WR 9: Influencers gambling and deepfake dancing; digital relationship detritus
Weekly Reckoning for the week of 4/12/23
Welcome back to the Ethical Reckoner. In this Weekly Reckoning, we cover influencers—who are doing some bad influencing but also may be replaced by deepfakes soon anyway—plus Threads coming to the EU and Google Gemini coming for ChatGPT. Then, I make a shocking confession about the state of my digital storage.
The Reckonnaisance
“Animate Anyone” uses TikTok dances to deepfake anyone from a photo
Nutshell: Researchers from Alibaba created a model that can take a “reference image” and a pose guide and creates a video of the person going through the poses.
More: The two use cases the paper gives are fashion video synthesis and dance video synthesis. This model was trained on TikTok dances scraped from the web, which creates an interesting scenario where, like authors and digital artists, influencers are worried that their own data will be used to replace them.
Why you should care: This definitely won’t be used only for funny dance videos. This—and the authors’ other work on talking head generation based on a single photo—represent a concerning leap forward in deepfake technology that is currently basically unregulated. Here’s a demonstration from the authors:
Meta’s Twitter Competitor Coming to the EU
Nutshell: Threads, which launched in most of the world in July, is launching in the EU this month after making changes to comply with European tech regulations.
More: It comes with significant changes to make it compliant with EU legislation: no more cross-platform messaging between Facebook and Instagram (which likely would violate the Digital Markets Act), the ability to delete your Threads account without also deleting your Instagram account (which would also violate the DMA), and the option of a “read-only” option where you can read Threads without making an account. This could boost Threads’ user count from 100 million to 140 million—still less than half of X/Twitter, but growing.
Why you should care: Well, we in Europe will finally find out what we’ve been missing out on. I signed up soon after launch in the US and for a while after coming back to the EU was stuck in a weird twilight zone where I could see Threads but not search for anything, but a lot of my friends were there from what I could see. Still, it’s unclear if Threads will find a purpose. It apparently isn’t news, politics, or academic dialog. F1 memes? Perhaps.
Google unveils GPT-4 competitor, Gemini
Nutshell: Google announced a new LLM, Gemini,1 that will power its Bard chatbot, making it competitive with ChatGPT.
More: Google claims that Gemini outperforms GPT-4 on a variety of multi-modal (i.e., using text, images, and audio) benchmarks, although there may have been some prompt engineering that helped them. There are three versions—Nano, Pro, and Ultra—and they’ll be integrating into Google products starting now, with Gemini Pro now powering Bard.
Why you should care: OpenAI has had the best chatbot for over a year with very little competition. A serious competitor could upend the LLM landscape and bring more turmoil to a company that’s had a rough month (to say the least). However, this also means that we have a new, easily accessible tool that is highly capable of making up facts (and with no documentation of their training data, safety methodology, or environmental impact). Google promises that for Ultra, they’re doing “extensive trust and safety checks,” but it would be nice if they’d done that for Pro, too.
Influencers are driving young Nigerians to sports betting sites
Nutshell: Sports betting and advertising are legal in Nigeria, but social media influencers may be fueling an increase in addiction by advertising sports betting services.
More: These influencers are part of a $2 billion industry’s “aggressive marketing campaign with very low attention to responsible gaming messages.” A gambling addiction nonprofit has reported an “exponential increase” seeking their help, and experts caution that the problem is only going to get worse. Children are especially vulnerable to influencer messaging, with 57.2% of school-aged children having gambled at least once.
Why you should care: Aside from it being tragic that students in Nigeria are gambling away their school fees, this is a warning for places that are legalizing in-person and online sports betting—including many US states since the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban in 2018—while not regulating gambling advertising (which is becoming increasingly personalized). In fact, the UK is deregulating gambling advertising, while many EU states are tightening their restrictions. Sports betting, especially apps, can promote addiction, and leaving it unregulated could create a public health problem.
Extra Reckoning
Confession: I am a digital pack rat.
I have 46,402 photos and 1,282 videos stored in iCloud. I do not delete my text messages or emails. And scroll far enough in my app folders (at least I’m an organized pack rat) and you’ll find dozens of apps that have been sucked into the cloud because I haven’t used them in so long but haven’t bothered to delete them.
Some of these digital artifacts bring me joy: iPhotos will surface happy memories, like a trip to Punta Cana from 2017. Others, mild confusion (turns out I’m much worse at Angry Birds than I used to be, and I’m still not sure why Apple Music still recommends what the person I dated for two months in 2018 is listening to). But others bring genuine strife, like when, shortly after a family member died, Snapchat surfaced a slideshow of them.
My PhD supervisor, Luciano Floridi, has detailed how humanity has moved from a culture of having to deliberately decide what to record—whether by carving in stone, writing on paper, or recording on a VHS—to having to decide instead what to delete. Now that everyone has a camera in their pocket and as much cloud storage as you’re willing to pay for, things are recorded more or less by default; we snap pictures with our smartphones without thinking about it, whereas with a film camera, you only had so many shots, so each required forethought. And now, we create and consume an incredible amount of data every year.
Cloud storage has climate impacts that shouldn’t be ignored. But I want to think more about the impacts of the storage and surfacing of data on our relationships. Broadly, the digital era is reshaping our relationships (both romantic and platonic), while they’re happening and after they’ve ended. To start with the obvious, we don’t have to write letters and wait weeks for them to get to their destination anymore. Being in more or less constant digital communication with the ability to share many forms of content has likely changed how relationships form and grow, but it also changes what happens after they end. After a romantic relationship ended, you could put love letters in a box, burn them, or return them, which served purposes from nostalgia to closure. But what do you do with the text thread from an ex? Or shared albums? Or playlists you made for them? Destroying something tangible is a weighty act, and in our “delete culture” where recording is the default, deleting something important feels at once significant—it’s gone forever—but at the same time trivial. You aren’t left with a pile of shredded pages; you tap a screen, the content disappears, and the next piece shifts up to take its place. Poof. It’s like the photo or playlist or text never existed in the first place. There’s nothing cathartic about it, just a general sense of uneasiness. The closest thing we seem to have to burning an ex’s letters or smashing the mixtape they made for you is “sanitizing” your social media—deleting every photo of an ex from an account—which over 1/3 of singles have done at some point. But social media has always been a public forum, so it’s as much a way to present ourselves to our friends/the general public as it is a personal archive, and deleting a photo from Instagram doesn’t remove it from your personal archive.
Sure, if there are photos that I don’t want to surface regularly, I could back them up and delete them from my phone, but that doesn’t help with shared content, a new wrinkle that our digital culture has introduced. I still have a bunch of shared albums from a relationship that has ended, and in the immediate aftermath, I remember wondering if they would suddenly disappear from my device. But they didn’t, and I didn’t touch them, either. So now we’re in a détente that will last… forever? Physical relics of relationships, if kept, could be out of sight and out of mind, but our modern technology keeps them ever-present, just a click away—or involuntarily when they’re algorithmically suggested by your phone. Again, memories of being on a beach in Mexico: great! Photos of someone you’ve just broken up with? Not so great.
All this to say, our developing digital “delete culture” is creating new considerations for what to do in the aftermath of a relationship, and the norms still seem to be working themselves out. Platforms are building tools to help navigate transitions—while writing this, I discovered that iPhotos has a setting that lets you exclude someone from featured photos—but non-photographic digital relics still aren’t addressed. Perhaps this will change as generations that grew up with their relationships embedded in delete culture become the ones making decisions about products, but our digital forms of relating to each other will also keep evolving, ensuring easy access to memories for as long as we want them, but also many awkward moments for as long as the bits stay on our devices.
I Reckon…
That the NYT had to try really hard to come up with a list of important figures in AI with zero women.2
Unclear where the name came from—it would make more sense for something relating to digital twins.
How about: Fei-Fei Li, who is largely responsible for advances in computer vision through her creation of ImageNet and a founder of the human-centered AI movement; Joy Buolamwini, who uncovered racial and gender bias in commercial AI services; Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, who were fired from Google for publishing a paper about the risks of large language models but continue to research AI and its impacts; Alondra Nelson, who oversaw the development of the US Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights; Kate Crawford, the scholar/artist who wrote the brilliant “Atlas of AI”; Cynthia Breazeal, who developed the first social robot; and Daphne Koller, who co-founded Coursera and brought AI education to many people. I could go on.
Thumbnail generated by DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT with the prompt “An impressionist-style abstract painting titled 'Digital Relationship Detritus'. This piece interprets the theme of digital relationships with a more consistent color palette, focusing on shades of blue and green to convey a sense of digital connectivity and emotional depth. The painting should mimic the brushwork and texture typical of impressionism, with softer, less defined shapes and forms. Elements that suggest digital symbolism, like pixelated textures or circuit-like patterns, should be subtly integrated, blending seamlessly with the impressionist style to symbolize the intertwining of human emotions and digital communications.”
I hope you shared your list of women who have shaped AI as a comment on the NYT article! Also, loved the Extra Reckoning on our digital artifacts. Cleaning up and organizing old folders of photos is just one of those rainy day tasks that is too easy to put off, so we do.