Big week for blogs

Imagine you’re a middle-to-upper class suburban American with either a mild-to-severe fear of home invasions or a casual-to-obsessive impulse to monitor the whereabouts of your teenage children, or both. According to your screen time data, your most-used app is Nextdoor. You’re a member of a PTO or an HOA or something. You’re the ideal market for Wyze’s trendy at-home surveillance tech.

Now imagine that on Friday, February 16, you were spontaneously granted the power to snoop on the camera feed of somebody else’s home instead of your own. Dream come true, right? You basically won the lottery – only 0.25% of Wyzeheads, or around 13,000 total users, were blessed with this temporary privilege. If I were you, I’d be ecstatic.

Big week for violations of individual privacy!

In Alabama, Attorney General Steve Marshall will not be prosecuting in vitro fertilization providers for crimes against humanity, despite overwhelming evidence of their routine and systematic genocide of fertilized embryos, which are people now. In Alabama.

Questions abound. Like: Are all male citizens of Alabama transgender, technically? Can pregnant citizens of Alabama legally drive in the HOV lane? Will rates of teenaged reproductive coercion continue to rise nationally at an even pace, or will they begin to spike in Alabama? Does Alabama even have HOV lanes?

Big week for Reddit!

I just googled “does Alabama have HOV lanes reddit” and all the top results were related to the fertilized embryo personhood ruling. You actually don’t have to add the word “reddit” to your searches anymore, but I was feeling nostalgic. Lately, I’ve just been savoring the experience of typing a search term, scrolling through results, and independently selecting three or four appropriate links, which is an old-fashioned approach to web browsing and a bad user experience, purportedly.

I’m also nostalgic for Tuesday, when Reddit was still an internet forum site, not a real-time training dataset for Google’s AI stuff. Congrats guys, you are now watching porn on the world’s largest publicly-traded living LLM corpus. You put up a good fight. Here’s the running tally, for those who aren’t keeping track:

Places where you can be somewhat confident that your writing will not be plagiarized by a guy named Steve*

Places where you cannot be confident your writing will not be plagiarized by a guy named Steve

Big week for guys named Steve!

Speaking of things that are mostly for weird porn, Google announced on Wednesday that its brand-new AI image generator will be written and directed by Lin Manuel Miranda. Horseshoe Theory, by the way, is when the left and right-wing mutually agree that computer-generated multicultural Nazism is offensive.

Image generators are profoundly strange pieces of software that synthesize averaged-out content from troves of existing media at the behest of users who want and expect countless different things. They’re marketed as software that can produce photos and illustrations — as both documentary and creative tools — when, really, they’re doing something less than that. That leaves their creators in a fitting predicament: In rushing general-purpose tools to market, AI firms have inadvertently generated and taken ownership of a heightened, fuzzy, and somehow dumber copy of corporate America’s fraught and disingenuous racial politics, for the price of billions of dollars, in service of a business plan to be determined, at the expense of pretty much everyone who uses the internet. They’re practically asking for it.

Which is the only normal and sane response to any of that, honestly — thank you John Herrman of New York Magazine’s Intelligencer — but it still criminally underemphasizes the fact that all AI stuff is still really for porn mostly.

I don’t blame anyone for habitually avoiding the topic of AI porn; I try to avoid thinking about it too. But you (women, parents, cops, etc.) are going to be forced to think about it soon.

Last night, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal published flashy Instagram pedophile economy investigations: moms selling pictures of their tween daughters to grown men using the platform’s new subscription and tipping features. Who could have predicted that.

Also this week in AI flops: Giant rat penis in a scientific journal (see thumbnail).

Big week for capitalism breeds innovation!

In a deeply unserious and comically evil move, some extremely smart lawyers from Amazon have decided to run the “NLRB unconstitutional” argument, suggesting that the National Labor Relations Board (the only federal mechanism for enforcement of labor laws) “infringes on executive powers stipulated in the Constitution,” “denies the company a trial by jury,” and “violates its due process rights.” Not any specific action or procedure the NLRB has undertaken in particular – the structure, or existence, of the board itself

Friend of the blog Nick Devor has a longread in Barron’s about how video game companies are innovating new strategies to get children addicted to gambling. Capital One is innovating lowkey vertical integration with Discover, while the American people continue to innovate more credit card debt. The fine gentlemen of Goldman Sachs are innovating worker productivity pseudoscience, claiming the US GDP will grow 1% in the next four years if current Ozempic prescriptions continue to trend upward. Keep ‘em skinny and broke, Uncle Sam. Also, new banana just dropped.

Big week for journalism, but I don’t have time for all that right now

I’ll probably write something more cohesive about the music theater major-ification of journalists next week. However, a brief moment of silence for Vice, which just died. Here’s how Emanuel Maiberg, a laid-off Motherboard reporter now at 404 Media, put it:

Somehow, amazingly, VICE managed to take a brand I and other teenagers thought was cool and leverage it into a legitimate news operation that published important and shocking reporting from across the world. This was such an incredible feat that everyone—investors, the most powerful people in media, and VICE leadership itself—was convinced that the company would carry its millennial audience into a new age where it would replace the likes of CNN and the New York Times. I know that this is now hard to believe but people, including myself, actually thought it was possible, and bet millions of dollars on this being a likely outcome.

Then, in what has to be the greatest errors in the history of the media business, VICE decided that if it was going to replace CNN it would do so by building its own cable news channel, a medium enjoyed exclusively by baby boomers, and in order to fund this massive and idiotic undertaking VICE took on an investment that it could never repay. The only way to maintain the fantasy of its multi-billion dollar valuation was to keep pouring money into its foray into television, which eventually resulted in cutting back on the reporting resources, especially those published to the internet and in particular YouTube where VICE had a dominant position, which made VICE good in the first place. Good money after bad, business people upholding the multi-billion dollar fantasy while draining the company’s budget for executives bonuses, and then death.

If you’ve read this far: Help, I’m being held hostage and brutally tortured by the exposed-bulb fluorescent overhead lights in my office. Do blue light glasses actually work? If anybody knows, or has any other suggestions besides gouging my eyes out, message me.

*This blog ascribes to the Guy Named Steve model of AI ethics, which posits that all ethical dilemmas arising from AI output can be resolved by replacing the word “AI” with the name “Steve.” In any given instance, if it is not okay for some guy named Steve to do that, then it is also not okay for AI to do that.