The garbage on our screens
On the newest Techtonic (July 15, 2024) I spoke with Jason Koebler from 404 Media about how the spread of generative AI, and the absence of effective content moderation, are creating a “disastrous, zombified, cesspool” of an internet.
• Listen, but jump straight to the interview
• See playlist and comments
As Jason described in two 404 Media articles from June 24, the internet is looking more and more like a dying, decaying mall. Case in point is what’s happening at Facebook: it “has been overrun by AI-generated spam and outright scams,” Koebler writes, leading to
the proliferation of paid advertisements for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, and ads for electricians and roofers who appear to be soliciting potential customers with sex work.
As bad as this sounds, there are even worse things being shared on Facebook, with no meaningful content moderation restricting it. Meantime Facebook has mostly stopped responding to Koebler and other journalists when they question the company.
Robots singing
As social media embraces AI for scam posts, we’re also seeing explosive growth in AI-generated music, which is now facing a new legal challenge. Two AI-music startups, Sunio and Udio, appear to have trained their AI models with copyrighted music. That’s a problem for the record labels, which don’t want to be left out of the AI bonanza.
Evidence of the illicit training method was recently uncovered by record industry lawyers who were able to use Sunio and Udio to generate near-clones of well-known songs. One query asked the AI to generate a song in the style of a rock band whose name rhymes with “Meen May,” with a lead singer whose name rhymes with “Milly Moe Marmstrong.” The AI dutifully served up a clone of a Green Day song, strongly suggesting that the band’s music was ingested for training. (More in Jason’s article and, of course, our interview.)
The spread of AI music is a welcome development for companies like Spotify, which would love nothing more than to auto-generate streams that create profit without owing a penny to actual working musicians. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek recently brayed that “the cost of creating content [is] close to zero,” prompting Damon Krukowski - past Techtonic guest - to respond:
Obviously, it’s not true that the cost of creating content is close to zero. Ask anyone who creates it. . . . [Ek] insists that there is no cost to creating content, because he needs that to be true for his program to thrive.
Far from wanting to eliminate AI sludge, in other words, Spotify and Facebook and other tech companies need this extruded product, this Play-Doh glop, in order to continue their quest for growth at any cost. This is why the toxic sludge factories in Silicon Valley are working overtime to fill our screens with AI slop.
Something in the water
What happens when an entire society, day after day, pays attention to whatever Big Tech feeds them? Young and old, from toddlers to students to parents to retirees, their heads bent in prayer to the devices that show them - what? Garbage.
The social media industry, led by Facebook, is inexorably spiraling downward to amplify all manner of harmful content. Scams, hacks, malware, abusive content, extremist screeds, conspiracies - all used to monetize people’s attention.
The effects of this approach, at scale, are well-documented: more social isolation, more mental health issues, more political division. These are the factors - I need to point this out, as I did on the show last night - that create the conditions for someone to emerge with a gun and unleash murderous violence, like we saw a few days ago in Pennsylvania. A society can’t function when, day after day, it is fed garbage.
My best suggestion, for anyone who wants to opt out at least temporarily, is to put down the screen. If you’re feeling bold, delete the social media apps from your phone. An even bolder step would be - for those who can afford this - to delete your Facebook and Instagram accounts. We can’t change what Zuck smears onto the world’s screens, but we can choose not to look.
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Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good – see our services or join as a member
Email: mark@creativegood.com
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