There’s a tiger over there! (according to my phone)

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“Everybody is fighting for your attention, so your only real defense is to make it so that those stimuli don’t come in the door,” says Boston University cognitive neuroscientist David Somers. The idea that your technology should alert you when it thinks you should pay attention is relatively new, and, frankly, it’s a big step backward. You’re letting the bushes rustle nonstop, and telling yourself there’s a tiger over there.

“It’s so important that we define where we want to go as opposed to letting technology drive us and we’re just hanging on for dear life,” says author Amy Blankson, who works in the field of positive psychology, specifically on maximizing happiness.

Still, everyone gets a buzz from this high-octane news environment. Literally. Every notification, every tweet, every beep and buzz releases dopamine and other neurochemicals, providing a moment’s elation. As with any drug, your brain gets used to it. Perhaps even craves it.  

Reclaim control of what you read.

Emily Dreyfuss, Wired

23 Articles about Social Media & AI

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10 Best AI Tools for Social Media – Unite AI

Instagram Begins Randomly Showing Users AI-Generated Images of Themselves – 404 Media

Here’s what to know before using AI to craft your brand’s social media posts - Technical.ly

Meta plans to flood social media with AI-generated users and content - SiliconANGLE

Instagram is planning to introduce a generative AI editing feature next year that will allow users to 'change nearly any aspect of your videos' – The Verge

AI Social Media Users Are Not Always a Totally Dumb Idea – Wired  

Instagram Ads Send This Nudify Site 90 Percent of Its Traffic - 404 Media 

TikTok owner ByteDance plans to spend $12 billion on AI chips in 2025 - Reuters

Instagram’s head says social media needs more context because of AI – The Verge

Meta Permits Its A.I. Models to Be Used for U.S. Military Purposes - The New York Times

Does Anyone Need an AI Social Network? – NY Mag

The rise of fake influencers – Axios

Will AI Suck the Humanity Out of Social Media? – Social Media Today

Elon Musk’s X is a haven for free speech — and noxious AI images – Washington Post

Meta Launches Custom AI Bot Creation Platform in the US - Social Media Today

Facebook Is Already Mistakenly Tagging Real Photos as "Made With AI" – Futurism

Hot AI Jesus Is Huge on Facebook – The Atlantic

Meta Is Offering Hollywood Stars Millions for AI Voice Projects – Bloomberg

How Reddit Fits Into the AI World – Wall Street Journal

AI-generated influencers based on stolen images of real-life adult content creators are flooding social media – Wired   

Meta Moves to End Fact-Checking Program – New York Times

Is it still 'social media' if it's overrun by AI? – CBC

AI and Social Media Fakes: Are You Protecting Your Brand? – Law.com

Looking Down

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A small but detailed 2015 study of young adults found that participants were using their phones five hours a day, at 85 separate times. Most of these interactions were for less than 30 seconds, but they add up. Just as revealing: The users weren’t fully aware of how addicted they were. They thought they picked up their phones half as much as they actually did. Whether they were aware of it or not, a new technology had seized control of around one-third of these young adults’ waking hours.

Just look around you—at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

Andrew Sullivan, I used to Be a Human Being

The Web Almost Killed Me

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For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.  If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.

I realized I had been engaging—like most addicts—in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world.

Andrew Sullivan, I used to Be a Human Being

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

16 Articles about Social Media & AI

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Are you smarter than a pigeon?

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In the 1950s, Skinner began putting the birds in a box and training them to peck on a piece of plastic whenever they wanted food. Then the Harvard psychology researcher rigged the system so that not every peck would yield a tasty treat. It became random — a reward every three pecks, then five pecks, then two pecks. 

The pigeons went crazy and began pecking compulsively for hours on end.

Fast forward six decades. We have become the pigeons pecking at our iPhones, scrolling through news feeds, swiping left/right on Tinder for hours, the uncertainty of what we might find keeping us obsessed by design.

In the modern economy of tablets and apps, our attention has become the most valuable commodity. Tech companies have armies of behavioral researchers whose sole job is to apply principles like Skinner’s variable rewards to grab and hold our focus as often and long as possible.

Market research shows the average user touches their cellphone 2,617 times a day.

William Wan in the Washington Post 

In search of the digital facelift

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Unsurprisingly, a large body of research shows that viewing idealised or retouched images adds to the dissatisfaction that many people already feel towards their body. Research by Kristen Harrison, a media psychologist at the University of Michigan, shows that even disclosing that celebrity and advertising images are retouched makes many of us feel worse about ourselves. Becoming more aware of what others edit may heighten our awareness of our own supposed flaws. That may encourage us to spend longer using digital tools to repair them. And once you start it’s hard to stop. I felt better about posting my first FaceTuned photo than I would have if I hadn’t edited it. And since we’re more inclined to post images of ourselves that we like, says Harrison, “it’s self-sustaining because you want to do it again and again and again.” Beauty is attainable for all. Just don’t expect it to be more than a pixel deep. 

Amy Odell writing in 1843 magazine