intent. Free TV had that down ages ago. It was awesome. But they fucked market entry and whole population segments, more or less conservative and/or liberal as well as more or less authentic sub-cultural patchworks were left unserved.
That wasn't even nonsense! MTV, suddenly going away? Uhm, guys, I only get Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... beep boop bop beep boop bop beep... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP... (pause) ...brr-ding... brr-ding... Krrrrrrrrrrr-shhhhhhhhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeee-awwwwwwwww-eeeeeeeeeee... Bong-bong-bong... KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (click).
Silence ...
around here, and then a lot of popups, ads, .... you know, the wild wild west of internet history ...
We talked TV on the street and in school. And Video games. Now Netflix et al and your feed, too. Who's roofs is most of that media industrial complex under?
Thinking Meta et al and their ads infrastructure and UX weighs as much as that of Free TV is falling for a rather simple Kansas City Shuffle.
"New", only now native media still doesn't interface as well with the brain and our emotional processing as TV and "The News" do. And won't until Neuralink et al get their interfaces all the way up your ... lobes.
Forget Zuckerberg et al and let them do their jobs. They don't need publicity, they need to filter for suitable test subjects, edge case pop segments whose needs & desires are yet to be fulfilled.
There's still a lot of people out there with something to put on the market but they can't because a little something is missing and nobody seems to know why ... something double long running on the news maybe?
We did. Pre-WW II ..., and afterwards, the old, everlasting Cold War (vs the new one). And there are self-emerging/self-organizing buckets of people who all pledged their allegiance to ideas and plans, works forever in progress and aggregating jobs and expanding industries. People with value and virtue systems, radicalized or called to some need-to-know duty. And the personal level was always covered by applied and philosophical psychology, cultural discourses, however progressively or decadently lead by public figures while peoples' desires were and still are shaped by interactions, social AND parasocial.
Shouldn't we stop wondering whether they have enough time, now that several hundreds of thousands of hours of work already done and work yet to get done are neatly compressed into a few instants?
AI will always be "two" things:
- a search engine that misses less and less and is just waiting for you to increase your processing power - a tool to cope with your laziness or disability by deferring or skipping intervals of learning curves and/or biomechanics - an evergrowing compendium of abstractions and intents, formalized or not, by humans, for humans, off humans (even when it's AI)
but that's irrelevant ... because humans will always be only "two" things, as well.
So, ... the threat vector remains unchanged, however AI, accessibility and skill will amplify or change the landscape: casually, no, leisurely ignorant bystanders.
> 59% of videos served to a new TikTok account’s For You page were AI slop
97% of videos under the #cartoonkids hashtag were AI slop
57.4% of TikToks in the Kids category were AI slop
Source: https://www.kapwing.com/resources/the-tiktok-ai-slop-report
Common misconception. We won't kill the planet even if we tried to. Wed make it too hard to sustain billions of humans, sure. But they are very different things
Earth has been a rich, life sustaining planet in far hotter conditions then anything we are projected to take it to.
We can kill billions of ourselves, but short of ww3 earth will crack on just fine.
Social media emotional hot-takes dont match the numbers.
We are still screwed though.
You'd do as well to hope that people wake up and stop opening the damned sites
my mother recently got served a quite... disturbing video on Facebook. I won't get into details of the vid. what I can tell is that she was so dazed that she didn't even immediately understand me when I asked her, "delete Facebook and Instagram immediately or else they will think you like it and will serve you more." she kept replaying this video in her head. in a moment, I thought I wouldn't make her snap out.
for context, she is a damned Reels addict with war-induced traumas. (Ukrainian here.) she agreed to delete Facebook but decided to keep Instagram. we frequently pick bones about her sending stupid Reels and me hating them with passion. and every time I said "delete Instagram and your life will go up," she brought up scandals until she talked to a therapist.
EDIT: to quote a sibling comment, this is, indeed, like dealing with a drug addict.
Sometimes endnotes reference other endnotes and you have to wait until the point in the text, e.g. endnote 304 is referenced from earlier endnotes than it occurs in the text (rather late in the book) and you just have to wait until endnote 304 is read to find out what it is. that's a bit of a disadvantage, but infinite jest is the kind of book that you really need to read multiple times in order to get it anyways.
And yes, I agree. Im on my second read through now. The first time I skipped the first ~50 end notes. I thought the creator of infinite jest was a mystery, same with Joelles deformity (“was she really mangled or not— maybe we find out at the end!”). Oh, those two things are spelled out clearly in early end notes..
Any DFW fans here want to conjecture as to what “atemporal” jazz Pemulis listens to? I was thinking maybe some albert manglesdorf or perhaps ornette coleman..
There is nothing at all social about the latest generation like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
https://medium.com/@darth.mark.23/the-moloch-dilemma-how-gam...