Emformation

The problem that I often have with media is that I look to it for information, not emotion. "Here's something to know about the world," is different from "here's how you should feel about this aspect of the world." Of course, given that, I should have known better than to read "Behind the Curtain: What AI architects fear most (in 2024)" when I saw it on Axios this morning. I suspected what was coming; vague warnings of an immanent threat, and nothing in the way of workable solutions that the reader could implement.

Actually, let me take part of that back. I deliberately read articles that I suspect will engage in fearmongering because I do find them somewhat informative; they tell me about what media outlets, and their sources, understand their incentives to be. And Axios was pretty clear about their incentives in this article. The conclusion of the column is a mix of anxiety triggers and flattery, directed at the reader. It's open about the idea that "realize a new problem is coming," while subtly insinuating that a large part of that problem will be the credulity of other people. Axios readers, it hints, are alert and know when someone is trying to trick them... even if "one leading AI architect" finds that they themselves "no longer can distinguish fake from real."

That "one leading AI architect" is one of five people that the Axios journalists spoke to for the column. The others were a "a former top national security official," who warned that Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin was up to no good, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who claimed that open-source "AI" models couldn't be trusted because only closed models were capable of self-policing, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, whose main contribution was a platitude concerning industry collaboration, and finally, "a senior White House official," who sounded the alarm over disinformation, fraud and cyberattacks.

The obligatory mention of the "sick use" of AI for revenge pornography was apparently thrown in by the authors of the column themselves. Maybe they couldn't find anyone else willing to invoke that particular hobgoblin.

In any event, no-one was saying anything particularly noteworthy or sensitive. So why were three of the column's five sources anonymous? The whole of the AI industry refuses to acknowledge advances in text, image or video generation? No one in the national security establishment would put their name to speculation that Vladimir Putin is looking to sow discord in the United States? In the entirely of the Biden Administration, there wasn't a single person authorized to say publicly that generative "artificial intelligence" could potentially make it easier for people to mislead people or mount cyberattacks? Sure, they likely wouldn't have been names that I, or most other members of the general public, would recognize. But at least then there would have been an avenue for some follow-up via Internet search.

To be sure, articles like this also give me insight into a another group of interest: the readership of these publications. This goes beyond Dahlia Lithwick's observation to Stephen Dubner that  "If you scare people’s face off, they will click." The reason why the commodification of people's anxieties works is that people don't see news coverage as playing on their fears. Instead, they see it as providing valuable information... that just happens to coincide with their existing anxieties, which are mainly about other people. In other words, the world is a terrible place because of the unintelligent, credulous or unethical among the populace (a group of people that, of course, excludes the reader), and there are people who seek out items that remind them of that, because they are also reminders of their own exceptionalism. To be sure, I don't know how large a group of people this is, in the end. All things considered, it doesn't have to be very large to keep any one publication afloat, so I'm going to go out on something of a limb and conjecture that it's not a majority. It's just large enough to keep the wheel spinning. Which, really, is all the wheel needs.