How social media helped drive mayhem in Brazil
Plus: Intellectual Challenge as a luxury good in an AI world / Poe’s The Raven x Transformer Neural Networks / Zork x Google Imagen
Another tried-and-failed farright coup organized by strategically riling up people on socmed, largely on Telegram. How long until one of these doesn't fail? The utopian and anachronistic positions of net activism on the anonymous internet stuck in the 90s needs to be updated pronto.
Here’s a short piece i wrote on Piqd (in german):
Wie soziale Medien den versuchten Coup in Brasilien anfeuerten
Gestern stürmten rechtsextreme Kräfte und Anhänger des ehemaligen Präsidenten Jair Bolsonaro mehrere Regierungsgebäude in einer "Festa da Selma" getauften "war cry party".
Die Parallelen zum Sturm des Capitols am 6. Januar 2022 sind erschreckend, von Vorwürfen der Wahlfälschung bis zur Organisation eines "Liberty Caravans", und nicht überraschend wurde der versuchte Coup von rechten Influencern aus der Trump-Ära angeheizt.
Die Washington Post hat sich mit der Rolle sozialer Medien bei den Ausschreitungen auseinandergesetzt: Wie bereits beim Sturm auf das Capitol spielte der anonyme Chat-Service Telegram eine zentrale Rolle bei der Koordination des Coup-Versuchs, was die Debatte um anonyme Services erneut anheizen dürfte.
Ich weiß, dass Anonymität von Netzaktivisten aus guten Gründen für sakrosankt gilt und manche Aktivisten sprechen von einem Menschenrecht auf Anonymität. Ich denke aber auch, dass diese utopischen Ideale, die noch auf Ideen begründet sind, die man unter anderem in John Perry Barlows Erklärung des Unabhängigkeit des Cyberspace nachlesen kann, veraltet sind. Es ist Zeit, anzuerkennen, dass diese Ideale an der Realität der menschlichen Psyche gescheitert sind.
update 10.1. Ryan Broderick has a very good piece on the insurrection:
Intellectual Challenge as a luxury good in an AI world
In 2107, masses are fed generative ai-mimiced culture based on the past, while the rich enjoy "social critique" written by humans. It will be cheap to visit generative Matrix worlds that read your thoughts and react to (not) every wish. A generative AI-genie in a headset, where Neo is a black panther and all machines wear furry costumes from the 21st century. 5 bucks per hour, your neuro privacy will surely be respected.
Meanwhile the rich enjoy intellectual challenge as a luxury good, reading handpicked social critique written by human thought leaders embedded in fine art and movies played by real actors, and they never wear a headset.
In this AI-Brave New World the masses are fed what they want until they starve of monoculture and intellectual malnutrition, and the rich keep up an illusion of intellectual freedom with art that surely will contain harsh critiques of the intellectual hell we created for society, but what can you do?
It's technological progress, after all, and everybody is entitled to their own plato cave, including the rich and their bastardized version of art that bites.
Links and Thoughts
The Ur-Textadventure has been updated: AdventurImagen - Zork meets Google's Imagen generative imagery
Poe’s The Raven x Transformer Neural Networks plus the modifyer prompt “try very, very hard” yields impressive results. “Quoth the net ‘the truth is boring!’” is accidental synthetic brillance and so, so true on so, so many levels.
Generative AI reduced workload for this game dev to roughly a third. I've seen voices that doubt the productivity surge for gaming assets, but keep in mind that the gaming industry is bigger than movies and employees already work in abysmal conditions.
I have zero doubt that studios will implement any tech that can reduce workload and rise productivity of their creative teams, with the consequence of reducing the workforce. And if only to stay competetive.
The real question here is: How do we distribute wealth that is generated by exploiting societal achievements and the work of the past? And do we name it basic income or something else? (Twitter)"If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it." (Seth Godin, Attention, trust and GPT3) //
Same is true for gaming assets, or coloful dragon pictures, or meaningless background music. Creators pointing at bad hands in Midjourney illus are just as clever as coachmen in the 19th century pointing at fragile motor vehicles that break down and need gasoline and only can drive for 10 minutes. There are letdowns in generative AI that will not be easily fixed: The unability for precision, the stochastic nature, is a good start.
Production ready Logos are another, because they need to be scalable, and while AI can produce SVG-paths, they are not precise enough. What I've seen for "AI generated logos" up till now is a joke, these are merely colorful icons that you can use as a socmed avatar or a button on your phone, but not much else, but that's not a logo, which has to work as a 50ft print for outfoor advertising and a 2mm wide print on a promotional pen. AI also won't be able to put out usable infographics (that are not standardized) for a long time. But meaningless pulp fantasy illus that are nice to look at on a book cover? That's gone.In that same vein: Artist banned, told to "find a different style" since his style is too similar to AI-made art.
Here’s a pair of some beautiful AI-generated sneakers. If i were that swoosh company, i'd train a CKPT on my new sneakers and release an image generator that puts out promotional imaginary of my product for free. Then i'd watch in awe as 4chan hijacks the thing and produces nazi sneakers en masse by jailbreaking my safety measures. (Twitter)
Social Media connections are not parasocial. Parasociality describes the non-connection between e.g. a fan and a pop singer. They don't communicate, there is no connection at all, its just a fan having intense feels about the model of a person in their head that mimics sociality. Social Media connections are real, we communicate *with each other* and this is not *para*social. These may be weak social ties, but they exist. This is the real world, not some electronically produced magic kingdom. (Twitter)
This year, a writer with aphantasia will sit down and generate a story with midjourney and then write about the stuff she can suddenly see. (Twitter)