“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
– Hannah Arendt
Nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired.
– The Thing
Bots and generative AI have always raised my hackles, but a few incidents have irked me in particular. The first happened this summer, and other people have experienced similar problems of being dinged for TOS violations they didn’t commit on social media. Appealing no longer does any good because Meta’s already faulty moderation has been overtaken by AI. It accused me of spamming my own friends-only post for engagement because I included a link in the comments. Weirdly Meta’s AI was fine with someone else spamming a public post with increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories.
Many of us have reported promoted posts linking to malware and adult content, only for Meta to say it’s fine. Good luck attracting legitimate advertisers when the only eyeballs you have left to offer are virtual. Don’t get me wrong. The commercialization of social media is an issue unto itself, but at least I understand the financial motivation. I don’t get alienating your “product,” whether it’s the algorithm making it harder for people and small businesses to connect, or poor AI moderation. It certainly hasn’t worked for a certain competitor so I’m not understanding Meta’s end game. Maybe it’s a simple matter of leadership having more hubris than brains.
Even more off-putting, I received a message saying it had an answer to the question I asked. Here’s the thing. I never asked for pictures of cats pretending to be employed, but right above that message was one that appeared to be from me. It wasn’t. Did they seriously program their AI to mimic me…to me? Do I have to worry about it mimicking me to others?
I found a setting to mute it – yes, amazingly such a setting exists, for now – but you can’t turn if off altogether.
Speaking of AI “innovations” nobody asked for, Microsoft recently locked up my computer during a particularly productive writing session with an offer from a new AI functionality to do research for me. If I want to do research, I can do my own research. Also, I most often write fantasy so I’m a lot less obsessive about research than I used to be, and more comfortable making things up. In any case, I don’t want to be interrupted in the middle of my work by unsolicited offers. Beyond all the legal concerns people have about AI, it’s the pushiness and the intrusiveness that bothers me most of all.
Innovations like assistive AI can be beneficial, but more and more AI feels like another means of disconnecting people to further enrich and empower a few. That’s certainly what people like Elon Musk and former Meta CEO Peter Thiel want. Musk regularly communicates with Putin per right-leaning Wall Street Journal. Both are spending a lot of money on the US presidential campaign in hopes of subverting democracy in favor of unregulated technological development. Everything in this substack article should be hyperbole, but it’s not.
And a certain unhinged politician has always used lies and fake news to spread discord and division. His most recent rally echoed a similar Madison Square Garden rally in 1939, and a lot of people were shocked and horrified like Trump and his supporters haven’t been saying the quiet part aloud for years. I feel sad when I see people complain about their friends and family being fooled by him when it seems more likely their friends and family knew all along, and it’s they who’ve been fooled by friends and family. And I feel angry when I look back at all the lies from my own childhood, and all the times I was told not to worry when my instincts were correct. I don’t understand people who are so full of hate, they would rather hurt themselves and their supposed loved ones than help others. If nothing else, you’d expect self-preservation to kick in where basic human decency fails. Nobody will ever be pure enough for white supremacist ideology. Eventually the consequences come for us all.
As for the press, Bezos stopped the editorial staff of The Washington Post from endorsing Harris because he fears retaliation despite hollow claims he wanted to restore the paper’s credibility. Ownership by self-serving multi-billionaires like him are why papers like The Washington Post don’t have credibility. Similar happened at the L.A. Times. Thousands of people unsubscribed from both. People are leaving Amazon, too. Unfortunately Amazon has a near-monopoly on publishing.
