@robhorning
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robhorning.substack.com
always distrust the framing of AI as an "assistant"; think of it instead as an insistent advertisement that can hound you into compliance
don't think AI threatens our sense of being sovereign subjects authoring our own lives; think it will instead seem to grant us unilateral capacity to remake memories as we see fit and desocialize them. but I also think few people want that without being ideologically reprogrammed https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-machine
paper studying whether people like it when others send automated responses to them finds that "they perceive them as less cooperative, less affiliative" — "perceive" seems a little weak, as though there is as a way that sending automated responses is a way of working together with someone https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30938-9
Artificial intelligence in communication impacts language and social relationships - Scientific Reports
Artificial intelligence (AI) is already widely used in daily communication, but despite concerns about AI’s negative effects on society the social consequences of using it to communicate remain largely unexplored. We investigate the social consequences of one of the most pervasive AI applications, algorithmic response suggestions (“smart replies”), which are used to send billions of messages each day. Two randomized experiments provide evidence that these types of algorithmic recommender systems change how people interact with and perceive one another in both pro-social and anti-social ways. We find that using algorithmic responses changes language and social relationships. More specifically, it increases communication speed, use of positive emotional language, and conversation partners evaluate each other as closer and more cooperative. However, consistent with common assumptions about the adverse effects of AI, people are evaluated more negatively if they are suspected to be using algorithmic responses. Thus, even though AI can increase the speed of communication and improve interpersonal perceptions, the prevailing anti-social connotations of AI undermine these potential benefits if used overtly.
this list of jobs unthreatened by GPT, according to this OpenAI paper, suggests how "AI" will be used to help reify distinctions between intellectual and manual labor https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130.pdf
"social media" platforms are becoming TV
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgv79/social-media-is-dead
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgv79/social-media-is-dead
this is from an LRB essay about the 1848 revolution in France; it jumped out at me as a description of the attachment to social platforms (which serve as an experience of the social in microcosm) and whether they can be revolutionized. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/christopher-clark/bristling-with-barricades
a good point about data being created rather than collected https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/digitization-surveillance-colonialism/
Digitization, Surveillance, Colonialism - Liberties
As I write these words, articles are mushrooming in newspapers and magazines about how privacy is more important than ever after the Supreme Court ruling that has overturned the constitutionality of the right to have an abortion in the United States. In anti-abortion states, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment data, and information