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Simon Willison

It's the ten year anniversary of XKCD 1425, one of the all-time greats and one that resonates slightly differently today. Wrote up some notes on that here: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/24/
24 September at 15:11 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
5 comments
Matt May

@simon 10 years later, this is basically my job now.

24 September at 15:46 | Open on mstdn.social
Richard Rutter

@simon I do find it incredible that I don't find it incredible that I can take a crappy photo of a bird and very quickly get the bird identified (using pre-AI-hype google image search for example)

24 September at 16:01 | Open on mastodon.social
Mikołaj Hołysz

@simon To be honest, the fact that we now have this power is extremely scary, and I don't think we're seeing the ramifications just yet.

Tech companies will soon have the ability to scan every picture we send, every article we write and every conversation we have, in a way that can't easily be beaten by euphemisms or thinly-veiled references.

The obvious use cases are fighting CSAM, fighting spam, child safety, censoring all evidence of protests and finding everybody who expresses anti-government sentiments. The non-obvious use cases, which are, in many ways, even scarrier, are ensuring that people don't break platform rules.

Think "dating app where you can chat for free, but the app will ban you if you try to meet up IRL without paying a fee first."

This gives tech platforms weird powers and business models they never had before.

This won't affect Whats App (as long as end-to-end encryption holds), but it will definitely affect Tinder, Airbnb, Craigslist, Instagram, Uber, eBay etc.

@simon To be honest, the fact that we now have this power is extremely scary, and I don't think we're seeing the ramifications just yet.

Tech companies will soon have the ability to scan every picture we send, every article we write and every conversation we have, in a way that can't easily be beaten by euphemisms or thinly-veiled references.

24 September at 18:07 | Open on dragonscave.space
Simon Willison

@miki I get the impression China has been living a version of this for quite a while now, especially with respect to facial recognition

24 September at 18:11 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Mikołaj Hołysz

@simon And not just China, I like to watch people reading Reddit stories on YT when doing chores, and "redrum" (murder), "grape" (rape) and "spicy time" (sex) are words these people have to use to avoid drawing the ire of the allmighty algorithms.

For now that's just "simple" keyword and voice / face recognition. As tech progresses and models get smaller, it'll become a lot more pernicious.

I think a "no more discussions of copyright infringement and vaccine conspiracy theories on the internet" law (that actually works) is something we will get in the next 20-ish years in at least one major country.

@simon And not just China, I like to watch people reading Reddit stories on YT when doing chores, and "redrum" (murder), "grape" (rape) and "spicy time" (sex) are words these people have to use to avoid drawing the ire of the allmighty algorithms.

For now that's just "simple" keyword and voice / face recognition. As tech progresses and models get smaller, it'll become a lot more pernicious.

24 September at 18:19 | Open on dragonscave.space
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