AI Content Sludge, New Tea With Alice with Maris Kreitzman, Salon Details

Picture Attribution, Laser Fraser

I think I want to figure out how to say something about AI and the Content Model of the internet. Maybe for my show or maybe for something else.

A theme that comes through at least once in most of my shows and has been present in my mind a fair bit has been the idea that we are bad at attributing value to things that can’t easily be quantified (even when we acknowledge that they ought to be valued). It appeared first in Savage, in the joke about "The Bet" we make that we'll be able to enjoy ourselves when we retire, and it's appeared in every show since, in one form or another. 

Individually we might be able to “irrationally” factor the unquantifiables (happiness, time with our family, not feeling like shit in the morning, liking our colleagues) into our equation (I’m going to take this job that pays 10% less because it will make me x% happier and some amount more morally able to sleep well at night, where happiness and ethical self comfort aren’t really things you can really render into a percentage.*) But the moment we begin to operate within a system, it becomes functionally almost impossible to factor in the unquantifiables, and so they tend to disappear.

Things like… kindness, caring for others, taking a load off someone who looks a bit stressed out, making social life smooth, disappear out of the system and into the cracks of society, where they tend to be maintained by good people in their spare time or at their individual cost. It becomes a tax on the kind.

Sometimes, there will be a proxy measurement that systems will use for the unquantifiables. For example, say people buy more tomatoes when their friendships are going well (a good friendship is like a caprese salad...) or whatever. A system or company that says it values friendships (and how much healthy relationships improve the quality of their workers productivity), might track tomato sales as a proxy for that friendship non-metric.

But then of course, if someone's job relies on them proving that they're keeping company friendship stats high, and their job success is measured by tomato sales, they might just buy a bunch of tomatoes and warehouse them or throw them into the ocean. In a less tomato and more reality based scenario, an author might want lots of people to connect emotionally with their book, the proxy for that would be book sales, book sale success often depends on opening weekend stats, and publishers who want to pitch best sellers will buy up copies of their own books in the hope that the appearance of success will beget actual success. How many people read the book has somehow been almost entirely edged out of the equation.  

IN THE SAME WAY (sorry, this point I'm thinking of needs so much setup, I have no idea how I'm going to squish it down into a comedy format... maybe it's meant for something else), so much of the internet is now run by algorithms that measure engagement (clickthroughs), which is driven often by quantity of content, which means that the quality of content becomes almost irrelevant to the process of creators being pressured to constantly generate filler. 

And now, with AI content generation (drawing from a bank of so far mostly human created content to generate itself, but -with the speed it creates - soon to be drawing from a  proportionally more and more AI generated bank of 'inspiration'), those algorithms will be counting robot looks at robot generated content, (generated from robot generated content in increasingly samey sludginess) and the whole system will either roll downhill gathering cruft and speed like a cartoon snowball, or we'll have to figure out new metrics from scratch.** 

* I wanted to say “percentivise”, but didn’t.

** and immediately start gaming them again, I assume

NEW TEA WITH ALICE PODCASTS UP!

There's an episode with Maris Kreitzman who is an author and Book Personality, about workers rights, the publishing industry and how to make the world a better place. 

Apple: here

Non-Apple: here

SALON AND WORKSHOP DETAILS FOR THIS WEEK

Salon this week will be at 8.30am Thursday 9 March SYDNEY TIME, (time conversion permalink here) and the writers meeting/ workshop will be at 9-11am Sunday 12 March SYDNEY TIME (time conversion permalink here). If you're in the UK or US, these will fall on the day before as I'm in Australia and the future.