Dark forest, bad art and paying to bike
Neologism #24, 28.12.2024
Against the dark forest
"The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions."
"Strickler’s initial formulation, published in 2019, translates a central idea from Liu’s Three Body series into a way of understanding the social internet."
"The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It’s unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way."
The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology] enables them to manipulated into building systems which reproduce and reinforce social structures and social relations in ways that they would otherwise object to.
AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.
People prefer A.I. art because people prefer bad art
"On Wednesday, the prolific and popular blogger Scott Alexander published the preliminary results of a kind of poll he’d set up called 'The AI Art Turing Test,' in which he asked readers to distinguish between A.I.-generated images and human-fashioned art."
"Generative A.I. apps have gotten very good at creating satisfactory imitations of human product! Under the right circumstances it is indeed difficult to discern A.I.-generated images; indeed, this fact seems so obvious to me I’m not sure it even requires testing."
"Like any LLM output, A.I.-generated images are designed to please, not to provoke. I’ve argued before that these images are, by their nature, almost unavoidably kitsch—comforting, straightforward, accessible, flattering. And people love kitsch!"
Read People prefer A.I. art because people prefer bad art
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Governments Should Start Paying People to Bike to Work
"Governments should pay people to bike to work. This simple yet powerful policy can address some of our most pressing challenges: improving public health, combating climate change, reducing traffic congestion, and enhancing mental well-being."
"By incentivizing cycling, we can create more people-centered cities that prioritize clean air, physical activity, and vibrant communities."
In 2022, nearly one in three employers (29%) in Belgium voluntarily provided their workers with a bicycle allowance. This allowance, calculated based on the distance commuted by bicycle, has become a sought-after perk, with the share of Belgians benefiting from it doubling in just five years, from 7% in 2017 to 14% in 2022, according to HR service provider SD Worx.
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