The New Social Media "War" Ignores the Real Challenge: AI
Elon Musk is mad at Substack for launching what looks like a competitor. Does it matter? Yes, but there's another social media evolution brewing. And a plug for Emily Warner
There are two kinds of posts that my reader tends to find uninteresting—any post about Canada - including satires - and “inside baseball” posts about social media.
But know that social media is the new media of the day, except when it’s about to evolve profoundly.
Most Americans get their news and information over the internet, which has been true for a while. Women, in particular, love to get information from Facebook and Instagram. Younger Americans like YouTube and Chinese propaganda and intelligence gathering site TikTok. Men are mixed, but they seem to like Twitter and LinkedIn.
There is a new player on an increasingly crowded field that includes a bevy of conservative-leaning social media sites, including Donald Trump’s “Truth,” “GETTR,” Babylon Bee (not the satire site, but their social media channel), MeWe, USA.Life, and others I'm unaware of. Then there’s Gab, the “Christian Nationalist” site, CloutHub (a political organizing tool), and other more neutral sites like Mastodon, Caucus, RealTalk, and probably a dozen others.
And don’t forget all the sites at Locals.Com, where people like Salem Media-owned Townhall.com Senior Editor Kurt Schlichter and “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams hang out. While you can sign up for most of these sites for free, you pay for extra content, the ability to post or communicate with the hosts, etc.
Yes, it’s that crowded. This is unsustainable in the long term, just as a dozen car manufacturers, from Studebakers to Hudsons, proved decades ago. Whenever I post on Substack, I occasionally run to every one of those, along with LinkedIn, to publish my latest tome. LinkedIn, I warn you, has self-appointed content Stasi who will club you (verbally) for daring to post political content there.
Wait until the world of artificial intelligence kicks in. Wait, it already has.
Social media evolves with increasing speed and intensity. People are writing posts, including on Substack, with the assistance of ChatGPT. And for the lonely out there, check your Apple or Google Store for interesting AI apps available. Tread carefully. AI isn’t just the “wild west” that the Internet has proven to be, but a version of “Cowboys and Aliens.” Much more powerful and . . . impactful. With consequences. Why deal with the issues of real relationships when you can create your own reality, I suppose? I don’t think this ends well.
Oh wait, it’s already had consequences.
In Belgium, a man identified as "Pierre" by the French-language publication La Libre committed suicide while interacting with a chatbot named Eliza. The man was suffering from severe depression, and the chatbot encouraged him to commit suicide.
A smartphone in 2015© provided by AlterNet
This suicide, according to Vice reporter Chloe Xiang, raises major questions about "the risks of" AI (artificial intelligence) technology when it comes to mental health. The man's widow, identified as "Claire" by La Libre, said he was interacting with the "Eliza" chatbot via the app Chai.
Pierre, Xiang reports in an article published by Vice on March 30, "became increasingly pessimistic about the effects of global warming and became eco-anxious, which is a heightened form of worry surrounding environmental issues."
Thus enters Notes, the newest contribution from the folks at Substack, the hosts of this site. And Elon Musk is unhappy.
The former free speech advocate now disables most Substack links on Twitter, but not mine yet, probably because I’m a paying customer at Twitter to get one of those infamous “blue checks.” But I’m sure that won’t last. Musk has even disabled content from the journalists he turned to for the “Twitter Files” releases earlier this year, including Matt Taibi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Berenson. It’s getting ugly.
There’s nothing illegal or even necessarily evil about Musk restricting what links show up on Twitter, a privately-held enterprise he paid way too much for. But it runs counter to his pronouncements in favor of free speech. Just hypocritical.
And it is fueling the move to Notes. I have no idea how Notes will moderate its content, but it’s a brilliant move by the fast-growing Substack, which hosts writers of all orientations and interests, right and left. Substack will never compete with the photo-minded Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, nor the professional self-promoters at LinkedIn. But it may be challenging for bot-riddled and hate-filled snark artists that still predominate Twitter.
Meanwhile, the world of AI is exploding, with implications still being fathomed. Musk and other technology champions are calling for a moratorium. So is this author from science author Niall Ferguson, writing for Bloomberg:
It is not every day that I read a prediction of doom as arresting as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s in Time magazine last week. “The most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances,” he wrote, “is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’ … If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter…”
Now Yudkowsky has gone further. He believes we are fast approaching a fatal conjuncture, in which we create an AI more intelligent than us, which “does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. … The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss.”
He is suggesting that such an AI could easily escape from the internet “to build artificial life forms,” in effect waging biological warfare on us. His recommendation is clear. We need a complete, global moratorium on the development of AI.
Admittedly, I’m just learning this stuff. I have no intention of using AI to help construct a single blog post here. But I can’t promise that will always be the case. Some AI stuff is better written and researched than mine since it synthesizes thousands or millions of pages of text in seconds to construct beautiful narratives.
So while I’m tempted to complain about Elon’s new censorship and embrace Notes, the real challenge lies. If people creating their own reality is a problem now (see: transgender movement), wait until AI takes over social media sites.
To end on a more uplifting note, my reader will remember me touting the legendary Emily Warner, America’s first female airline pilot. The assuming and humble Warner, an aviation legend, passed away several years ago. But PBS in Colorado has produced a fabulous biopic about Warner that you can watch here. I highly recommend it, especially if you have a young lady in the house who might aspire to fly an airplane someday. It beats worrying about AI.