2026-08-24 20:33 UTC
Alex Ross in the New Yorker:
"You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your e-mail is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voicemails from no one about nothing. A glance at the news reveals that the President is continuing to spew lies and obscenities; that a trillionaire is peddling white-supremacist propaganda on a social-media platform he owns; that a chart-topping musical artist is praising Hitler, or apologizing for praising Hitler, or praising Hitler once again. Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot 'naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.' It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus -- a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop."
Replies (4)
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@drj@typo.social 2026-08-24 20:47
@sunumbral@beige.party *Starship troopers meme* I'm doing my part, are you?
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@earthclimate@mastodon.social 2026-08-24 21:48
@sunumbral@beige.party part of it due to platforms lead by bigots + ppl hiding behind pseudonyms, and prior masses had no platform + bots to drive opinions, rules and enforcement insufficient.
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@Beatpoet13@mastodon.social 2026-08-24 22:05
@sunumbral@beige.party if any nobody can stop it, take yr anonimity as a force for change ...
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@alisynthesis@io.waxandleather.com 2026-08-24 22:49
@sunumbral@beige.party "A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does." That's exactly it! Thanks again, Alex Ross. <3