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2·3 days agoInteresting article. The results of the author’s research is consistent with my understanding of the social media landscape in countries like the Philippines, which I believe are extremely toxic and partisan. However, I’m not sure the additional studies linked support the argument that social media does not increase polarisation. I’ve only read the abstracts of each so it’s quite possible I’m overlooking something, but they immediately seem flawed due to their reliance on consenting participants. I would have thought that anyone who agrees to take part in such a study is clearly an outlier within society and therefore not a reliable test subject. Polarisation via algorithm relies on people being unwittingly exposed to content; if they’re switched on enough to deactivate their social media accounts or disable re-shares as part of a study into political polarisation, they are clearly not representative of society at large.
It’s not a “problem”, as such. As I said, I created the account to view the pages and groups of small businesses and organisations that have no other online presence. I don’t use it for the doomscroll algorithm. This was just my observation of what kind of content is targeted towards males in my location by default.
I found this article quite interesting, as I deactivated my main Facebook account around the time the article asserts Facebook was still “trying” and only recently created a new account under a generic pseudonym to access all the community and small business information that is still locked entirely to the platform. Because I have basically nothing in my feed on this account, Facebook backfills it with “recommended” posts and I was pretty shocked at how universally terrible they are. I guess the algorithm uses my location and gender to generate these recommendations, since I’ve provided very little in the way of alternative information or interaction for it to use. As a result, my default feed is basically just a wall of misogynistic and highly sexualised slop and even the few genuine recommended posts (like backpackers looking for travelling buddies) are clearly being recommended because they feature young women with a bunch of older men thirsting over them in the comments.
Really great article, and thanks for posting the text of it.
You’re welcome. It was their daily free article to email subscribers. I can’t afford to pay a subscription fee for full access but I find the combination of their mailing list + podcast is a good way to keep up to date with their investigations.
an iPhone comes clean out of the box
How does it come “clean out of the box” when you literally just said it requires modifications to the settings to improve its privacy?
at least there’s no vendor garbage
Samsung and Xiaomi apps are vendor-specific and can be disabled, even without the use of UAD (which works fine, not sure why you’re lying about that).
unlike an Android where you’ll be forced into a 3rd party tool or a ROM like GrapheneOS if you want a clean experience.
GrapheneOS is available as an option because Android has an open-source basis. Remind me which alternative privacy OS Apple allows third party developers to create for iPhone? Which iPhone did they allow users to install this imaginary privacy OS on?
You also are sure that your apps won’t be able to get system-wide access
Android applications have been sandboxed for several versions now.
How is stacking 10 buckets of sand and letting them fall in an art gallery, comparable to real art? Dunno, but they call it that: “real art”.
Your insinuation here was that AI art is “real art” because someone once stacked 10 buckets of sand and called it “real art”. It comes across as pretty desperate that you relied on a comparison with something as questionable as this to argue that AI art is the equivalent of traditional art. As you said, there will always be artists and “artists”. Sounds like AI “artists” fit in quite well with the latter group.
The problem with iOS is the lack of freedom and control you have as a user. Yes, Apple may be “better than Google” when it comes to some aspects of default privacy on their devices (being better than the worst is hardly something to brag about), but as a user the level of privacy you can achieve on your iPhone is always limited by the design of the operating system, where you are just a user with no permissions and no ability to modify or even replace the operating system entirely. You are locked into a proprietary ecosystem that you cannot get out of.
I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t track things, because they do, but at least there’s no vendor garbage and you can go through the Settings and disable everything you don’t need, restrict Apps from running in the background etc.
Did you make a mistake here? You are describing an Android device. You can even remove apps entirely from a device with a tool like Universal Android Debloater, and Android allows alternative app stores so you don’t need to rely on a heavily limited selection of proprietary apps.
Err, you admitted yourself that you are absolutely clueless when it comes to AI music generation. So yes, your “point” was a bad one and clearly came from a place of complete ignorance.
I’m not sure equating AI art to sand bucket man is the glowing endorsement you think it is.
They’re not just typing in “make me a pretty image” and then refreshing a lot.
The only explanation I’ve received so far sounded exactly like this, just with more steps to disguise the underlying process.
You’re sort of stepping around the issue here. Are you confirming that AI art is about cycling through options blind until you stumble across something you like?
It was a terrible and irrelevant point, as I explained. Thanks for the links though, I will check them out.
In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems.
Hopefully this doesn’t go the Apple direction where “security” becomes the catch-all defence for anti-consumer business practices.
You keep using the word “vision”, but I have a hard time understanding how an AI artist has a vision equivalent to that of a traditional artist based on the explanation you’ve provided. It still sounds they are just cycling through AI generated options until they find something they like/that looks good. That is not the same as seeing something in your mind and then manually recreating that to the best of your ability.
You see where I’m going with this?
No, I’m sorry but those are terrible examples. Synthesisers still require full creative control and an understanding of sound production techniques to create a custom sound. Some musicians rely on presets and samples, but even then they still need to be capable of actually composing a piece of music. Also, the debate was largely about whether synthesisers could be considered real instruments, not whether the music created by synthesisers was real music. The Hip Hop comparison is completely irrelevant and an even worse attempt at conflating genuine criticism of AI “musicians” with “old people are just mad”.
I don’t know anything about AI music generation
It’s literally just prompts AFAIK, so the people making it don’t require any musical talent, ability or creativity. They are just asking someone/something else to make them music that has a certain sound. It’s the equivalent of a monarch commissioning a piece of work from their court musician and then claiming they are a musician too.
visual art can be generated by AI models on local machines with a great amount of fine tuning and depth.
Are there specific pieces of AI art software people use? Any popular ones you can recommended to help me understand the process better?
But even if you don’t, have some respect for the AI artists out there who put time and effort into their craft.
What kind of time and effort? How is AI art a skill that is comparable to real art? I am genuinely asking here, I’d like to understand your work process.
I am not a visual artist, but I have composed my own music and the amount of time and/or effort needed to create a comparable piece using generative AI is not even close to being the same. I think there is a place for AI tools that assist artists, but people generating entire pieces using AI and then referring to themselves as “artists” is honestly delusional and sad. I hope that’s not what you are referring to here.
From the article:
The Atlantic has a corporate partnership with OpenAI. The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division.
Yes, I always get the feeling that a lot of these militant AI sceptics are pretty clueless about where the technology is and the rate at which it is improving. They really owe it to themselves to learn as much as they can so they can better understand where the technology is heading and what the best form of opposition will be in the future. As you say, relying on “haha Google made a funny” isn’t going to cut it forever.
The title is not mine and the paper the article is responding to was published last month, not two years ago as you claim. The only mention of Musk in the entire article is in this one sentence: