A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.
Or a Rupert Murdock. Someone capable with a long term strategy
Peter Thiel would be pretty scary.
Peter Thiel would be pretty scary.
Isn't Thiel running it now?
Dat's da joke
Yeah, Thiel is, at the very least, almost certainly advising current ownership.
Might need to change the thread title to something more apocalyptic as the technology singularity is upon us:
Building a virtual machine inside ChatbotGPT
Do not believe what your eyes tell you, it is all a dream. Sleep.
Nah, I feel like "The Internet Was a Mistake" covers it.
But we are getting just the dumbest Cyberpunk dystopia.
So not only do we get to suffer, we get to be mad about how stupid it is with every new facet of it.
Elon Musk’s Twitter will create a toxic ripple effect across social media
Much has been written about Elon Musk’s reckless moves to dismantle the system Twitter built to keep its platform safe, threatening to turn it into precisely the kind of “hellscape” that he vowed to avoid. But the concern actually stretches further, affecting much larger platforms with a larger influence on the public debate.
For years, Twitter has played an outsize role in setting the standards for social media as a whole, creating competition among tech companies to make their platforms safe. Twitter is far smaller than other tech companies; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once boasted that his company spends more on safety than Twitter’s annual revenue. But the platform has often been the first mover on significant policy changes with real-world impacts, effectively creating a floor for the industry as a whole.
By taking the first step, Twitter put pressure on other, larger platforms like Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Facebook to follow suit and provided them with critical political cover to make policy changes that were contentious with those affected. For example, Twitter led the way when it cracked down on hundreds of thousands of accounts pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory in July 2020, saying it had the “potential to lead to offline harm.” Facebook announced similar action in August of that year, followed by YouTube.
Twitter was the first to fact-check Donald Trump, attaching context labels to the then-president’s misleading claims about mail-in ballots. Zuckerberg initially bristled at the idea of fact-checking Trump, but he later reversed course amid intense criticism. Twitter also led the way on targeting COVID-19 vaccine misinformation with labels and a strike system. Weeks later, Facebook announced a similar labeling system, and YouTube eventually followed suit as well.
After Facebook and Twitter temporarily suspended Trump, following the January 6 insurrection, Twitter announced on January 8 that it would permanently ban Trump. YouTube suspended Trump a few days later. Facebook, which initially said it would bar Trump until the end of his term on January 20, 2021, ultimately decided in June 2021 that the suspension would last at least two years.
Twitter wasn’t always effective in enforcing its policy changes, and many users faced hate speech and harassment in the pre-Musk era. But the company nevertheless wrestled with the major issues and often set the standard in how the platforms should act on big, politically fraught issues. With Twitter now reversing course under Musk, it’s unclear if Facebook and Google will feel the pressure to make those tough decisions on their own.
The outlines of Musk’s agenda at Twitter have become increasingly clear in recent weeks, including his intention to reinstate banned accounts, something he has already done with Trump. (The former president says he has no interest in returning to Twitter and plans to stick with his Truth Social platform, though it’s not clear how long that will last.) Musk, who previously criticized Twitter as having a “strong left-wing bias,” has also shredded any sense that Twitter is a politically neutral platform, urging Americans to vote for a Republican Congress and tweeting that he would back Ron DeSantis for president in 2024. He’s also undoing the platform’s efforts to combat dangerous COVID-19 misinformation, announcing that the company will no longer be enforcing those policies.
These moves—combined with reports that racist troll activity has surged on Twitter since Musk took the helm—make it unlikely that Twitter will continue to be a leading voice on content moderation. In fact, Twitter appears to be headed in the opposite direction entirely, becoming a new model of an anything-goes platform like 4Chan, regardless of the real-world impacts.
A.I. Is Evolving Too Fast To Process
A.I. content has fully invaded our feeds and, as more of these services launch and turn out to be actually sort of good, I’ve found that our ability to talk about these tools is breaking down and getting fuzzier. In fact, even keeping up with what these services are and how people are using them has become pretty difficult.
If we’re talking about A.I. art, the big three are DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. As for video, the most exciting is Luma AI’s neural radiance field (NeRF) app. If we’re talking about text A.I., the newest and most impressive is ChatGPT, which was created by OpenAI, the same company that made DALL-E 2. And, as for the services that turn your own photos into A.I. art, Midjourney can do it, but Lensa, created by Prisma Labs, and a Chinese app called Different Dimension Me, which was created by Tencent, have also become super popular recently. Lensa costs money and generates a pack of avatars after scanning photos on your camera roll. Different Dimension Me specializes in turning a singular photo into an anime character.
I’ve heard a bunch of different frameworks for thinking about the current A.I. explosion. The most common is the “Photoshop argument,” which dismisses very real concerns about A.I. art by claiming that we’re just treating generative A.I. the way we treated digital art programs 20 years ago. (For the few zoomers that might be reading this, in high school, I had to ask for permission to use Adobe apps to complete my final project in art class because, at the time, Photoshop and similar programs were not allowed.) I don’t think this is quite right.
I also recently heard what I’ll call the “Napster argument”. While reporting a Fast Company piece this month, technologist Andy Baio told me he thinks it’s possible that the larger A.I. firms end up being dragged into court and are forced to show exactly what content was in the data set that trained their A.I. As Baio explained, this wouldn’t kill the smaller world of A.I. copyright infringement, but it would make the bigger A.I. companies have to keep their data above board. I imagine A.I. lawsuits would also lead to more tools like Luma or Lensa, that ask users to provide their own data to scan. This argument’s logical endpoint would also be “Spotify, but for A.I. data,” which is as troubling as it is interesting to consider.
The A.I. framework I subscribe to the most at the moment, though, is what I’m going to nickname the “smartphone argument,” which I think ultimately boils everything down to a question of access. Basically, technology kind of sucks when it’s still only being used by early adopters. But as it becomes less prohibitively expensive, we start to actually learn how to use it. That increased access, however, tends to dovetail with — both real and imagined — moral panics about the technology. When smartphones were only for rich people, they were a revolution in computing and a status symbol. Ten years later, after low-cost mobile devices had spread around the world, suddenly you get the cable news segments with folks panicking about privacy, mob violence, and misinformation, while CEOs and influencers are bragging about raising their children phone-free. Even though the people who have gone most insane thanks to their smartphones are, as we’re currently learning, rich white guys who would pay $44 billion dollars to own Twitter! The last nine months of A.I. have felt like a speedrun of the last 15. And, similarly, I think I trust the guys running A.I. companies way less than I trust an average user putting a fun idea for a meme into Midjourney.
ChatGPT proves AI is finally mainstream — and things are only going to get weirder
There’s a concept in AI that I’m particularly fond of that I think helps explain what’s happening. It’s called “capability overhang” and refers to the hidden capacities of AI: skills and aptitudes latent within systems that researchers haven’t even begun to investigate yet. You might have heard before that AI models are “black boxes” — that they’re so huge and complex that we don’t fully understand how they operate or come to specific conclusions. This is broadly true and is what creates this overhang.
“Today’s models are far more capable than we think, and our techniques available for exploring [them] are very juvenile,” is how AI policy expert Jack Clark described the concept in a recent edition of his newsletter. “What about all the capabilities we don’t know about because we haven’t thought to test for them?”
Capability overhang is a technical term, but it also perfectly describes what’s happening right now as AI enters the public domain. For years, researchers have been on a tear, pumping out new models faster than they can be commercialized. But in 2022, a glut of new apps and programs have suddenly made these skills available to a general audience, and in 2023, as we continue scaling this new territory, things will start changing — fast.
Watching the NYT strike, was musing on what Silicon Valley would look like if there were a shred of solidarity amongst tech staff. How quickly would Elon have gotten on his knees if the oar-pullers collectively said, "No."
Anyone know how to get past the Economist's firewall? Cuz I'd really like to read this article:
Japanese Manga is being eclipsed by Korean webtoons
Lee hyun-seok grew up in South Korea addicted to Japanese manga series such as “Dragon Ball” and “Slam Dunk”. As soon as he could, he emigrated to Tokyo to build a successful career as a manga artist and editor. Then in the early 2000s came “webtoons”, a South Korean cartoon innovation optimised for smartphones. Mr Lee was at first unimpressed. Compared with manga’s inventive graphic styles and sophisticated plots, he found webtoons crude and superficial. “I thought: ‘Anybody can make this’.”
Yet Japanese manga is being eclipsed by Korean webtoons. Last year the manga print market shrank by 2.3% to ¥265bn ($1.9bn). The size of the global webtoons market was meanwhile valued at $3.7bn—and projected to reach $56bn by 2030. Manga is gravitating to digital slowly, in part because it is still designed for print, so awkward to read on smartphones. The letters tend to be too small and the way the panels are laid out requires constant zooming in and out. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, Mr Lee abandoned manga for the webtoon industry in 2014.
Anyone know how to get past the Economist's firewall? Cuz I'd really like to read this article:
If you use iOS there’s a browser extension called AntiPaywall that has yet to fail me. I copied the whole article here for you though:
Dec 8th 2022 | TOKYO
Lee hyun-seok grew up in South Korea addicted to Japanese manga series such as “Dragon Ball” and “Slam Dunk”. As soon as he could, he emigrated to Tokyo to build a successful career as a manga artist and editor. Then in the early 2000s came “webtoons”, a South Korean cartoon innovation optimised for smartphones. Mr Lee was at first unimpressed. Compared with manga’s inventive graphic styles and sophisticated plots, he found webtoons crude and superficial. “I thought: ‘Anybody can make this’.”
Yet Japanese manga is being eclipsed by Korean webtoons. Last year the manga print market shrank by 2.3% to ¥265bn ($1.9bn). The size of the global webtoons market was meanwhile valued at $3.7bn—and projected to reach $56bn by 2030. Manga is gravitating to digital slowly, in part because it is still designed for print, so awkward to read on smartphones. The letters tend to be too small and the way the panels are laid out requires constant zooming in and out. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, Mr Lee abandoned manga for the webtoon industry in 2014.
Though webtoons such as “Itaewon Class” and “Solo Levelling” have become popular among Japanese consumers, most Japanese publishers have stuck doggedly to manga. “The Japanese industry is very conservative,” sighs Mr Lee. “There’s a strong belief that it’s better to stick with precedent.” The manga industry’s business model, in which stories are first published in weekly magazines and then in books, has hardly changed since the 1960s.
Their format is also sacrosanct. Japanese manga hew to unique templates which require special knowledge of readers, such as the order in which panels must be read. “The only people who know how to read manga are Japanese, Koreans and geeks across the world,” says Iwamoto Keita, who runs a cartoon studio. Webtoons have grown so fast, in part, because they can be read more easily and intuitively.
It is tempting to see the way manga traditionalists are ceding the global cartoon market to South Korean innovators as symbolic of a broader malaise: the sluggishness and introspection of too many Japanese firms. Other recent South Korean exports, such as the Netflix sensation “Squid Game” and bts, a boy band, have taken the world by storm thanks to the same combination of innovation and smart marketing behind webtoons. Meanwhile, the “Cool Japan” strategy of the government in Tokyo, intended to emulate that Korean success, has been a flop. Having run up huge losses, it may soon be abandoned.
And yet, by sticking to what it does best, the manga industry has at least maintained its strengths. Its complicated layouts can convey sophisticated narratives. And many manga are artistic wonders, with designs manipulated at the millimetre level. Witness the intricate ink drawings in “Vagabond”, an epic martial-arts series, or the surrealist illustrations of “Berserk”, a medieval fantasy. By contrast, complex plots with dramatic twists are hard to convey in webtoons, which can display only a limited number of words. “I doubt webtoons would ever trump manga in terms of quality,” says Mr Iwamoto.
With its strong stories and craftsmanship, manga maintains a loyal domestic audience, which gives publishers little motivation to innovate or change. Growth in their core business may be flagging; yet they can still find opportunities to boost revenues through anime adaptations, or by collaborating with businesses that create manga-themed merchandise. Shueisha, the publisher that produced “Demon Slayer”, a recent hit manga and anime, had record sales in 2021. “There’s not much of a sense of crisis among Japanese publishers,” observes Nakayama Atsuo, an entertainment-industry expert.
Some still fret about the future. Japan’s manga fans are, like all its population, ageing. The average reader of the Weekly Shonen Magazine, a manga anthology for children (shonen means “young boy”) launched in 1959, is now over 30. “Manga could end up as old people’s culture,” warns Mr Lee. “Children these days are scrolling through webtoons on their smartphones. Why not make something that suits their taste?”
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Manga v webtoons"
Thanks ruhk!
This gets to a thing about content creation, especially RE: comics that blows my mind these days, which is that basically everyone young gets their comics via mobile now, while I am still crushingly "desktop plz and thank you."
In unrelated news, I ended up on "Elon Musk is an actor and space is fake" Twitter today, which is exactly as amazing as you think.
In unrelated news, I ended up on "Elon Musk is an actor and space is fake" Twitter today, which is exactly as amazing as you think.
Oh, great. Dude apparently lives in my state. Might as well call us the Florida of the North.
Might as well call us the Florida of the North.
Pretty sure people have been doing that for a while.
I thought Michigan was the Florida of the North.
Definitely FL of the north or Gilead...
How TikTok warped the fame game in 2022
In the mid-2010s, there was a running joke about YouTube: that you were never more than a few recommendations away from a conspiracy theory. Whether you were watching music videos, Zoella, or prankster compilations, it seemed the algorithm was constantly nudging even those with the most benign search history toward extremist content. Though it was never unequivocally proven – in part, due to most platforms’ reticence to share how their algorithms work – independent research pointed towards real truth in the idea. YouTube was widely credited for the meteoric rise of a whole class of unsavoury figures, allowing them to become famous online at a disproportionately rapid rate, many of them (Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones) becoming household names.
The YouTube algorithm led to global recognition of the power of unchecked virality, and the power of an algorithm to reward ordinary people with this unique, often societally-damaging type of fame. In New Zealand following the Christchurch shooting, in the US Congress, and even in YouTube’s own internal trials in the US and the UK, the dangers were debated at the highest levels of private and public institutions. Apparently acknowledging the problem, YouTube has since tweaked its algorithm and has effectively eradicated this phenomenon on its own site. However, despite the lessons learned, a new, much more powerful form has been on the rise in 2022 – TikTok, where the fame cycle has been turbo-charged to literal overnight speeds.
It’s hard to overstate how easy it is to game TikTok’s algorithm to go viral. Though it is still not verified how exactly every element of the notorious tool works, we do know some basics: it looks for people uploading similar types of content – for example, a swell of users uploading the same dance routine, skit, or lip sync – and when it sees that number grow, it will look to promote it to a wider audience, presuming that the quickly increasing number of uploads means a video will be of broader interest to other users. The speed with which clips of trends can spread is also aided by the app’s relative simplicity – you will likely watch more than 100 videos in an hour on TikTok compared to single-digit numbers on YouTube, giving TikTok more information about what you want to watch in a narrow set of time.
While we once considered YouTube’s algorithm chillingly speedy, this phenomenon on TikTok is a comparative Slip ’n Slide, where fame is readily available to anyone with a few spare minutes and a willingness to adhere to the algorithm’s pattern. Whereas on other platforms, the guidance for how to get famous or go viral has always advised a long-game strategy of consistency over several months (or even years), the guidance on achieving TikTok status is farcically simple, with countless step-by-step guides on how to become an influencer in the space of a few weeks – some even successfully demonstrating how to get famous in 10 minutes. This fame may not be permanent, and may only be confined to a single video, but it is far easier for your post to reach a wider audience on TikTok than any other platform in the world.
And youtube's algorithm tweaks have done little to mothing to boot.
Why Conservatives Invented a ‘Right to Post’
The insistence that social-media companies should not be allowed to make editorial decisions about what is welcome on their platforms, that it violated the Constitution for a publisher to reject a story it saw as unreliable, that a private company is obligated to let you use its platform to hurl racist slurs at strangers from behind the safety of a screen—this understanding reflects belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.
So if I start a Twitter account just to post dick-pics, Twitter is obligated by the First Amendment to keep those photos online and available to all, yes?
What if they're Trump dick-pics? What if they're Elon dick-pics? Is there a non-partisan clear code regulating this?
Oh please. If there's anything we know about our thin-skinned overclass, it's that "Rules for thee, nein for me."
Thus, Alex Jones is verboten because Herr Elon has experienced the pain of a dead child, whilst Herr Elon has not experienced other types of pain, so those remain open to interpretation.
Welcome to your Estates System, 21st-Century Edition.
Best to ingratiate oneself to Ubermensch Elon and find where one's...identity...overlaps with ones He also holds to. In this way, He may deign to accept one into His pantheon.
Art thou a coder?
Or a self-styled "free-thinker?"
Or ultra-wealthy?
Or a believer in "The Meritocracy?"
Or a space aficionado?
Perhaps one cares about tech and/or have aspirations to "save" others?
These are all identities (don't ever use that word!) His Highness is predisposed to listen to.
Prederick wrote:Anyone know how to get past the Economist's firewall? Cuz I'd really like to read this article:
If you use iOS there’s a browser extension called AntiPaywall that has yet to fail me.
If you're using Firefox on desktop (and everyone f**kin should be!), the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension will do the job.
Why Conservatives Invented a ‘Right to Post’
The insistence that social-media companies should not be allowed to make editorial decisions about what is welcome on their platforms, that it violated the Constitution for a publisher to reject a story it saw as unreliable, that a private company is obligated to let you use its platform to hurl racist slurs at strangers from behind the safety of a screen—this understanding reflects belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.
It's not new, so much as a logical extension of the inalienable right of Christian conservatives to be assholes to anyone anytime with no consequences.
Looking at his response to today's obviously-cribbed-from-the-Babylon-Bee joke he told, again, I think it's just insanely obvious that this is a grudge stemming from the fact that he blames the "Marxists" for his daughter turning out to be trans and hating his guts.
Grimes dating Chelsea Manning probably didn't help.
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