Researchers have worked out how to distinguish elephant ivory from the mammoth variety – useful for when smugglers are caught. CC-licensed photo by James St. John on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 9 links for you. Piano. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Gen Z is losing its political voice on social media • TechCrunch
Amanda Silberling:
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According to young political content creators, the ban could decimate Gen Z’s access to political news and information.
“An unfortunately large amount of 18- to 24-year-olds find out information about local elections from TikTok, so my heart is breaking,” Emma Mont, a political content creator, told TechCrunch. According to the Pew Research Center, about a third of American adults between ages 18 and 29 regularly get their news from TikTok.
“I think it’s going to have an impact not only on the people who provide information, but also the people who receive that information,” Mont said. “Part of the reason I make the content I do is that I know there’s someone who’s watching and this is the first time they’re ever gonna learn about Roe v. Wade, or whatever I’m talking about.”
For most content creators, the transition away from TikTok is difficult, but not insurmountable — many full-time creators already cultivate multi-platform followings, rather than depending on one platform, in preparation for this exact kind of worst-case scenario (remember Vine?).
Instagram Reels is a clear alternative to TikTok, but for political creators, it’s not a real option. As of March, Instagram is filtering out political content from users that you don’t already follow. That means that it’s basically impossible for political creators and activists to reach a wider audience.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” said Pratika Katiyar, a Northeastern University student and research assistant at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “There’s no need for Instagram to limit political content. That’s just driving users away from their platforms.”
Even before Instagram’s recent policy update, users alleged that their posts about the war in Gaza were being suppressed. Meta communications director Andy Stone chalked up these complaints to a “bug” that had “nothing to do with the subject matter” of the posts.
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Given how much TikTok skews the information that it allows (some fascinating threads on Twitter about the defaults it shows, and the censorship that goes on), the TikTok ban doesn’t sound like the worst thing. Also, have these 18-24 people heard of these things called news organisations?
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Why AI is failing at giving good advice • Maxim Zubarev
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TLDR: ChatGPT generates responses based on the highest mathematical probabilities derived from existing texts on the internet. Popular advice (for various reasons) is seldomly good, nor (by definition) uniquely applicable, nor (mostly) founded on actual experience. You are probably better off taking advice from a real person who can empathize and knows what they are talking about.
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But if you want to read the longer version, there’s the whole rest of the blogpost. Which does expand on it usefully.
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US fertility rate falls to record low • WSJ
Jennifer Calfas and Anthony DeBarros:
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American women are giving birth at record-low rates.
The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier, federal data released Thursday showed. It is the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s.
The decline reflects a continuing trend as American women navigate economic and social challenges that have prompted some to forgo or delay having children. A confluence of factors are at play. American women are having fewer children, later in life. Women are establishing fulfilling careers and have more access to contraception.
At the same time, young people are also more uncertain about their futures and spending more of their income on homeownership, student debt and child care. Some women who wait to have children might have fewer than they would have otherwise for reasons including declining fertility.
“People are making rather reasoned decisions about whether or not to have a child at all,” said Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “More often than not, I think what they’re deciding is ‘Yes, I’d like to have children, but not yet.’”
Total fertility estimates the number of children a woman would give birth to in her lifetime. The estimates don’t account for what women actually decide in later years, said Brady Hamilton, a co-author of the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
The number of births last year was the lowest since 1979, according to provisional data. About 3.59 million children were born in the US in 2023, a 2% drop compared with 3.66 million in 2022.
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Facebook’s bizarre AI images now on LinkedIn, too • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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The same types of bizarre AI images that have repeatedly gone viral on Facebook have begun to make their way to LinkedIn. In some cases, these images are performing very well, as is the case on Facebook. In others, they are identified as AI by a majority of the commenters.
We’ve covered the success of AI-generated content farming on Facebook, where bizarre AI images of “shrimp Jesus,” hot flight attendants, elaborate wood carvings and sand sculptures, and children building extremely elaborate things out of trash have repeatedly gone megaviral and are getting fed to people via the platform’s recommendation algorithms. The same type of images are going viral on LinkedIn, which is nominally for work but has many bizarre corners and its own, often deranged types of engagement hacking.
“This is an amazing work of craftsmanship, and Mark should see this,” a post featuring an AI-generated child standing next to a gigantic AI-generated gourd (or wood?) carving of Mark Zuckerberg reads. “Please, re share so this can get to Mark Zuckerberg.” The post has 1,139 reactions and had 133 comments before the creator turned them off.
Some of these images have been discovered by the r/linkedinlunatics subreddit, but I was able to find many other examples by searching for the same types of repetitive captions that these images are posted with on Facebook.
“I think the kid is so talented and has a great future,” one account wrote beside an image of an AI-generated child standing next to an elaborate AI-generated sculpture of the soccer player Ronaldo. “Don’t you agree he did his best bringing out Ronaldo sculpture from a tree.”
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Maybe it should be an interview requirement to identify this junk. Though the pictures are truly hilarious, particularly the “Zuckerberg emerging from an orange” one.
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Dazhon Darien: ex-athletic director accused of framing principal with AI arrested at airport with gun • The Baltimore Banner
Kristen Griffith and Justin Fenton:
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Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School’s former athletic director Thursday morning and charged him with using artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the public to believe Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors.
Dazhon Darien, 31, was apprehended as he attempted to board a flight to Houston at BWI Airport, Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. Darien was stopped for having a gun on him and airport officials saw there was a warrant for his arrest. Police said they did not know whether Darien was trying to flee.
Darien was charged with disrupting school activities, after investigators determined Darien faked Eiswert’s voice and circulated the audio on social media in January, according to the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office. Darien’s nickname, DJ, was among the names mentioned in the audio clips he allegedly faked.
“The audio clip … had profound repercussions,” police wrote in charging documents. “It not only led to Eiswert’s temporary removal from the school but also triggered a wave of hate-filled messages on social media and numerous calls to the school. The recording also caused significant disruptions for the PHS staff and students.”
Police say Darien made the recording in retaliation after Eiswert initiated an investigation into improper payments he made to a school athletics coach who was also his roommate, and Darien is also charged with theft and retaliating against a witness.
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Not the first time that deepfake audio has been used in this way – remember the mother back in March 2021 who “created deepfake videos to force rivals off her daughter’s cheerleading squad”.
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An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary • MIT Technology Review
Melissa Heikkilä:
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I am standing in front of a green screen, and Oshinyemi guides me through the initial calibration process, where I have to move my head and then eyes in a circular motion. Apparently, this will allow the system to understand my natural colors and facial features. I am then asked to say the sentence “All the boys ate a fish,” which will capture all the mouth movements needed to form vowels and consonants. We also film footage of me “idling” in silence.
He then asks me to read a script for a fictitious YouTuber in different tones, directing me on the spectrum of emotions I should convey. First I’m supposed to read it in a neutral, informative way, then in an encouraging way, an annoyed and complain-y way, and finally an excited, convincing way.
“Hey, everyone—welcome back to Elevate Her with your host, Jess Mars. It’s great to have you here. We’re about to take on a topic that’s pretty delicate and honestly hits close to home—dealing with criticism in our spiritual journey,” I read off the teleprompter, simultaneously trying to visualize ranting about something to my partner during the complain-y version. “No matter where you look, it feels like there’s always a critical voice ready to chime in, doesn’t it?”
“That was really good. I was watching it and I was like, ‘Well, this is true. She’s definitely complaining,’” Oshinyemi says, encouragingly. Next time, maybe add some judgment, he suggests.
…The day after my final visit, Voica emails me the videos with my avatar. When the first one starts playing, I am taken aback. It’s as painful as seeing yourself on camera or hearing a recording of your voice. Then I catch myself. At first I thought the avatar was me.
The more I watch videos of “myself,” the more I spiral. Do I really squint that much? Blink that much? And move my jaw like that? Jesus. It’s good. It’s really good. But it’s not perfect. “Weirdly good animation,” my partner texts me. “But the voice sometimes sounds exactly like you, and at other times like a generic American and with a weird tone,” he adds. “Weird AF.”
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Presently it’s a lot of work, but that’s going to get less and less.
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Our laser technique can tell apart elephant and mammoth ivory: here’s how it may disrupt the ivory trade • The Conversation
Rebecca Shepherd is a senior lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bristol:
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our new study, published in PLOS ONE, presents a major breakthrough – using a well known laser technique to tell mammoth and elephant ivory apart.
Our results couldn’t come soon enough. The number of African elephants has dramatically declined from approximately 12 million a century ago to about 400,000 today.
Annually, over 20,000 elephants are poached for ivory, primarily in Africa. This decline not only disrupts ecological balance, but also diminishes biodiversity. Ultimately, it highlights the urgent need for conservation efforts to protect these species.
The hunt for mammoth ivory is also a problem. The new regulations are leading to a rise in the modern-day “mammoth hunter”. These are people who deliberately set out to excavate mammoth remains from the Siberian permafrost in the summer months.
Driven by the lucrative market for mammoth ivory, these hunters undertake expeditions in remote Arctic regions, where permafrost melting is accelerated by climate change. This has made previously inaccessible mammoth tusks more reachable.
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Non-invasive, done with laser light, though I wonder quite how many Customs halls would invest in it. And how many have ivory passing through. Perhaps in the African nations (or Russia?).
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Bill Gates, Man United and 20 other sites that ban linking to them • Malcolm Coles
Malcolm Coles:
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10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence.
Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’s still doing it … And yes I’ve linked to your websites to prove this. Uh oh.
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Thames Water, British Gas, Real Madrid, even YouGov; and a peculiar one you’ll have to look up for yourself at Which?. (Thanks Malcolm for the link!)
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February 2024: Kuo: Apple Vision Pro on track to launch in more countries before WWDC in June • MacRumors
Joe Rossignol, back in February:
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Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today reiterated his belief that the Apple Vision Pro will launch in additional countries before Apple’s annual developers conference WWDC in June. The headset first launched in the U.S. earlier this month.
Apple will likely expand the Vision Pro to more English-speaking countries, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K., but it has also been localizing visionOS in preparation to launch the headset in countries like France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Kuo said demand for the Vision Pro in the U.S. has “slowed down significantly” since the headset launched there on February 2. He estimated that US shipments of the headset will total 200,000 to 250,000 units this year, which he said is better than Apple’s original estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 units, but it is still a “niche market.”
In recent weeks, there was a lot of discussion about Vision Pro returns on social media. However, based on his inspection of the “repair/refurbishment production line” for the headset, Kuo estimated that the current return rate is “less than 1%.”
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I link to this because Neil Cybart pointed to it in his Above Avalon newsletter. This is in light of the suggestion – also by Kuo – earlier this week that “Apple has cut its Vision Pro shipments to 400-450k units”. Kuo says this is a cut made before launching elsewhere, and that US sales forecasts have been cut, but it does feel a little like offering one set of figures one time, and a different one another.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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