Slow Takes Ep. 23: Is AI Really for Everyone?

Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.

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Mark Zuckerberg published ‘The Future Is For Everyone’ last week: six and a half thousand words on the path to a positive AI future. Some of the premise is fair. Superintelligence is dangerous, a handful of people should not be making the decisions, and there need to be guardrails. It is written by one of the most powerful men alive, and it is written so that you can have all of those things provided his company delivers them.

In over 6,500 words it contains zero citations. Not a thin evidence base, none. A high school student handing that in would be asked what they thought they were doing. I ran it through an AI detector out of curiosity and it came back 100% human, which is the last nail in that particular coffin: the machine certified as authentically human a document with nothing in it to check.

Leor’s read is that this is a company playing catch-up. Meta led on AI, went to the metaverse instead, spent billions, and now writes manifestos. If Meta were OpenAI, this document would not exist.

Anthropic is adding a watermark to Claude’s text, built on Google DeepMind’s SynthID. Certain words and phrases fall in a pattern only a key-holder can read, and at present Anthropic holds the only key.

I am for this, which surprises people who know my position on detection. A detector like Pangram guesses at AI tells and gets students wrongly accused. This marks the output at the source. If it works, it takes the market out from under the detection industry and the humaniser industry that feeds on it.

It is still mealy-mouthed, and it looks like a box-ticking exercise to appease Congress. The workarounds are already circulating: ask Claude to swap every synonym it used for another one, or simply ask a second AI to strip the first one’s watermark. Read it alongside Google announcing this week that users can now remove the watermark from their AI-generated images.

Spotify will badge AI Persona accounts and stop recommending them. Some accounts have made hundreds of thousands of dollars from fully generated tracks while crowding out musicians who spent months on a record.

Chad Thiele put the sharpest question of this debate into the chat: if the AI music got the streams, was it slop? Is the market voting with its time? That is worth taking seriously, because a lot of what gets called slop is taste dressed as standards. The mechanism remains absurd. An AI writes a track, an AI recommends it, and a third AI decides whether the first AI wrote it.

Flock runs surveillance cameras that read number plates across the US. Officers have been caught using them to follow their exes. The safeguard against that was a single free-text box asking why you were running the plate, and officers typed ‘hee hee hee’ twenty times and the generic word ‘investigation’ 111 times.

Whoever built that check wrote a binary test. Is there text in the box, yes or no. That is the entire guardrail standing between a national camera network and a man looking for his ex-partner. As Leor pointed out, none of us want a surveillance state, particularly not a venture-backed one.

Amazon is building a data centre in Pecos County, Texas so large it needs its own gas plant, permitted for up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, which would make it the largest single source of power-plant carbon in the country. Amazon’s net zero pledge is dated 2040.

Leor thinks this infrastructure will be obsolete inside a decade, the horse stable to the automobile factory, with the Department of Energy targeting useful fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2028. I think the building is the point. The money leased against these sites is what keeps the valuations up, so divesting into something more efficient runs against the interest of everyone holding the paper.

One warning for the election cycle. Data centres employ thousands of people to build and almost nobody to run. When a politician promises you jobs, ask how long for.

Which loops back to where we started. Zuckerberg’s manifesto makes exactly this argument, that data centres enrich the people nearby, and offers one example: a county where wages rose because it tied a share of capital gains to local residents. That was a policy decision by a local authority. It had nothing to do with Meta.

Go slow.