67 Comments
User's avatar
Bruce Cohen's avatar

I'm rooting for the EU to shut them both down as major sources of misinformation and purveyors of violent propaganda against minority groups (up to and including genocide in Zuck's case).

Expand full comment
Age P.'s avatar

Yikes. I don't want the EU or any governmental body in charge of what I'm allowed to see, just like I didn't want them to block Russia Today for me, even though I think it's clearly a propaganda channel. It's so patronizing.

Expand full comment
mpsingh's avatar

Instead shut them down for monopolising the public communication forum and Turing it into an addiction machine at the severe detriment of society

Expand full comment
ami's avatar

Gary, have you read about slopsquatting? A vulnerability served directly by AI hallucinations to hackers. It will be hard to solve until LLMs make up facts

Expand full comment
Gary Marcus's avatar

I wrote about it here before it had a name but may return to it

Expand full comment
Az's avatar

If Sam Altman creates a social media, I think hackers should give him a taste of his own medicine, by creating millions of bot accounts and flooding his site with AI generated slop. The goal won't be to trick the actual users of the site, but to poison the training data that will be fed to his "AGI".

Expand full comment
mpsingh's avatar

Why not root for decentralized and truly democratic platforms like the Fediverse

Expand full comment
Ttimo Cerino's avatar

Yes and per the discussion below re “wokeness” - how about TWO decentralized and democratic platforms: #1 for people who want to spend their time and energy fighting about politics and #2 for normal people who want to engage in civil discussion of a broad range of topics

Expand full comment
Jim McNeill🇬🇧SDP's avatar

🤣🤣 the Mastadon hordes are even woker than Bluesky, I got dumped from it for challenging the view that Israel is engaged in genocide

Expand full comment
Dick Dorroile's avatar

That sounds really tough for you. What's it like being victimized by the woke hordes? There are few people as oppressed as those who advocate for the current dominant foreign policy and social conservative narratives.

Expand full comment
Jim McNeill🇬🇧SDP's avatar

I found it hilarious. It confirmed my opinion that the Fediverse is stuffed full of misogynistic, antisemitic twats. And they wonder why it isn’t more popular?

Expand full comment
mpsingh's avatar

mastodon ain't the fediverse, plenty of software and there are a ton of communities in it; it is true that A good part of mastodon tends too far that direction but many instances aren't like that and if you aren't in a bad place which disconnects itself with every other instance (or one of the more awful annoying reactionary right type places) it's not hard to find a good place.

You also tend to see people be more tolerant of others in these places and exceptional behavior you won't attribute to a group because people aren't strictly categorising themselves a la twitter

Expand full comment
Jim McNeill🇬🇧SDP's avatar

Any examples? Every instance connected to the Fediverse that I found had rules of conduct that only a drag queen could have drafted.

Expand full comment
mpsingh's avatar

Not quite sure rn, The instances from what I could infer are a good fit for you seem to have close registerations?

People tend to gather based on interests or the community of people they are close to, the dynamics of this side of fedi are far more person oriented and you get a mental map of various communities and people.

Plenty of instances which aren't like that (you just have to be in the network as the large public ones are either the typical mastodon ones as you describe) but I seriously joining for the first time will be very jarring as there is a cultural influence of places like 4chan and tumblr, people tend to like anime, video games and a lot of people are proficient with computers (just a tendency of a community that you tend to only know of due to technical knowledge that it selects for that, but plenty of normal folks) The people oriented dynamics also tend to change your beliefs as a person and you gradually open up and get used to it via osmosis

If I find an open instance that fits you I'll try to let you know I suppose

Expand full comment
olimay's avatar

In the right column, should also be "Claims to support free speech but individually bans everyone who hurts his feelings"

Expand full comment
VH's avatar

@Gary Marcus, I am a bit disappointed when you join the (incredibly annoying) culture of the super-hero and super-villain that has permeated US politics and media for decades now and has entered other domains of public interest as well. Activities of large groups are focused into the identity of one figure head. The Great Leader. Whether Jobs or Musk, Trump or Obama. The Star System is still a highly effective marketing tool, fueled by attention be it positive or negative.

It is nearly totally irrelevant whether these people are nice or not. Power corrupts, absolute power absolutely. The odds are these people have long passed the threshold into not-so-nice territory. If not, they sooner or later will if they do not step away from power voluntarily before it is too late.

So why fall into the trap and join the choir, Gary Marcus?

I have enjoyed some of your criticism of the AI snake-oil bubble which I believe is very real indeed, and you have expertise and have made some pretty good predictions. On the other hand, I am regularily disappointed by you taking intellectual short-cuts (I found it not hard, for example, to create a working and recognizable pac-man in about 5 prompts using an AI programming tool, though I have no coding skills as a theatre student and film professional.) And I think you are diminuishing your valid critique by lashing out and throwing personal insults at figure heads. Not that they do not deserve it. But you are just not doing yourself a favour, in my view.

Expand full comment
João Pedro Martins's avatar

+1. Criticisms too personal, and self praise is annoying.

Expand full comment
Chara's avatar

Well this isn’t dripping with ulterior motive and manipulation at all.

Expand full comment
VH's avatar

Haha really? Interesting. I mean that seriously, that's not what I intended. What exactly are you reading as ulterior motives and manipulation?

Expand full comment
Stephen Schiff's avatar

One might hope that the number of social media platforms will proliferate to the point of unprofitability, with decreasing influence. As for myself es macht's nichts. I avoid that shit.

Expand full comment
Aaron Turner's avatar

It's hard to imagine how these people could possibly know and understand any less about machine cognition / AGI. You can't build reliable human-level machine cognition / AGI just by pumping boat loads of data into a model that can be described in 6 pages. And, even if you could, you can't build an internal model of the universe using data scraped from the internet - you have to put your robot boots on and actually experience the actual world (via a large sensor array) for years and decades.

Expand full comment
Ben P's avatar

From the link:

"While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. "

Too late Sam, Facebook already exists.

Expand full comment
S.S.W.(ahiyantra)'s avatar

It's more like instagram. That aside, i tried out "sora" & over there, i noticed the completely unexpected social media features.

Expand full comment
Ben P's avatar

Has instagram been overrun with AI clickbait images too? I'm not on it but I wouldn't be surprised.

Expand full comment
S.S.W.(ahiyantra)'s avatar

My acquaintances tell me that there are a lot of AI-generated images on instagram nowadays.

Expand full comment
Max Millick's avatar

I was reading this morning that OpenAI got another $40 billion investment from Softbank. Still no path to profitability. I'm so lost in this modern world. Investors seem to be, on the one hand, incredibly cautious and skittish, pulling their investments at the slightest whiff of market volatility or risk. Then plowing everything into an industry that loses billions of dollars each year, where capital investments expire just as quickly (chips burn out and need to be replaced, they are not reliable machines that last decades).

Think about how many homes could be built for $40 billion.

Expand full comment
The Phoenix's avatar

I don't think Sam is charming

Expand full comment
Maura's avatar

For a minute, I was like wait. There’s no way those pasty losers are that muscular. Then I saw “fabricated by Grok,” and the world righted itself.

Expand full comment
Larry Jewett's avatar

Just another “hallucination”, not unlike the “hallucination” that they are intelligent.

Expand full comment
Spartacus's avatar

Altman is just doing his best to secure an exit for his investors.

He will make a deal with beelzebub in a heartbeat for that.

Expand full comment
Larry Jewett's avatar

If he is looking for an X-it, something like X is it.

Expand full comment
Spartacus's avatar

Another half a billion, he's at least got salary.

Expand full comment
Larry Jewett's avatar

An X-it will X it* for sure

*Investor ROI

Expand full comment
Aaron Turner's avatar

Except that there is no deal to be had - his investors are f*cked, they just don't know it yet.

Expand full comment
Spartacus's avatar

Bwahaha

Expand full comment
Google Man's avatar

Goebells has to be the strong favourite.

Expand full comment
Arie te Stroete's avatar

In a war between these two? I’m cheering for the bullets. In this methapor I suppose that would be either the lawyers or the regulators

Expand full comment
Jim McNeill🇬🇧SDP's avatar

It seems that Bluesky may have a toxicity problem, particulary wrt UK law https://wingsoverscotland.com/learning-to-cope/

Expand full comment