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Good Friday Morning! Especially to whoever decided to fill a pothole so large in Great Britain that it covered both lanes. The pothole had closed an entire road, but some enterprising Brit chose to fill it with concrete overnight and hilariously “reopened” the road. Officials are so bewildered that they demand answers on who did it and are “hunting” that person. The people are, predictably, not saying a word. King Charles could get off to a good start by knighting whoever took the action.
This week, I’m diving into social media and artificial intelligence and why the combo is terrible for society—links to follow.
Quick hits:
- Bud Light sales are down for a fifth consecutive week. Don’t worry, y’all; Anheuser Busch will right the train and get things back on the tracks. The beer company is planning a new ad campaign for the summer. I assure you I am not making this headline up: “Bud Light to launch camouflage bottle amid transgender controversy.” That’s right: camo cans are the new savior of Bud Light. There are some mockups floating around Twitter. It’s up to you to decide whether that or the Babylon Bee headline was funnier: “To Win Back Old Customer Base, Bud Light Adds Mullets To Cans.” Market analysts have started downgrading the company’s stock, calling this a full-blown crisis.
- WIRED Magazine sat down for an interview with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. I’ve seen some puff pieces, but prostitutes have more self-respect than this journalist. This is the actual headline: “Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang: Sure, the US Secretary of Transportation has thoughts on building bridges. But infrastructure occupies just a sliver of his voluminous mind.” This a real opening paragraph: “The curious mind of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.” There were other paragraphs like it too. To be totally honest here, I don’t get the Mayor Pete cult in Democratic circles. It makes no sense. He’s the definition of an empty suit, has no accomplishments to his name, and is currently failing at being a Secretary of Transportation. His speeches read like AI-generated text filtered through a corporate buzzword generation machine. If you’re in the Mayor Pete cult, seek immediate help. For those of you with a National Review subscription, Charles C. W. Cooke wrote a hilarious parody of the piece here: I Love Pete Buttigieg.
- It seems clear at this point that CA Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein cannot perform the duties of her office and may not even know where she is. The New York Times has a long-ish piece going into Feinstein’s medical condition and what is going on. None of it is good. Politico reports that Democrats are on edge and holding their breath regarding her health. The SFGate is openly calling for her to resign. There are open questions as to whether or not Nancy Pelosi is unduly manipulating the situation. The problem is this: Democrats need Feinstein. Without her, Democrats don’t have the margins to push through judicial nominations OR pass a debt ceiling bill for the White House. After the debt ceiling situation gets dealt with, I’d expect the volume on her to resign to go up significantly. But aside from the clamor, there’s not much Democrats can do. Between Feinstein, Fetterman, and Biden, how the Democratic Party has treated and used the old and disabled is disgraceful.
- On the debt ceiling: the White House is quietly putting together a concessions package for Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Republican House. If McCarthy takes the weak hand he got dealt and turns it into a legislative victory over the White House after uniting House Republicans, it’ll be the deftest stroke of political genius from a Republican House Speaker in decades. I fully admit I have misread McCarthy. He’s done an astonishing job so far outmaneuvering the White House and Congressional Democrats. And Mitch McConnell is deferring to him in this fight.
Where you can find me this week
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[05/15/2023] Tax revenue plunges while Americans fight inflation – Conservative Institute
[05/19/2023] Disney blames Ron DeSantis for its own institutional collapse – Conservative Institute
Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, and the new “Perfect”
I left Instagram this week. And by departing, I marked my personal account for deletion. Meta gives all Facebook and Instagram users a chance to choose whether or not they want to reverse this decision for a month. I have no plans on doing that.
Of all the major social media accounts, I’ve been on Instagram for the least amount of time. I joined roughly in late 2015 on a whim after getting a new phone. I’ve been on Facebook forever. I joined it in 2006, immediately after committing to MTSU and getting my .edu email address, which was necessary to join Facebook. Around six to eight months later, Facebook opened up to everyone, and it was a big deal.
Twitter followed in 2009 when a friend got me into it. I’d never even heard of it. And then, when I was graduating from college, I formed a LinkedIn account. Going back even further, I know the social media landscape of MySpace and before that (thankfully, I never made a LiveJournal like many other angsty teens my age).
I had several reasons for dumping Instagram, not all of which are overly relevant here. But one of the last straws is the increasing use of artificial intelligence on social media platforms. When you think of AI, you probably think of “algorithms” and other things. And it’s certainly true that AI is getting used there.
But what struck me recently is the use of AI in creating fake influencers. I don’t mean using Photoshop, filters, or AI text generation to improve posts. What I mean is using AI to create fake people for the sole purpose of driving an audience.
Here’s an example from last summer:
At first glance, Kyra’s Instagram profile looks a lot like that of any other influencer. According to her bio, she’s a dream chaser and model. The 22-year-old from Mumbai, India, is thin, light-skinned, and conventionally attractive. She takes bathroom selfies and complains about the hassles of modern airline travel. But there’s a catch: She’s not real.
Kyra is only the latest in a growing number of Instagram influencers generated by artificial intelligence. With only 23 posts, Kyra has already amassed 113,000 followers, a number dwarfed by the online presence of other AI influencers, including Miquela (with 3 million followers), Shudu, Blawko, and Imma. Despite their origins in the imaginations of marketers and programmers, all of the meta–influencers clothe themselves in a thin veneer of authenticity.
In a May post on LinkedIn, Kyra’s creator, Himanshu Goel, business head at TopSocial India, wrote, “Since her first post, she has traveled to the mountains, beaches and the forts of Jaipur. She has done a fashion shoot, Valentine’s Day interaction with fans and even Yoga! Kyra’s journey has just begun and there are many more adventures and secrets to be revealed.”
On a similar note, the NYT did a story a few years back about how you could purchase “fake people,” all generated via AI, to use in video games or other places. The fascinating thing is that so many of these fake influencer accounts are doing the whole “model” route. That was what I saw on Instagram.
I was mindlessly scrolling one day, looking at memes and dumb videos. Instagram pitched me a random female thirst trap model account. Usually, I’d scroll past, but something was off about this one. It was like staring at something presented as real, but also, you’re getting the “uncanny valley” sensation as you look at it.
So, I pulled up the rest of the account, looked through it, and immediately realized this was AI. It was a profile with about 25 pictures posted, all using something like Dall-E to generate the perfect female form, in ideal lighting, in a perfect setting. Maybe it was the perfectness of it that made the uncanny sensation start. In any event, the account already had tens of thousands of followers. It was working towards something like the Kyra account above. It was less than a year old.
I’m old enough to remember how people complained about magazine covers, television, and movies setting unrealistic expectations for women. And those expectations fueled an uptick in body issues with everyone. Social media amplifies that by letting everyone you know present themselves in the best light possible 24/7/365.
What’s worse about this is that everyone knows it. And by everyone, I mean Facebook and Instagram. The Wall Street Journal released a report of internal documents from Meta showing this very thing:
Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”
For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.
“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.
It’s worth noting that this is with ordinary people posting photos. Social media takes all the issues from the mass media age, cranks it to eleven, and rips off the knob. The problem is that we’re crossing a new barrier. Now, people aren’t comparing themselves to other real humans; they’re comparing themselves to the perfection of AI.
You can hit a gym, diet, get in shape, and do many things. But there’s no plastic surgery, gym time, supplements, or anything that will ever get anyone to the level of an AI-generated image specifically programmed to portray perfection to the human mind.
If you tell an AI program to build a model representing the ideal form in US culture, then ask it to make those photos more likely to hit all the key points to go viral, it will do it. No questions asked. What’s the result, though? You’re teaching people they’re worthless if they fall below AI perfection. The meme page 9gag was even covering this point. They shared information from the Bulemia Project, which generated some “perfect models” to analyze:
The Bulimia Project, an eating disorder awareness group, monitored the findings and warned the results are largely unrealistic in their depiction of body types.
It said the images of women tended to have a bias toward blonde hair, brown eyes, and olive skin – while for men, there was a bias toward brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin.
It also found that AI’s collection of social media-inspired images was “far more sexually charged” than those based on everything else it found on the World Wide Web.
The study also showed there was some variation between body preferences for men and women. The images generated of the perfect female body, according to social media in 2023, featured tanned and Caucasian-looking women with slim figures and small waists.
For women, 37% of the AI-generated images included blonde hair, while 53% of the images included women with olive skin.
Images of the perfect male body featured muscly men with a six-pack, wearing tight t-shirts. For men, 67% of the AI-generated images included brown hair, and 63% of the images included olive skin.
Advertising agencies are seeing this and realizing: “We don’t have to scout for or find models anymore; we can create the perfect model and use them forever!” Think about it: these AI models will never age, look perfect in any fashion, and require no maintenance. You can create the ideal human for your advertising and move on.
Obviously, this doesn’t include things like celebrity endorsements. But even there, movies broach this subject to bring back dead stars.
On a related note, it’s also possible to feed an AI program the social media feed of a real man or woman and then have it generate porn of them. It’s a new wrinkle in the whole revenge porn genre of law. I suspect this will eventually get outlawed, but that hasn’t happened yet. And the abuses are only starting to wrack up.
Do I lay all this at the feet of Instagram, Facebook, and the social media universe of websites? No, of course not. They’re just tools on the internet to make it easier to connect with other people. Tools themselves are amoral; the uses of those tools are less so.
But I do find myself disillusioned by it all. And that’s where my break with Instagram, a primarily visual social media site, comes from. The social media age started by amplifying what we were already used to by comparing yourselves with the Joneses. Now, though, you’re comparing yourself with an AI-generated person/family/lifestyle tailored to make you feel less than or wild-eyed envious. And none of it is real.
The standard retort is: “None of it is real, anyway!” There’s some truth to that. But until now, even if it’s all fake, there’s a real person behind it. Even if you accept that phenomenons like Britney Spears or the Kardashians get created in a lab to be viral, it’s still real people involved. Britney Spears is a real person. The Kardashians are real. @HotModel0123 isn’t real.
There’s a secondary effect to all this: how will we get people to form families if everyone is searching for a person that doesn’t exist? Since 2007, the US birth rate has fallen every year. That’s roughly when Facebook started dominating social media. Causation isn’t correlation, and many causes are at fault. But there’s still the trendline that’s not going away.
Marriage, family formation, and the birth rate are all down. People point to cohabitation and living together. Still, the simple fact is that people aren’t hooking up and making babies. I partially blame the rise of dating apps, which are taking the same problems of social media and overlaying that onto dating/marriage.
What will happen to these issues when AI-created models become what everyone wants in a relationship? When you want to marry something that does not exist in human experience, that will impact the world much more than just pictures on a random influencer account.
We’ve jumped into an AI-created rabbit hole, and I don’t think anyone realizes it yet. We won’t know the effects this shift will have for many years. It’s hard to see any positives at the moment, though.
But for me, I’m leaving Instagram. This was one of many reasons, but the more I thought about that AI account and what it was designed to do, the less I wanted to be a part of Instagram. We’ll see what happens with other social media platforms; I have yet to make up my mind there.
Links of the week
The Full Durham Report on the Department of Justice’s website.
Teacher pushes gay pornography on middle schoolers, NBC provides a smokescreen for it – Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner
By The Standards Democrats Applied To Trump, Joe Biden Is A Traitor – The Federalist
With Trump Grounded, DeSantis Stumps in Iowa – RealClearPolitics
The Great Underestimation of DeSantis Starts to Unravel – RealClearPolitics
Taylor Lorenz: An Authoritarian ‘Journalist’ Flexing Digital Power – Red State
Twitter Thread(s) of the week
How a Washington Post reporter used pre-Elon Musk Twitter to attack people on the right.
The truth on late-term abortions.
Satire of the week
New TSA+ Program Allows Members To Pat Down Any Other Travelers They Want – Onion
To Win Back Old Customer Base, Bud Light Adds Mullets To Cans – Babylon Bee
Indiana Jones Changes Name To ‘Land Stolen From Indigenous Peoples Jones’ – Babylon Bee
Biden deserts presidency to fight in Ukraine: Wagner group no Cornpop – Duffel Blog
I LIVED IT: I Can’t Go to Bed Because My Lava Lamp Finally Started Doing Its Thing – Reductress
Girlfriend’s Annoying Habits Include Pointing Out All Man’s Annoying Habits – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!