Deep fake scam calls at work? Great. I already have to educate people that the CEO is not texting them for emergency gift cards. Now I have a new thing to worry about.
I was reading some good advice to counter this such as asking them to interact with their environment, like picking something up, to see if you can break the filter. Presumably, they would be holding still as much as possible to maintain the illusion.
I once almost fell for the gift card thing (several years ago) only because it is very much something my former CEO would do, and at the time, I'd never heard of it being a scam.
I'm a creative for an ad agency that shall remain nameless on an automotive account that will also remain nameless and I can tell you that on two of my last three campaigns, a lot of the digital content was entirely animated with unity. We put disclaimers on the spots, but people watching at home canNOT tell the difference. It's genuinely unsettling and it feels SUPER icky to run stuff that people can tell isn't real.
Internally, we're having a pretty big battle about how far we can take the AI generated crap. So far, (thankfully) we're only allowed to use it in client decks, but some people are pushing really hard to start using it to make public facing ads.
As a now retired photographer, my heart goes out to you involved in the creative industries. I watched my business disappear as people refused to pay for real photography and wanted to use their mobiles instead. Now, we hardly need a camera, just install PhotoShop and as you say, spend hours writing a script for AI to do its worst/best. So for fun and my sanity, I’m going backwards and using film and a friend’s darkroom!
I gave up an illustrious photography career in 2000. Digital was just starting. More and more creatives were finding images in stock libraries and then wanting me to recreate those images. Then digital cameras made photography accessible to everyone and the market started to collapse. I can't imagine what it must be like now, nearly 25 years later.
Same Tony! I spent my whole adult life working photography as a craft. Decades of work. So many thousands on equipment, just hand over fist. Time spent in classes and seminars. All replaced by an app. Obsolete.
I’m in a similar situation, but my creative director is not beyond using AI for final products as well unfortunately.
It’s been so disheartening seeing my job as art director go from actually being creative to simply spending mind-numbing days trying to write the right prompt to get the perfect image he sees in his head 😭
Thanks for sharing this, Mac. I'm really glad to hear it's a battle at least (although obviously it's also all steam ahead). I wish there was a way we could catch people up with digital literacy; not sure how the kids are faring in this brave new world. Fuck.
I hate generative AI. It's poisoned the internet, whether in visual or written form. Outing myself here - unless it's really obvious like most of the examples you've posted, I sometimes find it frustratingly difficult to notice. I can *usually* tell when photographs are faked, but I find it a lot harder with art. Sometimes my brain just skips the small details and smooths out some of the stuff that doesn't make sense unless I really stop to check. It's always done it with everything, since well before AI. If I'm on my phone with its little screen, which is the main way I experience the internet nowadays, sometimes I really just can't see the little details unless I'm zooming in on purpose. I always feel like I've been taken for a fool if I don't notice it right away. Plus, who wants to look at *every* image they see through the lens of 'is this real'? That's exhausting. I hate that AI has done that to us. I hate it so much.
Ugh - this bit: "Sometimes my brain just skips the small details and smooths out some of the stuff that doesn't make sense."
I think that's at the heart of it all - we're just doing this with *everything*, too! A little fact seems "off" in a piece? We just quickly move on. I guess we've always had a tendency to do this, but the fakery has just increase to such a giant level it makes me very, very freaked out for society.
That's how brains work. We build a mental model of what is going on around us, and respond to the model. We focus more attention on what we've already decided is important.
The art of being a scientist is to fight this stuff - to make sure what we see, what we understand is what is actually there, and it's really fk'n hard.
I learned this stuff when I was working in road safety. "Looked but did not see" was a specific code to describe the cause of a crash. Think about that next time you're driving - or perhaps don't, and look twice for that kid on a bike you could have sworn wasn't there a second ago.
In a tiny way, it would be good if it raised our skepticism and increased/widened its application, but not if it makes it hard to trust meatspace people and we have to start proving we are real in every interaction that isn't face to face.
So, I completely relate with this feeling of meltdown/overwhelm at seeing people become completely detached from reality and feeling like you're shouting into the void "Am I the only one seeing this!!"
I know you mentioned religion near the end, and kind of categorized it differently, and perhaps it is, but I can't help but think for myself at least, and perhaps for you too, if our outsized (?) emotional reaction to all this is related to our religious upbringing and then detachment from it. I wonder if, we grew up immersed in a set of objectively wild beliefs, that felt very real because kids raised believing in talking snakes and demons and mind-reading preachers will believe what the grown ups tell them. And we managed to leave behind those beliefs by looking to evidence based thinking and following that path.. untangling our worldview from the web of beliefs we were raised in, only then to face a new world where we see, AGAIN, huge swaths of people believing in incredulous things that we can see with our own two eyes are *unbelievable*, whether it's as insubstantial as crab-children or as dangerous as "They stole the election!" .. And to be faced with all these people believing an alternate reality triggers something deep inside us. Some fundamental fear that we're the ones that are wrong. Even though on a logical level we can SEE the 7 toed monsters, on an emotional level, having these huge groups of primates collectively believe in an alternate reality freaks my brain right out. Maybe pokemon really are demons, maybe evolution really is a atheistic conspiratorial collusion by the scientists of the world, maybe Trump really did win and is an altruistic saint. Obviously not, but some younger scared-of-going-to-hell for not believing the exactly right thing part of me? I think that's where the overwhelming emotion jumps out from. I think, maybe. You're not the only one learning to figure out emotions in therapy as a full grown adult..
Yes. The ‘scared-of-going-to-hell’ feeling is ever present. It’s hard to dismantle it when your childhood was immersed in simply taking it as fact. This feeling feeds the need to be ‘right’ and therefore your behaviour. It’s tiring interrupting the cycle.
Well religious programming is a form of “artificial”, I hesitate to say intelligence, maybe false social construct would be better. And that programming still stays with me at the age of 68 and after decades as a scientist. I know intellectually that hell doesn’t exist, it’s a medieval trope, but in the dead of night the “scared of going to hell stuff” re-emerges. Maybe I’d better finish reading, “The Scarlet Letter”, which maybe contributing!
I would hope most people thought "Cute!", liked it and moved on with their day, but that's probably a tad optimistic.
I was listening to a podcast (Behind the Bastards, which I wholeheartedly recommend) about how the push for AI in Silicon Valley has slowly become more cult-like, almost resembling a religion. One major investor even put out a literal manifesto claiming AI regulation would be a "form of murder" given how many lives it could ultimately save.
Robert Evans (the host of Behind the Bastards) also wrote an article about this in Rolling Stone, for anybody interested in reading:
I shared this on my Instagram last night despairing that half the world is about to vote this year but can’t tell what is real. A former colleague shared that she is working with Digital Action (www.digitalaction.co) who are working on digital threats to democracy and human rights. Just knowing people are trying to fight back made me feel a little bit better, so I’d thought I’d share.
"my emotions all involved me thrusting my head into wall repeatedly, the overwhelming reality that we’re all fucking doomed felt in every fibre of my body"
this was the emotion i felt about 2.5 years ago that led me to shut off my facebook. I don't know how to emotionally deal with it and it's only getting worse with more technology and it's deeply influencing so many important things.
This is the exact parallel to my comment regarding Humankind, and why Rutger Bregman determined he was actually much better off when *not* following the news.
I stopped watching the news regularly for that reason too. Haven’t taken the step of no fb or instagram yet but it’s becoming a more and more attractive step.
yes! i still follow some things (like here!) but I make a very conscious decision to curate my inputs. never anything from 24 hour news cycle channels or sites, mostly local indie journalists and several misinfo/disinfo fighting journalists. i try to curate to actionable things, and only when I have the space for it, but still want to have some info about what's going on.
I think for me more problematic is due to all this fake content it drives people further and further away from recognition of reality with people saying images of actual tragedies are faked. Then there is the very real possibility that images will be faked by governments or their agents to get us to support their actions or causes. No longer reliant on just claiming propaganda about events they could use AI to create the narrative they want to share. And while today we can spot the mistakes I feel a time is coming when we will no longer be able to.
i feel like as gen z we have built up a sort of sixth sense in spotting AI content. it emerged around us and in the spaces online that we populate. we can tell when a post on reddit is a repost of another post from a few years ago, we can tell when the video essay we are watching on youtube was written even partially by an AI. it’s a new predator in the spaces we occupy and we are slowly learning to hunt it.
So there's a fun little 'theory' - I hesitate to give it that much credit yet - that the large majority of social media posts are just algorithms doing algorithmic things to each other, and that the percentage of things that you interact with on a daily basis that's generated by humans for other humans is a diminishing fraction of a fraction of all the 'content' out there. It's called the Dead Internet Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
This post by known human David Farrier sends chills down my spine, as I realize that it may very well become true - a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy fueled by ad revenue.
Oh, I very much subscribe to that theory. It's so apparent on X at the moment - it's just bots. A world of bots. The clutter is overwhelming and has pretty much made the service pointless.
In the book Humankind, Rutger Bregman says that he stopped watching the news because it just wasn't valuable or worth it to him, and that in doing so he became more connected to the people around him and the reality of what is truly happening rather than the un-reality and fear being infused through watching those news reports. (It's a great book if you haven't read it.) It sounds like everything in the sphere of "social media" content should be added to that, but the challenge is that there are marketing people who want to give money to those who have a large "reach", and so these people are encouraged to do whatever they can to gain visibility so those marketers will throw money at them.
I revel in my ignorance of the "meme of the day", the next "hot post on [pick your favorite social media platform]", and the flippant "scandal of the day", because none of those things are actually important or relevant to me and I have better things to do with my time. And I'm someone that works deep, deep within technology and online systems and has for many years.
I have that book and I am going to read it - have been meaning to for about a year now. I get the idea of unplugging from the news - but also I feel there is such a privilege to be able to "turn off" the rest of the world in 2024.
I mean, ideally we should all be living in a cave with 30 friends and family and no screens.
But - we're part of this much bigger thing.
My personal life would probably be better if I'd unplugged from being aware of this slaughter in Palestine - but I think it was vital I stared at it and didn't turn away.
I sound like I am getting very preachy here haha - I will read the book, and I certainly get that the news format is an issue in and of itself!
this is how i felt in the past, like all these things are truly terrible, I should know about them! but, you know, therapy...locus of control stuff and anxiety cycle stuff...does knowing about the terrible things do anything to help/stop them? sometimes yes, sometimes no, and examining that.
for me I had to pull back to where I can do some actionable things to try and mentally complete the anxiety about the thing and turn it into an action even if it's small thing that I can do (send a note to my representatives or some money at a charity or volunteer somewhere).
also the idea of prioritizing and picking one or two topics of activism so that you can create more impact vs trying to know about all the things which can dilute individual efforts and progress.
i feel like the right level of inputs is different for everybody and it comes down to being mindful and having intention around what we do with it and also being able to nope out (the opposite of what the algorithms want) and acknowledge that sometimes we are powerless on a thing and aren't bad for not engaging or focusing engagement very locally vs globally. i don't know. work in progress thoughts.
I still watch the news and absorb a lot of things that are happening around the world, but also with the understanding that they're presenting only a small slice of what is truly out there, exaggerate the shock value to try and have greater impact, and that there are additional untold stories. Humankind reminds you that there's a lot more positive in the world than you might assume from what is often being fed out to the public. I do generally ignore all of "social media", just because I've never found anything there that was valuable or useful to me. If I did then I'd likely just stick to those specific people/narrow areas, pruning those that just aren't persisting as a positive influence. Like here on Substack, I only have Webworm right now. I had one other that I tried for a while but they evolved from when I previously liked them and wasn't a good fit for me anymore, and I'm going to try out Stephen Fry from your recommendation and see if I enjoy his content.
Skynet doesn't need to drop bombs on us, just fatten us up with all these sorts of lies. Melt our brains and sow division and we will take care of each other for them! Humans are our own worst enemy.
To me this image is an easy spot as an AI image. The extra toes, the random handles & lines that I’m assuming are supposed to have been fishing rods, the impeccable balance of these “babies”, the fact that it clearly looks animated rather than a photograph & the improbability of the entire setup. It’s not the easy for everyone apparently and even if it is for me I just wish I didn’t have to do this. I don’t want to check every image for extra toes. I don’t want to have to question if the article I just read was written by Chat GPT or just a human that’s made several glaring errors. Please take this “AI” away. All I’ve seen it used for so far is evil. The whole concept of these “AIs” is just copyright infringement. The most common thing I’ve seen is using AI instead of real people to do the work in a bid to not have to pay creatives. Computers don’t ask for a salary. From there it just gets worse. Using AI to scam people and to do deepfake porn.
I would love for it to be used constructively, like connecting a person's bunch of symptoms and more quickly give them a diagnosis than humans have so far been able to do. In a more refined way, too, like to identify subtypes of a disease presentation in such a way to direct treatment more accurately. It could take the collective experiences of humans and work out which subsets of symptoms respond better or worse or not at all to which treatments, rather than the "See if this works for you. No? How about this?" approach currently used, which sees people suffer for years until they finally get the help they need.
But no, shitty emotionally manipulative pictures it is.
👍🏾The good news is... THIS IS A REAL THING! I listen to a variety of podcasts & also one contributor on a site I follow & they are talking about AI already being used to analyse genetic and/or medical data at incredible speeds& with the same or superior accuracy as highly qualified humans, & in some cases"seeing" things on x-rays the human eye has missed! 👀. People have already had lives saved & they are just training the technology ready to be implemented. This to me is what I want from technological advancement... not fake photos clickbait 🤔🤷🏻♀️
Yesterday I was asked to put together a Q&A for a project I am working on.
I used ChatGPT to generate the questions to save time...I then paused, and fed the questions back to ChatGPT and asked it to generate the answers. They were solid. Now human have to read that crap. I'm part of the problem.
Deep fake scam calls at work? Great. I already have to educate people that the CEO is not texting them for emergency gift cards. Now I have a new thing to worry about.
For sure. I also need to remember to talk to my parents about it, too. It's very much here.
I was reading some good advice to counter this such as asking them to interact with their environment, like picking something up, to see if you can break the filter. Presumably, they would be holding still as much as possible to maintain the illusion.
That’s a really great tip thanks
Tbf a deep fake CEO is probably preferable to my real one
I once almost fell for the gift card thing (several years ago) only because it is very much something my former CEO would do, and at the time, I'd never heard of it being a scam.
I'm a creative for an ad agency that shall remain nameless on an automotive account that will also remain nameless and I can tell you that on two of my last three campaigns, a lot of the digital content was entirely animated with unity. We put disclaimers on the spots, but people watching at home canNOT tell the difference. It's genuinely unsettling and it feels SUPER icky to run stuff that people can tell isn't real.
Internally, we're having a pretty big battle about how far we can take the AI generated crap. So far, (thankfully) we're only allowed to use it in client decks, but some people are pushing really hard to start using it to make public facing ads.
As a now retired photographer, my heart goes out to you involved in the creative industries. I watched my business disappear as people refused to pay for real photography and wanted to use their mobiles instead. Now, we hardly need a camera, just install PhotoShop and as you say, spend hours writing a script for AI to do its worst/best. So for fun and my sanity, I’m going backwards and using film and a friend’s darkroom!
I gave up an illustrious photography career in 2000. Digital was just starting. More and more creatives were finding images in stock libraries and then wanting me to recreate those images. Then digital cameras made photography accessible to everyone and the market started to collapse. I can't imagine what it must be like now, nearly 25 years later.
I hope you find joy in that.
Sure do! I have my wall art up in the house just to remind me what is real.
Same Tony! I spent my whole adult life working photography as a craft. Decades of work. So many thousands on equipment, just hand over fist. Time spent in classes and seminars. All replaced by an app. Obsolete.
I’m in a similar situation, but my creative director is not beyond using AI for final products as well unfortunately.
It’s been so disheartening seeing my job as art director go from actually being creative to simply spending mind-numbing days trying to write the right prompt to get the perfect image he sees in his head 😭
Yeah. It's been extremely frustrating trying to advocate for the benefits of human-concepted&human-made. 🙃
Thanks for sharing this, Mac. I'm really glad to hear it's a battle at least (although obviously it's also all steam ahead). I wish there was a way we could catch people up with digital literacy; not sure how the kids are faring in this brave new world. Fuck.
I hate generative AI. It's poisoned the internet, whether in visual or written form. Outing myself here - unless it's really obvious like most of the examples you've posted, I sometimes find it frustratingly difficult to notice. I can *usually* tell when photographs are faked, but I find it a lot harder with art. Sometimes my brain just skips the small details and smooths out some of the stuff that doesn't make sense unless I really stop to check. It's always done it with everything, since well before AI. If I'm on my phone with its little screen, which is the main way I experience the internet nowadays, sometimes I really just can't see the little details unless I'm zooming in on purpose. I always feel like I've been taken for a fool if I don't notice it right away. Plus, who wants to look at *every* image they see through the lens of 'is this real'? That's exhausting. I hate that AI has done that to us. I hate it so much.
Ugh - this bit: "Sometimes my brain just skips the small details and smooths out some of the stuff that doesn't make sense."
I think that's at the heart of it all - we're just doing this with *everything*, too! A little fact seems "off" in a piece? We just quickly move on. I guess we've always had a tendency to do this, but the fakery has just increase to such a giant level it makes me very, very freaked out for society.
That's how brains work. We build a mental model of what is going on around us, and respond to the model. We focus more attention on what we've already decided is important.
We don't spend any processing power on things where we think we know what is going on - see this video for example: https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo?si=WV6hijCCTrA6kBEu
The art of being a scientist is to fight this stuff - to make sure what we see, what we understand is what is actually there, and it's really fk'n hard.
I learned this stuff when I was working in road safety. "Looked but did not see" was a specific code to describe the cause of a crash. Think about that next time you're driving - or perhaps don't, and look twice for that kid on a bike you could have sworn wasn't there a second ago.
In a tiny way, it would be good if it raised our skepticism and increased/widened its application, but not if it makes it hard to trust meatspace people and we have to start proving we are real in every interaction that isn't face to face.
I just had to search meatspace 😅 I've never seen that word before
So, I completely relate with this feeling of meltdown/overwhelm at seeing people become completely detached from reality and feeling like you're shouting into the void "Am I the only one seeing this!!"
I know you mentioned religion near the end, and kind of categorized it differently, and perhaps it is, but I can't help but think for myself at least, and perhaps for you too, if our outsized (?) emotional reaction to all this is related to our religious upbringing and then detachment from it. I wonder if, we grew up immersed in a set of objectively wild beliefs, that felt very real because kids raised believing in talking snakes and demons and mind-reading preachers will believe what the grown ups tell them. And we managed to leave behind those beliefs by looking to evidence based thinking and following that path.. untangling our worldview from the web of beliefs we were raised in, only then to face a new world where we see, AGAIN, huge swaths of people believing in incredulous things that we can see with our own two eyes are *unbelievable*, whether it's as insubstantial as crab-children or as dangerous as "They stole the election!" .. And to be faced with all these people believing an alternate reality triggers something deep inside us. Some fundamental fear that we're the ones that are wrong. Even though on a logical level we can SEE the 7 toed monsters, on an emotional level, having these huge groups of primates collectively believe in an alternate reality freaks my brain right out. Maybe pokemon really are demons, maybe evolution really is a atheistic conspiratorial collusion by the scientists of the world, maybe Trump really did win and is an altruistic saint. Obviously not, but some younger scared-of-going-to-hell for not believing the exactly right thing part of me? I think that's where the overwhelming emotion jumps out from. I think, maybe. You're not the only one learning to figure out emotions in therapy as a full grown adult..
Um - amen.
You said this SO much better than I was clumsily trying to!
I'm simultaneously glad and sad that someone else relates!
Yes. The ‘scared-of-going-to-hell’ feeling is ever present. It’s hard to dismantle it when your childhood was immersed in simply taking it as fact. This feeling feeds the need to be ‘right’ and therefore your behaviour. It’s tiring interrupting the cycle.
Oh yeah, that stuff is buried deep, huh.
I always think of this song when thinking about those buried ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzXeJ762BBc
Well religious programming is a form of “artificial”, I hesitate to say intelligence, maybe false social construct would be better. And that programming still stays with me at the age of 68 and after decades as a scientist. I know intellectually that hell doesn’t exist, it’s a medieval trope, but in the dead of night the “scared of going to hell stuff” re-emerges. Maybe I’d better finish reading, “The Scarlet Letter”, which maybe contributing!
I would hope most people thought "Cute!", liked it and moved on with their day, but that's probably a tad optimistic.
I was listening to a podcast (Behind the Bastards, which I wholeheartedly recommend) about how the push for AI in Silicon Valley has slowly become more cult-like, almost resembling a religion. One major investor even put out a literal manifesto claiming AI regulation would be a "form of murder" given how many lives it could ultimately save.
Robert Evans (the host of Behind the Bastards) also wrote an article about this in Rolling Stone, for anybody interested in reading:
www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/amp/
Big, big fan of that show.
Oh - right, Behind the Bastards! So good - and thanks for the reminder. They dropped out of my algorthmic-driven spotify!
Comprehensive, well written article. Thanks for the link.
I shared this on my Instagram last night despairing that half the world is about to vote this year but can’t tell what is real. A former colleague shared that she is working with Digital Action (www.digitalaction.co) who are working on digital threats to democracy and human rights. Just knowing people are trying to fight back made me feel a little bit better, so I’d thought I’d share.
Your former colleague rules. Power to them. This is so, so important.
"my emotions all involved me thrusting my head into wall repeatedly, the overwhelming reality that we’re all fucking doomed felt in every fibre of my body"
this was the emotion i felt about 2.5 years ago that led me to shut off my facebook. I don't know how to emotionally deal with it and it's only getting worse with more technology and it's deeply influencing so many important things.
This is the exact parallel to my comment regarding Humankind, and why Rutger Bregman determined he was actually much better off when *not* following the news.
I stopped watching the news regularly for that reason too. Haven’t taken the step of no fb or instagram yet but it’s becoming a more and more attractive step.
yes! i still follow some things (like here!) but I make a very conscious decision to curate my inputs. never anything from 24 hour news cycle channels or sites, mostly local indie journalists and several misinfo/disinfo fighting journalists. i try to curate to actionable things, and only when I have the space for it, but still want to have some info about what's going on.
Yeah I got rid of mine last year for very similar reasons.
I think for me more problematic is due to all this fake content it drives people further and further away from recognition of reality with people saying images of actual tragedies are faked. Then there is the very real possibility that images will be faked by governments or their agents to get us to support their actions or causes. No longer reliant on just claiming propaganda about events they could use AI to create the narrative they want to share. And while today we can spot the mistakes I feel a time is coming when we will no longer be able to.
Please tell me that Donald Trump is an AI generated figment of our imaginations. He can’t be real surely!
100% this
It turns out Inigo Montoya was just looking for an AI. “Excuse me, but do you have six fingers in your right hand?”
TPB fans abound around here. And I’m deeply into that. Bravo sir.
Something to smile about. Have watched that movie so many times.
i feel like as gen z we have built up a sort of sixth sense in spotting AI content. it emerged around us and in the spaces online that we populate. we can tell when a post on reddit is a repost of another post from a few years ago, we can tell when the video essay we are watching on youtube was written even partially by an AI. it’s a new predator in the spaces we occupy and we are slowly learning to hunt it.
Love this concept of AI as the new Predator
(And just to be that person who is so xennial it hurts: GET TO DA CHOPPER!)
At least, you hope you can tell. The things that have successfully deceived you, well, you simply never noticed them doing it, did you?
:/
So there's a fun little 'theory' - I hesitate to give it that much credit yet - that the large majority of social media posts are just algorithms doing algorithmic things to each other, and that the percentage of things that you interact with on a daily basis that's generated by humans for other humans is a diminishing fraction of a fraction of all the 'content' out there. It's called the Dead Internet Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
This post by known human David Farrier sends chills down my spine, as I realize that it may very well become true - a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy fueled by ad revenue.
Oh, I very much subscribe to that theory. It's so apparent on X at the moment - it's just bots. A world of bots. The clutter is overwhelming and has pretty much made the service pointless.
In the book Humankind, Rutger Bregman says that he stopped watching the news because it just wasn't valuable or worth it to him, and that in doing so he became more connected to the people around him and the reality of what is truly happening rather than the un-reality and fear being infused through watching those news reports. (It's a great book if you haven't read it.) It sounds like everything in the sphere of "social media" content should be added to that, but the challenge is that there are marketing people who want to give money to those who have a large "reach", and so these people are encouraged to do whatever they can to gain visibility so those marketers will throw money at them.
I revel in my ignorance of the "meme of the day", the next "hot post on [pick your favorite social media platform]", and the flippant "scandal of the day", because none of those things are actually important or relevant to me and I have better things to do with my time. And I'm someone that works deep, deep within technology and online systems and has for many years.
I have that book and I am going to read it - have been meaning to for about a year now. I get the idea of unplugging from the news - but also I feel there is such a privilege to be able to "turn off" the rest of the world in 2024.
I mean, ideally we should all be living in a cave with 30 friends and family and no screens.
But - we're part of this much bigger thing.
My personal life would probably be better if I'd unplugged from being aware of this slaughter in Palestine - but I think it was vital I stared at it and didn't turn away.
I sound like I am getting very preachy here haha - I will read the book, and I certainly get that the news format is an issue in and of itself!
this is how i felt in the past, like all these things are truly terrible, I should know about them! but, you know, therapy...locus of control stuff and anxiety cycle stuff...does knowing about the terrible things do anything to help/stop them? sometimes yes, sometimes no, and examining that.
for me I had to pull back to where I can do some actionable things to try and mentally complete the anxiety about the thing and turn it into an action even if it's small thing that I can do (send a note to my representatives or some money at a charity or volunteer somewhere).
also the idea of prioritizing and picking one or two topics of activism so that you can create more impact vs trying to know about all the things which can dilute individual efforts and progress.
i feel like the right level of inputs is different for everybody and it comes down to being mindful and having intention around what we do with it and also being able to nope out (the opposite of what the algorithms want) and acknowledge that sometimes we are powerless on a thing and aren't bad for not engaging or focusing engagement very locally vs globally. i don't know. work in progress thoughts.
I still watch the news and absorb a lot of things that are happening around the world, but also with the understanding that they're presenting only a small slice of what is truly out there, exaggerate the shock value to try and have greater impact, and that there are additional untold stories. Humankind reminds you that there's a lot more positive in the world than you might assume from what is often being fed out to the public. I do generally ignore all of "social media", just because I've never found anything there that was valuable or useful to me. If I did then I'd likely just stick to those specific people/narrow areas, pruning those that just aren't persisting as a positive influence. Like here on Substack, I only have Webworm right now. I had one other that I tried for a while but they evolved from when I previously liked them and wasn't a good fit for me anymore, and I'm going to try out Stephen Fry from your recommendation and see if I enjoy his content.
Skynet doesn't need to drop bombs on us, just fatten us up with all these sorts of lies. Melt our brains and sow division and we will take care of each other for them! Humans are our own worst enemy.
To me this image is an easy spot as an AI image. The extra toes, the random handles & lines that I’m assuming are supposed to have been fishing rods, the impeccable balance of these “babies”, the fact that it clearly looks animated rather than a photograph & the improbability of the entire setup. It’s not the easy for everyone apparently and even if it is for me I just wish I didn’t have to do this. I don’t want to check every image for extra toes. I don’t want to have to question if the article I just read was written by Chat GPT or just a human that’s made several glaring errors. Please take this “AI” away. All I’ve seen it used for so far is evil. The whole concept of these “AIs” is just copyright infringement. The most common thing I’ve seen is using AI instead of real people to do the work in a bid to not have to pay creatives. Computers don’t ask for a salary. From there it just gets worse. Using AI to scam people and to do deepfake porn.
I would love for it to be used constructively, like connecting a person's bunch of symptoms and more quickly give them a diagnosis than humans have so far been able to do. In a more refined way, too, like to identify subtypes of a disease presentation in such a way to direct treatment more accurately. It could take the collective experiences of humans and work out which subsets of symptoms respond better or worse or not at all to which treatments, rather than the "See if this works for you. No? How about this?" approach currently used, which sees people suffer for years until they finally get the help they need.
But no, shitty emotionally manipulative pictures it is.
👍🏾The good news is... THIS IS A REAL THING! I listen to a variety of podcasts & also one contributor on a site I follow & they are talking about AI already being used to analyse genetic and/or medical data at incredible speeds& with the same or superior accuracy as highly qualified humans, & in some cases"seeing" things on x-rays the human eye has missed! 👀. People have already had lives saved & they are just training the technology ready to be implemented. This to me is what I want from technological advancement... not fake photos clickbait 🤔🤷🏻♀️
I’m off to read a good book...
Yesterday I was asked to put together a Q&A for a project I am working on.
I used ChatGPT to generate the questions to save time...I then paused, and fed the questions back to ChatGPT and asked it to generate the answers. They were solid. Now human have to read that crap. I'm part of the problem.
I would say requiring a human to spend their time and effort on something that a machine can do is the problem.