WR 47: Whose vibe is it anyway?
Weekly Reckoning for the week of 9/12/24
Welcome back to the post-Thanksgiving Ethical Reckoner. In this Weekly Reckoning, we cover the beigest lawsuit of all time, Australia banning social media for under-16s, and how AI is being used in Day of the Dead celebrations. Then, I muse on the re-emergence of crypto and regulating from a place of hype vs hope.
This edition of the WR is brought to you by… the twinkly Christmas lights of Brussels (and the rain)
The Reckonnaisance
Whose vibe is it anyway? Two influencers duke it out.
Nutshell: One “sad beige” (or “clean girl”) influencers is suing another for copyright infringement, alleging she copied her posts.
More: The two are both Amazon influencers who make a living reviewing products on social media. Sydney Gifford is alleging that Alyssa Sheil has copied her posts, image, and overall vibe (or “content style”), harming her own posts’ performance. There are few laws around influencer conduct, so this could actually be a landmark case delimiting the distinctions between “creator and borrower.” Still, legal experts are skeptical that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is actually applicable in this case, which involves not identical images but similar (and very bland) ✨vibes✨.
Sometimes, you can be so basic that copyright law doesn’t even protect you. -Mia Sato
Why you should care: This case is interesting from a legal nerd perspective because influencer legal issues are very unsettled, but also from an algorithmic perspective. I’m half convinced that this whole thing is happening because Amazon is pushing similar products on them, Instagram and TikTok have siloed them into the same audience and reward the same aesthetic, and thus this is a case of algorithm-driven imitation. This is probably impossible to prove, but if it goes to trial, we’ll be watching for evidence. Either we have a stalker-esque situation or a remarkable case of algorithmic nudging. Whichever way it goes, watch this space.
Australia bans social media for under-16s
Nutshell: The law will likely take effect in late 2025 and will ban under-16s from opening accounts on platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
More: Australia continues to be a pioneer for fairly intense tech regulation. They were the first to require social media platforms to pay news publishers. There have been mixed results, with Meta declaring that it will no longer make deals with Australian news publishers. Now Australia is serving as a country-level experiment for a pretty extreme social media ban. It’s unclear how effective this ban will be, and people have criticized it for being based on flimsy evidence, but on the other hand, the next few years will be a giant evidence-collecting opportunity that could shine more light on the impact of social media on teens. Of course social media companies aren’t happy—except for YouTube, which is exempt from the law—but Norway and the UK may soon follow Australia.
Why you should care: Well, hopefully we all care about the well-being of kids, both online and offline. I wish I could tell you how this is going to pan out, but like I said, this is basically one big experiment. There’s definitely a possibility that this will have negative effects on kids, like queer kids who want to connect with people like them. But, depending on how the definition of “social media” is construed, those kids might still have access to forums and chatrooms—in other words, Web 1.0 might be revived.
Day of the Dead, brought to you by generative AI
Nutshell: Companies in Mexico used generative AI to create deepfakes of people’s deceased relatives for Día de Muertos.
More: Several companies—including a beer brand and a funeral home—launched social media campaigns to essentially deepfake people’s dead relatives, which instantly raised legal, ethical, and cultural questions. Legally, it’s fine to use photos of dead people, but in a country where 1/5 people were victims of cybercrime last year, it raised concerns that this could allow criminals to steal the identities of the deceased. Most of the companies’ privacy policy seemed to be “we don’t have room to store all the images so we delete them,” but this isn’t exactly reassuring. Then there’s the question of would the dead people want this, and it it, like one technologist claimed, “almost like ignoring the fact they’ve died”?
Why you should care: Black Mirror aside, this is a concrete example of how people are using generative AI to remember dead loved ones. Obviously I do not celebrate Day of the Dead, but I’m not sure if I agree with the expert who claimed thatches hinders the purpose of the holiday, which is to “reconnect with the memory of them and to celebrate their life.” So long as we know that this isn’t a true “resurrection”—unlike the middle Peverell brother—I think it can be a way to reconnect with a dead loved one. It may not be for me, but if it helps people grieve and remember, who am I to judge?
Extra Reckoning
Will crypto bros get the last laugh?
It’s no secret that I’m a crypto skeptic. Though it’s touted as the future of money, the reality is that cryptocurrency is a cumbersome, environmentally damaging casino. The technology underpinning it, blockchain (or distributed ledger technology) has some interesting applications, and I’m not saying crypto has no use cases whatsoever, but the future of money cannot consume as much electricity as Finland1 annually and confuse a computer science major trying to set up a wallet.
Brief crypto explainer
You might ask: I have a credit card that I can use online. I can tap my phone to pay in shops. Why do I need crypto?
Great question! You probably don’t. Crypto’s main appeal is that it claims to be “decentralized”—there’s no central bank controlling its distribution. All transactions and thus who holds how much of what crypto are recorded on a public digital ledger (the blockchain). However, to buy and sell crypto, you have to go through a crypto exchange, so there is still some amount of centralization, which causes problems when these often-sketchy platforms go under.
There are a bunch of different cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was the first and is still the most popular, although Ethereum has made inroads. Bitcoin is the only one explicitly considered by the CFTC to be a commodity. Most other cryptocurrencies are considered securities, and they’re traded as such. You can maybe buy something with Bitcoin, but you can’t with, say, the Hawk Tuah coin. So why do these exist? So-called “shitcoins” pop up left and right when crypto is having a boom. This is where the casino comes in—these coins are speculative investments, but currency they ain’t. These coins are where many crypto scams come in. Since anyone can create their own coin, “influencers” see it as a great chance to make a quick buck—the Hawk Tuah girl was accused of a $400+ million pump-and-dump—and crypto scams have proved incredibly profitable because of the veneer of the “next great thing” combined with just enough technological obfuscation to make digging behind the scenes difficult.2
I thought crypto was dead. What’s going on?
Dear reader, so did many of us. And yet Bitcoin has nearly doubled from its low this year, breaking $100,000 for the first time.
The recent crypto rally has been fueled largely by the market’s (correct) prediction that Donald Trump would win the 2024 US presidential election. Trump ally Elon Musk is a crypto advocate known for tweeting about Dogecoin, a shitcoin started as a joke and featuring a Shiba Ina. After Trump won, Dogecoin rallied, and Musk was tasked with (co-)running the Department of Government Efficiency… or DOGE. Trump has also announced David Sacks as his “AI and crypto czar.” The pairing of the two kills me, because it implies that the Trump administration will be all aboard the tech hype train.
I think that it’s important to distinguish hope from hype. Hope is the genuine desire for a technology to be revolutionary. Hype is trying to convince everyone else that it will be so. Hype’s motivations are less pure: you can hype up a technology because you believe in it (like me and my jet lag app3), but you can also hype up a technology because you have other interests—including financial ones. Hope requires acknowledgement of the flipside, that those hopes may not pan out. Hype is blinding.
When it comes to tech regulation, hope is a better motivator. When you regulate from a place of hope, you’re trying to chivvy the technology along while also recognizing that its impacts may not be all positive. I think this was what motivated the EU’s AI Act, which acknowledges the great potential of AI along with its risks. But leading with hype decreases the likelihood of any regulation at all, because it lends itself to the view that “regulation stifles innovation,” and when the technology is going to revolutionize <banking/work/literally everything>, that’s intolerable.
I do not like this line of reasoning. I’m of the view that good regulation stifles bad innovation—crypto scams are an innovation that we would be better off without. But when the techno-optimist counter-argument is “this technology is going to save the world,” we become the buzzkills, even when advocating for something simple like labeling potentially deceptive AI-generated content.
We’re unlikely to see any major AI regulation in the next administration, and any new policies are likely to promote full steam ahead AI and crypto development. Trump has promised to rescind Biden’s Executive Order on AI—I commented on why this would be bad for New Scientist—and may establish a Bitcoin reserve and launch further business ventures. Tech companies are going to become even more important, since in the absence of federal regulation (and in a very fragmented state legislative landscape), they’ll be the ones setting the standards for how they develop and deploy tech, and so it’ll be even more important for industry, academia, and civil society to partner to ensure that this is done so ethically.
In the face of an increasingly hype-y regulatory scene, those of us in tech ethics and governance will continue to be buzzkills. But I plan to be a hopeful one.
I Reckon…
that Stereopsia is going to be a blast—let me know if you’re in Brussels this week!
This is a 2021 figure, meaning it’s likely increased. And this is just Bitcoin, not crypto as a whole.
Check out Coffeezilla on YouTube for great explainers of crypto scams.
It’s 10:53pm in Brussels and I’m doing great!
Thumbnail generated by DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT with the prompt “Please generate an abstract impressionist painting in soothing shades of beige”.