Tech created a global village — and puts us at each other’s throats

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As we get additional information about others, we place greater stress on the ways those people differ from us than on the ways they resemble us, and this inclination to emphasize dissimilarities over similarities strengthens as the amount of information accumulates. On average, we like strangers best when we know the least about them.

The effect intensifies in the virtual world, where everyone is in everyone else’s business. Social networks like Facebook and messaging apps like Snapchat encourage constant self-disclosure. Because status is measured quantitatively online, in numbers of followers, friends, and likes, people are rewarded for broadcasting endless details about their lives and thoughts through messages and photographs. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. One study found that people share four times as much information about themselves when they converse through computers as when they talk in person.

Progress toward a more amicable world will require not technological magic but concrete, painstaking, and altogether human measures: negotiation and compromise, a renewed emphasis on civics and reasoned debate, a citizenry able to appreciate contrary perspectives. At a personal level, we may need less self-expression and more self-examination.

Technology is an amplifier. It magnifies our best traits, and it magnifies our worst.

Nicholas Carr writing in the Boston Globe

Technology that makes us less human

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Like an episode out of Black Mirror, the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” AI expert Leif Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships.” What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. - Tyler Austin Harper writing in The Atlantic

Performance Ratings Don’t Tell Us What You Think They Do

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A significant body of research has demonstrated that each of us is a disturbingly unreliable rater of other people’s performance. The effect that ruins our ability to rate others has a name: the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect, which tells us that my rating of you on a quality such as “potential” is driven not by who you are, but instead by my own idiosyncrasies—how I define “potential,” how much of it I think I have, how tough a rater I usually am. This effect is resilient — no amount of training seems able to lessen it. And it is large — on average, 61% of my rating of you is a reflection of me. In other words, when I rate you, on anything, my rating reveals to the world far more about me than it does about you.  

13 Articles about How Companies are using AI

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Revealing ourselves without realizing it

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When we talk about ourselves, telling others who we are, researchers say the same part of our brain lights up as when we brainstorm ideas, discuss our dreams, or speak extraneously. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found this to be the case, even when musicians improvise. The same area of the brain is at work in these off-handed dispatches, displaying a musical autobiography of sorts.

When we are engaged in these intensely personal pursuits, we not only reveal intimate parts of ourselves, researchers say a part of the brain involved in self-control and planning is shut down.

Stephen Goforth

Eros as God

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We must not give unconditional obedience to the voice of Eros when he speaks most like a god. The real danger seems to me not that the lovers will idolize each other but that they will idolize Eros himself. The couple whose marriage will certainly be endangered by (lapses), and possibly ruined, are those who have idolized Eros. They expected that mere feeling would do for them, and permanently, all that was necessary. When this expectation is disappointed, they throw the blame on Eros or, more usually, on their partners.

CS Lewis
The Four Loves

Love as Dependency

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The second most common misconception about love is the idea that dependency is love. Its effect is seem most dramatically in an individual who makes an attempt or gesture or threat to commit suicide or who becomes incapacitating depressed in response to a rejection or separation from a spouse or over.

Such a person says, “I do not want to live, I cannot live without my husband (wife, girlfriend, boyfriend), I love him (or her) so much.” And when I respond, as I frequently do, “You are mistaken; you don not love your husband (wife, girlfriend, boyfriend).” “What do you mean?” is the angry question. “I just told you I can’t live without him (or her).” I try to explain. “What you describe is parasitism, not love. When you require another individual for your survival, you are a parasite on that individual. There is no choice, no freedom involved in your relationship. It is a matter of necessity rather than love. Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

16 Articles about Social Media & AI

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Mental shortcuts work — until problems get complex

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Franck Schuurmans, a guest lecturer at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, has captivated audiences with explanations of why people make irrational business decisions. A simple exercise he uses in his lectures is to provide a list of 10 questions such as, “In what year was Mozart born?” The task is to select a range of possible answers so that you have 90 percent confidence that the correct answer falls in your chosen range. Mozart was born in 1756, so for example, you could narrowly select 1730 to 1770, or you could more broadly select 1600 to 1900. The range is your choice. Surprisingly, the vast majority choose correctly for no more than five of the 10 questions. Why score so poorly? Most choose too narrow bounds. The lesson is that people have an innate desire to be correct despite having no penalty for being wrong.

Gary Cokins

The oppressive Standard of Extroversion

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The archetypal extrovert prefers actions to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all to often we admire one type of individual—the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.” Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking

Articles about Student Journalists Covering Gaza Protests

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The Less Traveled Road

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You’ve got briers below you and limbs above you. There's a log to step across. Then a hole to avoid. They all slow you down. Will getting past those obstacles really be worth the effort? The path of adventure and self-definition can be punctuated with periods of intense loneliness and nagging doubt. There’s no guarantee about how it all ends.  

Stephen Goforth

16 Great Quotes about AI Fakes & Detection

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There are limited guardrails to deter politicians and their allies from using AI to dupe voters, and enforcers are rarely a match for fakes that can spread quickly across social media or in group chats. The democratization of AI means it’s up to individuals — not regulators — to make ethical choices to stave off AI-induced election chaos. – Washington Post

Adobe surveyed more than 2,000 people in the U.S. and 63% of said they would be less likely to vote for someone who uses GenAI in their promotional content during an election. – Fast Company

Even a false-positive rate in the single digits will, at the scale of a modern social network, make tens of thousands of false accusations each day, eroding faith in the detector itself. - IEEE Spectrum 

It took me two days, $105 and no expertise whatsoever to launch a fully automated, AI-generated local news site capable of publishing thousands of articles a day—with the partisan news coverage framing of my choice, nearly all rewritten without credit from legitimate news sources. I created a website specifically designed to support one political candidate against another in a real race for the U.S. Senate. And I made it all happen in a matter of hours.- Wall Street Journal

"Tools to detect AI-written content are notoriously unreliable and have resulted in what students say are false accusations of cheating and failing grades. OpenAI unveiled an AI-detection tool in Jan, but quietly scrapped it due to its “low rate of accuracy.” One of the most prominent tools to detect AI-written text, created by plagiarism detection company Turnitin.com, frequently flagged human writing as AI-generated, according to a Washington Post examination." – Washington Post

It’s important to remember that generative models shouldn’t be treated as a source of truth or factual knowledge. They surely can answer some questions correctly, but this is not what they are designed and trained for. It would be like using a racehorse to haul cargo: it’s possible, but not its intended purpose … Generative AI models are designed and trained to hallucinate, so hallucinations are a common product of any generative model … The job of a generative model is to generate data that is realistic or distributionally equivalent to the training data, yet different from actual data used for training. - InsideBigData

“No single tool is considered fully reliable yet for the general public to detect deepfake audio. A combined approach using multiple detection methods is what I will advise at this stage." Politifact

Too many educators think AI detectors are ‘a silver bullet and can help them do the difficult work of identifying possible academic misconduct.’ My favorite example of just how imperfect they can be: A detector called GPTZero claimed the US Constitution was written by AI. – Washington Post

Most deepfake audio detection providers “claim their tools are over 90% accurate at differentiating between real audio and AI-generated audio.” An NPR test of 84 clips revealed that the detection software often failed to identify AI-generated clips, or misidentified real voices as AI-generated, or both.”  - NPR 

In a year when billions of people worldwide are set to vote in elections, AI researcher Oren Etzioni continues to paint a bleak picture of what lies ahead. “I’m terrified. There is a very good chance we are going to see a tsunami of misinformation.” – New York Times

Google appears to have quietly struck a deal with one of the most controversial companies using AI to produce content online: AdVon Commerce, the contractor linked to Sports Illustrated's explosive AI scandal.  Google is trying to have it both ways: modifying its algorithms to suppress AI sludge while actively supporting attempts to create vastly more of it. – Futurism

Most online detection tools do not provide sufficient information about their development, making it difficult to evaluate and trust the detector results and their significance. - Global Investigative Journalism Network 

Run some of your other writing dated before the arrival of ChatGPT in the fall of 2022 through an AI detector, to see whether any of it gets flagged. If it does, the problem is clearly the detector, not the writing. (It’s a little aggressive, but one student told me he did the same with his instructor’s own writing to make the point.) – Washington Post

Men are quite confident (72%) in their ability to tell real news from fake news than women (59%), according to new polling from the Ipsos Consumer Tracker. We see a similar gender gap when it comes to our perceived ability to tell content that was created by AI. - Ipsos

A former high school athletic director was arrested after allegedly using AI to impersonate the school principal in a recording that included racist and antisemitic comments. The principal was temporarily removed from the school, and waves of hate-filled messages circulated on social media, while the school received numerous phone calls. – CBS News

Dubbed “model disgorgement,” AWS researchers have been experimenting with different computational methods to try and remove data that might lead to bias, toxicity, data privacy, or copyright infringement. – Semafor