I was watching a documentary about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle the other day. It covers more of their struggle with tabloids and paparazzi than with the crown as one might have expected. And this battle looks very much like the one of David versus Goliath, with the only difference being that David seems to be losing this one.
For instance, they refer to a study of hate tweets about their couple and specifically Meghan. The cite the following figures:
Reach: 17 million people worldwide
Number of tweets: 114,000
Number of tweeting accounts: 83.
Let it sync.
83 accounts can now potentially reach 17 million people.
The Digital Echo in Real Life
Who can guarantee that all of these seventeen million people have critical thinking skills or the ability to recognize that they don't know enough to pass the judgement and simply scroll by? For most of them, what fits into a tweet's 140 characters will be their comprehensive understanding of the situation and the people in it - carved in stone.
In a few days, they will forget the tweet, but the sentiment, or rather the residue it leaves, is what will stick. And any new information from now on will be perceived through this filter.
Interestingly enough, in the case of Meghan and Harry, it was not your average trolls or a bot farm. These were real people, united by an idea - hatred, envy, fear - that drove them to tweet, post, record podcasts, and vlogs.
How many of us have a narrative so important that we stay up at night writing, commenting, arguing, and shouting in caps lock?
The Power of Pause: Cultivating Critical Thinking
AI developers say they've noticed a pattern: if you don't demand an answer from AI immediately but you give it a little time to think, it produces much better results. Even a machine needs a moment to gather its thoughts to avoid talking nonsense, what to say of us, tired, worried, limited by our own experiences and twitchy eye?
When we scroll through the feed, each new post is like a new browser tab open, or a new chat with chatgpt. Here you need to understand the historical context and psychology of relationships between empires and their colonies, as well as all available methods of propaganda and genocide, this one requires knowledge of biology and immunology, and understanding this one implies the ability to distinguish types of weapons and instantly choose your fighter for mortal combat, and yes, for dessert, you absolutely need to be able to tell Monet from Manet, including those created by AI.
Try talking to ChatGPT about everything at once in one chat, and it will go crazy in about 10 minutes, forget what the discussion was about, and generate word salad instead of brilliant insights.
But what's worse is that we demand from ourselves to have not just the professional acumen and the opinion about all the spheres at once. What we want is to be able to go on X or Facebook and provide solutions - 140 characters that are supposed to solve the eternal problems of humanity. Remember the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything? Maybe 42 is the number of characters? Including spaces.
I increasingly feel that spaces are more important than the letters themselves.
Being able to give yourself a minute, pause and think is the main tool of critical thinking.
The organizer of the Devternity conference generated female speakers using AI. There's a new scandal in the tech world this week. He created full profiles, added them to the program, and then, as it usually happens, said they wouldn't be able to attend due to some private reasons. With one of these profiles, he went so far as to run her Instagram gathering 115,000 followers. It would have been pretty funny if they all were generated too, but no. Real people with background and interest in tech.
Let's see if you can guess who's not real here.
I try to think about events like these more as a performance art than a scam, because (hopefully) they make those who believed in the reality of generated avatars think about why and how they were deceived. If you give brains a minute, you will remember what distinguishes this profile from others. And you will make a small note in your subconsciousness to make intuition throw an alert next time.
Any learning is a path of trial and error. Reinforcement learning is one of the most powerful tool that advances AI development: allowing the model to analyze the results of taken action, identify best and worst results, and gradually improve the quality of the output.
This takes time.
We all need time to analyze the results of our actions. The effect of our words. The impact of our likes. The power of our attention.
Maybe then not only AI will become super-human.
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