blast-o-rama. • issue 078 • 2023-03-12
blast-o-rama.
issue 078 • 2023-03-12
embracing our new ai overlords
Hello and Happy Sunday!
Thanks for your patience with my unexpected absence last week. My lovely wife traveled for work the week before, got herself a hell of a sinus and ear infection, and passed (thankfully?) just the sinus infection over to me. In turn, from Friday afternoon until Sunday evening last week, I pretty much just slept it off. I’m feeling much better now, and back in the newsletter saddle accordingly.
And the first story this week continues in a trend I’ve been following as a tech enthusiast, the rise of consumer facing AI tools. Whether it’s Chat GPT, the new AI focused version of Bing (yes, Bing), or Google’s forthcoming Bard, among many other tools, AI is now the buzz of the regular computer user.
But in all of this, has the heart of what Artificial Intelligence was supposed to be been lost? All of these tools grew out of an initiative called OpenAI, which was to make AI tools free and open. And as Chloe Xiang writes for Vice, it’s looking like anything but.
OpenAI Sam CEO Altman published a blog post last Friday titled “Planning for AGI and beyond.” In this post, he declared that his company’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—human-level machine intelligence that is not close to existing and many doubt ever will—will benefit all of humanity and “has the potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities.” Altman uses broad, idealistic language to argue that AI development should never be stopped and that the “future of humanity should be determined by humanity,” referring to his own company.
This blog post and OpenAI’s recent actions—all happening at the peak of the ChatGPT hype cycle—is a reminder of how much OpenAI’s tone and mission have changed from its founding, when it was exclusively a nonprofit. While the firm has always looked toward a future where AGI exists, it was founded on commitments including not seeking profits and even freely sharing code it develops, which today are nowhere to be seen.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization by Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, among other tech leaders. In its founding statement, the company declared its commitment to research “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” The blog stated that “since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact,” and that all researchers would be encouraged to share “papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world.”
Now, eight years later, we are faced with a company that is neither transparent nor driven by positive human impact, but instead, as many critics including co-founder Musk have argued, is powered by speed and profit. And this company is unleashing technology that, while flawed, is still poised to increase some elements of workplace automation at the expense of human employees. Google, for example, has highlighted the efficiency gains from AI that autocompletes code, as it lays off thousands of workers.
who watches the video games?
And with one inflection point comes another. The world of video games is a multi billion dollar business, with players of all ages, all over the world dedicating hours upon hours every day to the medium.
So why is it so hard to justify proper journalism for it?
Luke Winkie for Neiman Lab writes:
All this is to say that a dedicated video game desk — or at least a dogged video game reporter — is an essential requirement for any newsroom dedicated to fluent coverage of pop culture. When Ilhan Omar is showing off a monster PC rig and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is playing “Among Us” as part of a voter registration drive, we’re certainly in the midst of a vibe shift. And yet, even as the hobby’s imprisoning nicheness crumbles, a ton of journalists on the games beat have suddenly found themselves out of jobs. The field is in the midst of a brutal, paradoxical contraction. The world’s power brokers are investing desperately in the games industry, but games media is another story entirely.
Last month, Launcher — The Washington Post’s gaming vertical that broke ground in 2019 — announced it would be shuttering operations and terminating five of its staffers. (In total, 20 people from the Post’s editorial division were laid off.) The news came on the heels of a number of smaller, more enthusiast-oriented publications hemorrhaging staff members at the behest of management. GameSpot and IGN, two bastions of games coverage, were shrunk by their ownership groups (Fandom and Ziff Davis, respectively), as the calendar turned over into 2023. Fanbyte, which perfected a breezy, chatty, almost Gawker-like approach to industry news, has been rendered a ghost ship by cuts last summer by parent company/Chinese entertainment conglomerate Tencent. Even G4, the ancestral early-aughts cable broadcasting company dedicated exclusively to video games — which relaunched in 2021 with a slew of familiar faces — lasted barely a year before it was shut down by Comcast in October.
The carnage has engendered a fatigued pessimism in those who want to make a career writing about video games. There are so many stories in this sphere waiting to be broken, and ostensibly, interest has never been higher. But who, exactly, wants to publish all of that hard work?
Check out the full story here.
also from across the web
Other reads I enjoyed this week:
- You are not a parrot. And a chatbot is not a human - Intelligencer
- Donnie Yen Simply Cannot Stop Kicking Ass - GQ
- How Michael B. Jordan and Jonathan Majors Fought Harmoniously - The New York Times
- A Privacy Hero’s Final Wish: An Institute to Redirect AI’s Future - WIRED
- Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark Writer Brian Michael Bendis Interview – The Hollywood Reporter
- It’s time to take back control of what we read on the internet - The Atlantic
- Turnstile Broke Hardcore. Now What? - The Ringer
- ‘Yellowjackets’ Star Christina Ricci on Misty, Season 2, Her Comeback – Rolling Stone
- ‘It’s Embarrassing’: Animators Are Unhappy With the Oscars
- Lisa Marie Presley: Inside Her Wild Life and Tragic Death – Rolling Stone
- How a social network falls apart - The Verge
thanks for reading.
Have an awesome Sunday. And don’t forget to set your calendar’s forward. The sunshine is here!
See you in seven!
-Marty