sari

use AI to give users agency instead of stealing their agency.

If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the majority of respondents would prefer to live in a world where TikTok and Instagram did not exist!

Back in 2018, I explained this dynamic to Facebook’s head of NewsFeed, warning him that when BuzzFeed creates “meaningful content, it doesn’t get rewarded...the content that is working isn’t our best content” and I explained that the “entire digital media industry is faced with this dilemma. Do you make negative and polarizing content to win on Fac... See more

But the bigger loss of human agency comes from the billions of people that use these apps. These deep learning AIs are designed to maximize the time we all spend on these apps. While you are reading this memo, you are probably jonesing to switch over to Instagram or TikTok. It turns out when an app company doesn't care about content and asks an AI ... See more

Today, I can barely tell anyone apart. Many of the Substacks I follow use these big, figurative words that don’t really make sense in an attempt to go viral, which on this platform means getting subscribers and notes and comments. It’s like there’s this internet language that “works” for engagement (literal language, but also sense of style, and a ... See more

google’s core problem is that it was built to organize a web that no longer exists. the open web has been replaced by walled gardens, discord servers, newsletters, private forums, & algorithmic feeds that are never exposed to search. worse, the visible parts of the web that google still indexes have been overrun by seo-optimized sludge, ai-generate... See more

I don’t know how you can use LLMs without concluding that they’re already a very powerful technology — far more powerful than most experts would have predicted 10 years ago — with the potential to become more powerful in short order. The left may get dealt out of the hand if it doesn’t get better AI critics.

Hipster skepticism won’t help us understand AI’s potential or its risk

Coming from the left, the mood affiliation usually takes the form: “Tech bros think AI is cool, and tech bros are bad — therefore, AI is overhyped.” AI is often compared to crypto, a technology that’s least an order of magnitude less important. And in their hipster-esque dismiss... See more