September Links and Thinks
A round-up of stimulating pieces about technology, artificial intelligence, and the problem of general shittiness. Plus an interview with me about The 57 Bus.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a links round-up, so I’ve got a bit of a backlog. Lots of interesting stuff here about technology, particularly AI and social media, as well as a couple of things that relate to my recent post on The Problem of General Shittiness.
Nine Articles About The Impacts of Technology, Particularly Artificial Intelligence
My biggest objection to AI, aside from the crippling environmental impacts (see below), is that its overlords have their priorities reversed. Rather than using AI to replace dangerous or soul-crushing jobs, they’re replacing work that provides satisfaction and joy and where a human touch makes all the difference. I was talking about this today with a friend and she called those kinds of jobs “heart work.” Can we please let humans retain the heart work of making art, cooking food, and caring for other humans, and send the robots to do the jobs that wreck people’s physical and mental health? Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be how capitalism works.
1. Drowning in Slop by Max Read in New York Magazine
If you’ve been following the proliferation of bizarre images of Jesus on Facebook, or if you’re at all familiar with Dead Internet Theory, run don’t walk to this fascinating investigation of “Slop”—the cheap, poorly-made AI-generated content that is rapidly proliferating online. Max Read takes us on a surreal journey that includes a stop at a prestigious literary magazine bombarded with an overwhelming number of AI-generated short story submissions and manages to locate the actual generator of Crab Jesus and other Facebook oddities. I wasn’t able to gift-link this one, but it’s well worth a trial subscription.
A quote:
Worse than the havoc it wreaks on the internet, slop easily escapes the confines of the computer and enters off-screen systems in exasperating, troubling, and dangerous ways. In June, researchers published a study that concluded that one-tenth of the academic papers they examined “were processed with LLMs,” calling into question not just those individual papers but whole networks of citation and reference on which scientific knowledge relies. Derek Sullivan, a cataloguer at a public-library system in Pennsylvania, told me that AI-generated books had begun to cross his desk regularly. Though he first noticed the problem thanks to a recipe book by a nonexistent author that featured “a meal plan that told you to eat straight marinara sauce for lunch,” the slop books he sees often cover highly consequential subjects like living with fibromyalgia or raising children with ADHD. In the worst version of the slop future, your overwhelmed and underfunded local library is half-filled with these unchecked, unreviewed, unedited AI-generated artifacts, dispensing hallucinated facts and inhuman advice and distinguishable from their human-authored competition only through ceaseless effort.
2. The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age by Thea Lim in The Walrus
This essay about how technology’s data collection abilities have undermined our own abilities to evaluate our experience doesn’t necessarily break new ground—we all know, at some level, that technology has monetized nearly every aspect of human experience and that we are the poorer for it. What makes Lim’s essay a wonderful read is the way the author investigates how all of this feels.
A quote:
What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.
2. Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art by Ted Chiang in The New Yorker
Those of us who write for a living, or who aspire to earn enough money from their writing to call it a “living,” tend to feel alternately enraged and despairing about the growth of generative AI. Ted Chiang, who is one of the best speculative fiction writers out there, is uniquely positioned to think through the implications.
A quote:
The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.
3. National Novel Writing Month faces backlash over allowing AI by Adela Suliman in the Washington Post
Speaking of generative AI and the future of fiction, this is a wonderfully dishy piece about an AI kerfuffle at NaNoRiMo that is, frankly, ripe for satire.
A quote:
To condemn AI, the organization said, “would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology,” noting that issues around the use of AI “tie to questions around privilege.” The group argued that “not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing,” and that for some writers, AI is a practical solution, rather than ideological.
4. Don’t Downplay Risks of AI for Democracy by Suzanne Nossel in Just Security
Literary implications aside, could AI be the downfall of civilization? This NatSec expert says, “possibly” and does a nice job of reminding us about the gee-whiz techno-optimism that allowed us to be blindsided by the polarizing impacts of social media two decades ago.
A quote:
In 2004, the year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, Pew Research concluded in a study that fears that the internet “might hurt healthy democratic deliberation are not borne out by online behavior.” Users were “not insulating themselves in information echo chambers” and the internet was judged to offer “heartening” potential for “stemming” polarization. In 2012, there were cheery reports that Facebook’s “I voted” button had driven a meaningful uptick in voter participation.
Of course, those early measures of the impact of the internet and social media on democracy proved laughably rosy. We now know that digital transformation began reshaping democracy in ways that were hard to discern until they became all but irreversible.
5. Generative AI and the oculus of fascism by Karl Folk at the Institue of Unreality
If you weren’t alarmed by the previous essay, this next one should do the trick. The essay is part of an investigation into the overlapping worlds of technoauthoritarianism, disinformation, and far right hate groups. Folk argues, and I think he’s correct, that we are currently in a battle for reality. Book Bans, generative AI, disinformation, attacks on science and education, these are all aspects of the same mission. At stake is nothing less than the truth.
A quote:
You are not alone in thinking that the Internet is no longer something you fully recognize. It's not the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia skewing your perception. It’s not just you, and you are not crazy for thinking it’s different. The hopeful beacon of innovation and information has been destroyed and replaced with a weaponized form. The widespread adoption of generative AI has disrupted everything from creative jobs within Hollywood to the epistemic threat it poses within academia. The full-throated push of apocalyptic visions and rhetoric by those who own these unreal, digital hallucination machines has made it clear that not only has the Internet changed, but alarmingly, so have the ideas that drive Silicon Valley venture capital and tech creation. When looked at within the context of Silicon Valley’s surge into an overt techno-fascist tilt, generative AI starts to look significantly darker and more dangerous.
6. LinkedIn is training AI on you — unless you opt out with this setting By Chris Valazco in the Washington Post
A quote (and all the information you need to opt out):
To opt out, log into your LinkedIn account, tap or click on your headshot, and open the settings. Then, select “Data privacy,” and turn off the option under “Data for generative AI improvement.”
Flipping that switch will prevent the company from feeding your data to its AI, with a key caveat: The results aren’t retroactive. LinkedIn says it has already begun training its AI models with user content, and that there’s no way to undo it.
7. A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots by Pranshu Verma and Shelly Tan in the Washington Post
A reminder that we pay a huge environmental price for AI’s mediocre party tricks. If you don’t have access to the WaPo, this article in The Conversation covers much of the same ground.
A quote from the WaPo piece:
In July, Google released its most recent environmental report, showing its carbon emission footprint rose by 48 percent, largely due to AI and data centers. It also replenished only 18 percent of the water it consumed — a far cry from the 120 percent it has set as a goal by 2030.
And one from the Conversation piece:
The energy needs of AI are shifting the calculus of energy companies. They’re now exploring previously untenable options, such as restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant, site of the infamous disaster in 1979, that has been dormant since 2019.
8. Gen Z Has Regrets by Jonathan Haidt and Will Johnson in The New York Times
Polling shows that many young people wish social media had never been invented.
A quote:
Over 60 percent of our respondents said they spend at least four hours a day [on social media], with 23 percent saying they spend seven or more hours each day using social media. Second, our respondents recognize the harm that social media causes society, with 60 percent saying it has a negative impact (versus 32 percent who say it has a positive impact).
9. How government can cut kids’ social media use without doing more harm by the Washington Post Editorial Board
Some policies do more harm than good. So which ones work?
A quote:
The catch is that researchers don’t know precisely what kind of content is harmful to which kind of kids, and people should not want platforms to censor young people’s speech or access to it. Clearer, however, is that sites are engineered to keep tweens, teens and adults, too, clicking at all hours, with features such as infinite scroll, autoplay and nonstop notifications drawing them in and keeping them staring. Legislators ought to devote their efforts to curbing these addictive tactics. Going beyond that, into content control, risks damaging the same young people these lawmakers are trying to protect.
Two Pieces That Engage With The Problem of General Shittiness
1. What if the government really did want to help you?
My friend (and former editor) Alisha N. Berger has moved to Switzerland and started a newsletter about living there called Swiss Missus. In the inaugural issue, she writes about getting unemployment benefits in Switzerland, despite not being a citizen, and how utterly different the process is from what we’re used to experiencing at the unemployment benefits office in the U.S.
A quote:
“This is unacceptable,” said my Swiss unemployment caseworker. “We must get you the money to which you are entitled.” Jonas is in his early thirties. He has the biceps of a man who spends his off-hours at the gym, close-cropped blond hair with wee bangs gelled to the side that would melt the heart of any lovesick adolescent circa 1987, and an inviting smile. It’s the smile that gets me on every Web-Ex call, because he seems to think that an under-employed 43-year-old mom beginning to sport a wattle deserves anything.
And yet, the government says I do! As I was working on a Swiss contract, I can claim unemployment even though I’m not Swiss. My “entitlement” is 80% of my previous salary for 260 working days, or until I find full-time employment equal to that rate of pay—minus some number of days the government will dock me for having left my job of my own free will. This penalty can be up to 60 days (seriously—60 is the max even if you were fired!). Jonas says that in cases like mine, where the job was a significant drain on my mental health—convincingly explained in a short little Google-translated essay on my intake form—it’s usually a dock of 31 days. Which means, once my previous employer fills out their side of the paperwork, the famous coffers in Bern will open themselves to me.
I still pinch myself that this ridiculously kind unemployment benefit—even if you QUIT!—exists in anywhere on this planet.
I used to travel around the world for work, and everywhere people would ask me, “What is the typical dish of your country?” I would struggle to answer: I got to eat everything. I told my then three-year-old son, Oliver, about this, and we decided the answer could be, “In my country, we eat ketchup!” This was very funny when he said it.
Yesterday, after the sweet and burly Jonas became concerned that my previous employer has been ignoring requests for my salary history, he insisted upon taking up the issue himself because “it’s more likely they will respond to an official Swiss government inquiry.” I was speechless with gratitude. “In my country,” I consider telling him, “Unemployed people are treated like lazy pieces of shit. It is utterly incomprehensible that anyone would help a girl with paperwork. Actually, some of my fellow citizens think unemployed mothers should pull their peanut-butter-stained asses up by the bootstraps while being simultaneously barefoot and making pot roast.” I wonder, briefly, just how far Jonas’s inviting smile would extend, because now I’m deep in civil servant fantasies. This makes me LOVE the Swiss, despite their reputation of being somewhat standoffish, with all the warmth of a watch battery. What would happen if I said “Make me tick, Jonas?”
2. What Pete Buttigieg Learned Playing JD Vance on The Ezra Klein Show
Pete Buttigieg is always interesting to listen to; he’s a precise and nuanced thinker and speaker, as well as being a wonky policy dude who understands the details as well as the big ideas. So I was tickled to hear him talk about the Problem of General Shittiness in much the same way I did in these pages—even deploying the exact same joke (my husband asked, “Do you think Pete Buttigieg reads your Substack?”). There’s much of interest in their conversation, but here’s the bit that relates to last week’s column:
If you go back to the rise of Reaganism, one of the quotes Ronald Reagan’s best known for is that the most frightening thing you can ever hear is somebody saying, “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.” That generation of conservatives, when they took power, didn’t just believe that government was the problem. They also stripped away a lot of the capacity of government to solve problems.
That becomes a feedback loop, where if you’re looking around and you’re seeing crumbling infrastructure or widening inequality, you might think, oh, the government sucks at fixing these problems. And then the next time you’re being asked, for example, to vote for a candidate who’s going to make sure there’s enough funding going to the government, you say, “I’m not going to put tax money into the government. Government sucks.” That, too, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the next thing you know, these public institutions are less and less able to address things.
You contrast that with what you have, for example, in Nordic countries. And I know it is almost exhaustingly a go-to for liberals to point to a Nordic example. But importantly, one of the many, many things that would be nice for us to have — that they have in Sweden — is a high perception of tax fairness. Partly that’s because I think they actually have a fairer tax code, but I also think there’s been a virtuous cycle there, where public entities have done a reasonably good job of taking care of people. People therefore have a relatively high level of trust that their tax dollars will be used fairly and wisely. And therefore they allow those institutions to have the running room they need to try to solve things.
Finally, here’s an interview with me about my book, The 57 Bus. The interviewer is from my German publisher, but the interview is in English.
With a sigh,
Dashka