Lunar Kittens & the Benefits of Nuclear War

(According to Google)

May 29, 2024

Google Search’s GenAI summaries and the perils of misinformation 🔎💥
Can A.I. replace the role of C.E.O.? 🤖 💼
Meta’s choice to make its A.I. open source and what that’s doing for Mark Zuckerberg’s popularity ⓕ
Apple using AI for privacy ⬛
The growing rift in publishing over whether to sell to A.I. companies or to sue them 🗞️🏷️
Why is Vivek Ramaswamy buying up BuzzFeed stock? 🐝 📰

My Take:

Barack Obama was our first Muslim President. Astronauts have provided care to cats that they found on the moon. Humans should eat one rock per day for digestive health. If the cheese isn't sticking to your homemade pizza, mix a cup of Elmer's glue in with your marinara. The societal benefits of nuclear war include eradicating immigration problems.

This is obviously all hogwash -- and they're all real answers provided by Google's generative AI summaries.

These aren't hallucinations, by the way. The summaries cite their sources.

Putting glue on pizza? That's the advice of an 11-year-old Reddit comment by a user calling himself "fucksmith."

The societal benefits of nuclear war? Pulled from a parody piece in The Guardian.

All of these glitches occur along a spectrum. Some of them are just good fun -- personally, I'm ready for SNL to do a sketch RE: cats on the moon. If somebody decides to mix glue into their marinara because of GenAI, it's probably not a terrible thing for the long-term survival of our species if they chow down.

But none of the jollies I got from GenAI summary fuck-ups change the fact that we live in a fragile democracy. Misinformation has led to illegal coups and genocide (see: Myanmar, Rwanda). And it poses a serious risk to the preservation of liberal democracy as we enter a year of consequential elections all across the planet, not just in the U.S.

We should engage with AI -- and laugh at the silly stuff it so often spews. Who knows? These quirks and hallucinations could be the seedlings of potential human creativity. At Boombox, our creators are having a ton of fun with the kooky lyrics our AI, called Boombot, generates -- and some of them are turning into great hooks for new songs. But those are just songs, not authoritative-seeming results from the company that claims to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Without guardrails, regulations and further stress tests, GenAI summaries have no business getting marquee billing in the search engine most of the world depends on for information to guide their day-to-day lives.

I have big hopes for what AI can do for humanity. But you can't "move fast and break things" with a technology this disruptive, regardless of the billions of dollars in personal wealth it promises to put into the pockets of its founders. You can and should call BS on anyone who gussies up misinformation -- and the malappropriation of data without consent to feed the machines that generate it -- as the unavoidable but acceptable cost of progress and freedom.

If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your C.E.O. by David Streitfeld VIA NYTimes 🤖 💼

Long before the current A.I. boom, Jack Ma, then the chief executive of the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, predicted that in 30 years ‘a robot will likely be on the cover of Time magazine as the best C.E.O.’ He pointed out that robots were quicker and more rational than humans, and were not driven by emotions like anger.

How A.I. Made Mark Zuckerberg Popular Again in Silicon Valley by Mike Isaac VIA NYTimes ⓕ

After some trying years during which Mr. Zuckerberg could do little right, many developers and technologists have embraced the Meta chief as their champion of “open-source” artificial intelligence.

Apple’s Plan to Protect Privacy with AI: Putting Cloud Data in a Black Box by Wayne Ma VIA The Information ⬛

Apple plans to process data from AI applications in a virtual black box, making it impossible for its employees to access it, according to four former Apple employees who worked on the project.

Stories to Watch:

OpenAI’s news deals continue, with Vox and the Atlantic signing on by Gerrit De Vynck VIA The Washington Post 🗞️🏷️

There seems to be a real rift in the media world as of late: do we sell our content to Big Tech or do we sue them for stealing it in the first place? Jessica Lessin, veteran tech journalist and founder of the The Information says, “For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta. It never, ever works as planned.”

What Vivek Ramaswamy really wants with his activist stake in BuzzFeed by Oliver Darcy VIA CNN 🐝 📰

Tl;dr Vivek Ramaswamy acquired an activist stake (2.6%) in BuzzFeed and has since been trolling the media company across the internet with his grand vision of a company-wide transformation. Some of his “bold” ideas? Lay off more employees and replace them with GenAI (since that seems to be working so well) and pivot to video (since that has always worked so well.) It’s a stunt, I suspect — “Peretti owns 96% of class B shares, which each come with 50 votes compared to the single vote a class A share offers” — but it’s a stunt that comes with a very big price tag. So what’s in it for Vivek? “Occam’s razor would suggest the noise and attention it brings, which has been the apparent motivating factor behind the various moves he has made in recent years, including running for president.” At least that’s Mr. Darcy’s take. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping a curious eye on this.

Events:

AI Trailblazer’s Summit

(Thursday, June 6, 2-7pm in NYC)

If you’re heading to NYC Tech Week, don’t miss Vivek Vaidya talking "Founder and Operator: Building Data + AI Startups from Scratch"

Media & Publisher Breakfast at New York #TechWeek

(Wednesday, June 5, 9:15-11:15 in SoHo)

Get your fuel for the day and stick around to listen to speakers like Jennie Baird (Chief Product Officer of BBC) & Mark Howard (Chief Operating Officer of TIME)

Come work with me!

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