Zoomer sublime. Research Fellow @FamStudies. Marriage, fertility, technology, religion, politics, and the rest.
Joined September 2023
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This needs to be said over and over: AI doesn't actually "write" anything, anymore than a printing press "writes." It's an analogy at best, but the analogy is clearly confusing a lot of people.
James Taranto: AI: Ghostwriter in the Machine - ‘If we insisted that every politician write his own piece, we’d either get terrible pieces or none at all,’ said an op-ed editor at the New York Times. wsj.com/opinion/ai-ghostwrit…
Of course the insinuation here is that anti-AI politics is wholly inorganic, and not the result of a radically new technology being thrust on Americans by people who say their work is likely to (1) destroy the world or (2) destroy humanity as we know it. 🙄
This story is fascinating and is easily one of the most important things happening at the intersection of AI and politics right now. It's critical everyone understands the situation because this is just the beginning of the AI infowars and psyops
Jacob Coxon, a relatively unknown AI researcher, gives the WSJ an exclusive story about his resignation from Anthropic and his concerns about AI
Twenty minutes after the WSJ story drops, Jacob posts on X about how he's concerned that AI could kill us all in a few years. This post now has over 149M views. For reference, Ilya Sutskever (a very well known AI name) left OpenAI in 2024 and his announcement post has fewer than 6M views as of today
Bear in mind, Jacob Coxon's X account had no prior posting activity public, but it is immediately reposted and boosted by numerous AI-doomer policy advocacy nonprofits funded by the same donor (Jaan Tallinn) who just happens to be one of the leading investors in Anthropic
We find out Jacob Coxon, who worked at Anthropic for only a few weeks, worked for a left-wing political advocacy group in 2021 (Newspeak). This organization is a British NGO with ties to hacking democracy, Hillary Clinton, prison abolition and extinction rebellion
Many major Democrat politicians are now using Jacob's X post to fear monger the public into voting to regulate AI. It just so happens Bernie Sanders has a bill already written to ban artificial superintelligence (ASI) and to create a new federal agency to protect the public from the dangers of AI. This bill was announced just one week ago on September 3rd
It would also place a temporary pause on "advanced AI" until a new federal regulator exists and has issued safety rules and a model-review process
Elon then points out how none of this feels organic, and Jacob decides to take a shot at him for firing some xAI researchers
Meanwhile, we know Anthropic has publicly asked the government to audit and block frontier models and Anthropic has run a state-by-state campaign for rules that only large AI labs trigger, meaning the rules are structured around barriers only frontier labs can easily clear (limiting competition)
There is extensive Anthropic personnel and financial overlap with the groups that wrote the Biden-era AI policies. It is well known information you can seek out if you want the detail
This all seemingly comes back to regulatory capture and political motives. None of this feels natural. Jacob can say these are his real views all he wants, and they may be, but there is clearly far more to the story
Parents are rallying against AI in schools. 75% want to pause introducing AI into the classroom. Strong support for a pause is the most popular category.
This summer my colleagues and I @FamStudies asked parents their thoughts about pushing pause on AI in schools, as part of a larger survey on AI in education. We found that parents of children in every grade bracket support this policy by a margin of 3 to 1
Grant Bailey retweeted
This summer my colleagues and I @FamStudies asked parents their thoughts about pushing pause on AI in schools, as part of a larger survey on AI in education. We found that parents of children in every grade bracket support this policy by a margin of 3 to 1
Grant Bailey retweeted
Two extraordinary charts from today’s PISA test results:
1) School test scores continue to collapse internationally, underscoring how this is no longer a Covid effect but sustained decline.
Those falls in reading and maths are equivalent to about two years of lost schooling.
Grant Bailey retweeted
ANNOUNCEMENT: Acclaimed writer, essayist, and author @freyaindiaa is joining the Institute for Family Studies as a Fellow.
Known for her commentary on young women’s digital experiences, India will retain her independence and widen her commentary focus, with support from the Institute for Family Studies.
For IFS, India will contribute research and commentary related to her areas of expertise, including gender, youth culture, and digital life. She will do so in addition to her independent newsletter and editorial roles elsewhere.
Grant Bailey retweeted
Big Tech’s power is underwritten by their near total capture of our data. Tech companies capture information on everything: what we like on Instagram, the places we visit, what we do—even how we work and the culture we help create.
All that data is fueling hyper-addictive digital products and AI systems that threaten to erode or displace human relationships, social trust, meaningful work, and agency.
The good news: there’s a fix 👇 h/t @FamStudies
Nearly all data fueling the digital economy and AI is a co-produced good.
Governance of the systems and outputs it produces should be shared by co-producers, especially families and communities.
Our newest brief, co-authored by @RealDCochrane, breaks this down into three parts.
Part I argues that data is a co-produced good. Yet, control over its collection and use is concentrated in the hands of tech firms.
Part II makes the case for why both individual data rights and top-down data privacy regimes often fail to vindicate privacy, control, and economic interests.
Part III proposes a new class of informational rights.
Grant Bailey retweeted
Currently breaking up fights at @FamStudies HQ about who the other two Super Influencers are.
Sorry @lymanstoneky, it's me and @grantjbailey
"Three of the Super Influencers are at @FamStudies (including @BradWilcoxIFS). As Jonathan Baron put it, 'The Institute for Family Studies is killing it.'"
Grant Bailey retweeted
Reminds me of a dentist appointment questionnaire I remember that had a yes or no on "Do you drink alcohol or use cocaine or other hard drugs?"
I tried to bet at a horse race earlier this year but the betting window was too far of a walk away. shame.
Telling people to just "turn it off" is fine but it will not fix the population-level crisis we have. We have to treat DraftKings and Instagram like the crack-dealers they are
When you actually look at the literature, the "violent TV leads to more violent behavior" actually holds up.
Grant Bailey retweeted
"I really think people ought to take seriously the idea that we’ve been in a 75-year rolling moral panic about the influence of television on society and the critics have more or less been correct all along."
Matthew Yglesias: The real reason nobody feels good about technological progress - The internet is a small miracle that in practice we mostly use to watch short-form video slowboring.com/p/the-real-re…
