Plus: slop wildlife, the post-American internet and AI for emotional labor
#760: Gambling the future into existence
Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"
#766: An AI company you can wear without socks
Plus: Wedding Brain, news hustlers, the importance of talking to strangers and the best restaurant bread in America
#769: Nothing you see online is true
Clipping as emergent online literacy, the women self-injecting bootleg Botox and the woes of Facebook nanny groups
AI, Ethics, and Society — Home
233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper
This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.
AI Behavioral Science
We outline a foundation for a new field of ``AI Behavioral Science,'' covering three perspectives. First, as AI becomes ubiquitous and is increasingly proprietary and opaque, it becomes vital to develop techniques for assessing AI behavior. We outline how tools developed to assess people's behaviors by social scientists can be used to assess and infer AI's behaviors biases, tendencies, and heuristics. Second, we also discuss how AI can change the ways in which we learn about human behavior. Beyond its computational power, AI offers new techniques for simulating, inferring, and predicting human behaviors that we outline and discuss. Third, as humans and AI are interacting in increasingly complex and intertwined systems, we need to understand the implications for the resulting economic and political outcomes. We outline issues that are increasingly pressing concerning the future of human-AI interactions and potential changes and disruptions that can ensue.
What the Anthropic fight says about AI regulation
Fables of the deconstruction of American power
AI-generated ‘slop’ is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it? | Arwa Mahdawi
Low-quality ‘slop’ generated by AI is crowding out genuine humans across the internet, but instead of regulating it, platforms such as Facebook are positively encouraging it. Where does this end, asks Arwa Mahdawi
We Need To Rewild The Internet
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines
Plus: the physicality of data, the second coming of froyo, and the rise of "dopamine sites"
Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves
"I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated."
AI #177 Part 2: Wish You Were Here
As usual, part 2 of the weekly deals with speculative, regulatory, political and alignment questions.
✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇
