🤖 Wiser #87: Meta’s AI Chatbot | BeReal’s Authentic Social Media | Digital Hate | Tornado Cash.

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w/Issue #87–22nd August 2022

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”

Welcome to the 87th issue of the Wiser! newsletter (Medium Edition). You’re in good company. Over 14k subscribers who want to be smarter than their competition will get Wiser! this week!

The tech economy stories that caught my eye this week were:

• Meta Facebook’s new AI chatbot for the Metaverse 🤦.
• Sir Anthony Hopkins launches an NFT collection of digital art,
• A Web3 story about Tornado Cash (there’s a point as to why I share this story with you),
• BeReal is the social media app with momentum. I answer the questions: Why is that? And can it keep it up?
• Some disturbing findings from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate after Florida passed the “don’t say gay” Bill,
• Pew Research gives us insight into teen usage on the Internet.

As always, in this issue of Wiser! you’ll find dozens of links, headlines, and stories from across the tech economy. Plus, the latest episode of the Big Tech Little Tech podcast.

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w/Metaverse

“Since deleting Facebook, my life has been much better”

This is what MetaFB's new AI chatbot said to Vice reporter Janus Rose.

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has unveiled its chatbot for the Metaverse. BlenderBot3 was announced with the tagline: "An AI Chatbot That Improves Through Conversation.

Deja Vue: However, to me, this looks like it's going to be another dangerous experiment with AI self-learning bots. Remember Tay?

• Microsoft tried something like this back in 2016? They launched an AI self-learning chatbot called Tay. It promised to “learn” from its “conversations” with humans on Twitter.
• Within 24 hours, Tay had become sexist and homophobic. Tay repeated inflammatory remarks like “Hitler was right”, “feminism is cancer”, and “9/11 was an inside job”.
• Microsoft pulled Tay within 24 hours and issued a public apology.

Now Mark Zuckerberg is giving it a go. But it’s not worked out so well as BlenderBot3 hasn't been so kind to its dad.

• BuzzFeed: When BuzzFeed's Max Woolf asked BlenderBot3 about Zuckerberg, it responded: “He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical. It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes!”
• BBC: When the BBC interviewed the bot it said that Zuckerberg “did a terrible job at testifying before congress." It went on to say that his behaviour makes BlenderBot 3 “concerned about our country,” and that “his company exploits people for money and he doesn’t care. It needs to stop!”

There are dozens more examples like these across social media as folk push BlenderBot3 to make an arse of itself. To see more of them and also read some of the more serious commentaries on the dangers of letting an AI chatbot loose on social media, read this...

Meta's New AI Chatbot Pokes Fun At Daddy Mark Zuckerberg

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w/SocialMedia

BeReal: The Return To Authenticity In Social Media

BeReal is now the number 1 downloaded free app on iOS and everyone’s talking about it.

The question is why? What’s so special about an app that’s bucking the TikTok trend for viral content?

Connection: Maybe it’s the promise of closer connections between friends. No addictive features. And an authenticity to social engagement we’ve not seen in a decade.

In the latest Wiser! Insights, I take a look at BeReal and get to the bottom of what the fuss is all about. 👉 Read it here.

w/NFTs

Sir Anthony Hopkins To Launch An Exclusive NFT Art Collection

“NFTs are a blank canvas to create art,” Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Cool Dude: The octogenarian actor has 1 million followers on Twitter. Here’s how he announced it on Twitter:

Here’s The Thing: NFT Art plays to two very human emotions: the appeal of scarcity and the desire for status. Hopkin’s NFT collection does both:

• The collection will have limited numbers for every piece (scarcity), and
• Owning a piece of artwork from the iconic actor will carry with it unique and exclusive benefits (status).

Read the full story about Sir Anthony Hopkins with images from The Eternal Collection, read this…👇

Sir Anthony Hopkins Launches His NFT Art Collection

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w/Web3

Tornado Cash Is Sanctioned For Doing What It’s Programmed To Do

Here’s a story that’s worth taking two minutes to get your head around. Stay me as I need to use a bit of jargon, even if you’re thinking WTF!

It’s about a crypto protocol running on the Ethereum network called Tornado Cash. Stay with me…just think of it as a computer programme.

Privacy: Tornado Cash is what’s known as a “mixer” protocol. It’s a privacy tool that takes transactions between two parties and hides who the sender and receiver are in that transaction. Basically, it anonymises both parties.

Banned: However, despite Tornado Cash being (just) a piece of software, the US Treasury banned it last week for violating sanctions against North Korea. The US Treasury Department has accused the computer code of being used to launder money.

Here’s The Thing: Whether it was or wasn’t used for laundering half a billion dollars for North Korea, the point is, it’s just a piece of code.

Tornado Cash doesn’t launder money, the bad guys who use it do. Just like they do via big banks such as JP Morgan.

Tornado Cash Is Banned For Doing What It's Programmed To Do

Interesting Fact

• Chainalysis estimated that something like $33 billion in illicit funds has moved over the crypto blockchains since 2016. However, this pales into insignificance in the global money laundering “market,” which the UN estimates to be as much as $2 trillion a year crossing traditional banking networks.

w/Podcast

Big Tech Little Tech

The podcast that makes sense of the serious so that even my mum can understand.

Episode #7: Amazon One Palm Recognition | BeReal | CyberOne

🍏 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eCjgB72k
🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eb-hA3VQ
⚓︎ Anchor: https://lnkd.in/ejVCsk7n

🎙 Check out the Big Tech Little Tech website here.

🐦 Follow the Big Tech Little Tech Podcast on Twitter.

🗞 Sign up for the Big Tech Little Tech Newsletter on Substack.

w/SocialMedia

How Much Can Policy Makers Influence Digital Hate?

😤 As a regular reader of Wiser! you know that I have a keen interest in social media and it’s impact on society. It’s one of the 4 themes I focus my attention on. Which is why this report caught my attention and I thought I’d share it with you.

Misinformation

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate has just published a report that looks at the role of social media and how the platforms were used (and abused) when it came to spreading misinformation and outright lies about the LGBTQ+ community.

The CCDH investigated and catalogued the increase in social media posts that used slurs like “groomers” or “paedophiles” after Florida passed the “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” Bill.

• Researchers found a 406% rise in tweets labelling LGBTQ+ people as “groomers.”
• The “grooming” slur was spread via tweets, which received at least 72 million views.
• Facebook profited from ads that promoted the “grooming” slur with over 2.1 million views.

Influencers

Amongst the worst offenders for spreading anti-LGBTQ+ hate were influential policymakers. These are people with political, influential, and representative positions. IMHO, they should know better!

Sadly, there’s nothing new here in the findings of this 2022 study. Back in May, I wrote an article titled, “Social media has not done enough to stop the hate. Now Texas wants to make it even harder!”

• That was Texas, this is Florida. Different state, same issue.

The Big Questions?

What to make of all this? Should the platforms like Twitter and Facebook be doing more to stop it? Can they? How do they?

And what about arguments for “free speech” and expressing one’s own opinion?

On the face of it, it seems like there’s an easy solution, but it’s not really. What are the answers when society is divided and all debates are reduced to 3-word slogans or 280 characters?

To read the report in full, go here.

Further Reading

• Hate on Social Media. A look at hate groups and their Twitter presence.
• The ungovernability of digital hate on social media.
• Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons

w/TechNews

Some Headlines From The Tech Economy

• Apple has warned of a major security flaw in some recent operating systems of Mac, iPhones, iPads, and some iPods that could allow hackers to take control of your devices.
• Twitter is launching new features to help combat election misinformation for the upcoming U.S. midterm elections.
• Google has had its wrist slapped in Australia with a $60m fine for ”misleading users into thinking the company was not collecting personal data about their location”.
• Amazon has made a $1.7 billion offer for iRobot, the company that makes Roomba robot vacuums, mops and other household robots. (Read this for more on Amazon’s strategy to own your home’s technology: Ambient Computing: Amazon’s In The House)
• Amazon is testing a TikTok-like feature to show shoppers products in video format.
• Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and others shared details of their algorithms with China regulators for the first time.
• BlackRock CEO, the world’s largest asset manager, says “The hits on BlackRock’s website were 3,000 hits on Covid, 3,000 hits on monetary policy. And 600,000 hits on Bitcoin!”.
• Crypto fans are paying more for NFT cars than real ones. Research by Vanarama shows people are digging deep into their pockets to buy car-related NFTs.
• The Bank of England is worried about the risks of crypto and the developing Metaverse. (€)
• Playing Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ on some older laptops causes them to crash. Jackson’s tune happens to have the same “natural resonant frequency” as an older generation 5400 RPM disk drive. Who’d have thought it?

Some Numbers

➡️ New findings out of Pew Research show us how much teens (13–17 yr olds) use social media today versus the last time they did this study in 2014/15.

➡️ 95% of teens have access to a smartphone, up from 73% in 2014/15

➡️ 97% of teens reported using the Internet daily with 46% saying they use the Internet almost constantly, that’s up from 24% 8 years ago

➡️ YouTube is the most used platform with 95% of teens on it,

➡️ TikTok is the next used app at 67%

➡️ Usage for Instagram and Snapchat is around 60%

➡️ Facebook has plummeted from 71% of teens using it in 2014 to 32% today

w/Hacks

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🤖 Use AI Writing Tools To Do The Heavy Lifting

Do you ever need to summarise an interesting, long-form article without going through the effort of doing it yourself? Like, when your boss can’t be arsed to read it themselves and they dump it on you to do it for them. Well, here’s a hack you’ll find useful (and one that I use myself).

Check out Quillbot’s Summariser Tool. There’s a free and a paid version and you have options to adjust how you want the summary presented for you.

See How I Use Quillbot

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w/NFTs

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