LOOKING AHEAD

• The Week that Was: Surfing the AI Banwave and CES Highlights
• The Business End: Advertising Struggles and Cybersecurity Lessons
• Rules of Engagement: Copied Homework and Social Media Anxiety

SURFING THE AI BANWAVE

AI crashed onto the scene like a tidal wave, catching society at large by surprise. Kneejerk responses were to be expected, most of which have manifested as blanked bans on AI. Forums, platforms, and institutions have enacted such bans. How to deal with false positives though? Investment in the development of AI is only set to increase, yet moderation is failing to keep pace. One promising moderation tool has entered beta though, notably, an IT student made it. The question raised here is whether AI moderation, much like Stable Diffusion’s rise to prominence, will also be community powered instead of company powered. If so, I would consider this an interesting mutation of the adblocker plugin. LINK

CES HIGHLIGHTS

The Consumer Electronics Show concluded this past week. There were of course weird ‘just because we could’ showpieces stood alongside products you could actually expect to buy as a consumer. I personally watched the PC gaming highlights closely, because of its role in AI image generation. As AI gets better on the software side, proprietary hardware stands to lose out. The issue is further complicated by the present economic climate. Consumers are more careful with their wallets. Rather than hardware, software was the real focus for most big players at CES 2023 this year. AMD and Intel both showed off lots of new hardware, for example, but Nvidia only put in a token effort. Its real focus was on new automotive partnerships and building metaverse infrastructure. The evolution of the matter smart home standard was another example of the focus on infrastructure this year. Invisible to the consumer but powering many consumer facing devices. LINK

ADVERTISING STRUGGLES

The advertising world continues to be in a precarious state. Key issues include the uncertain future of cookies and user tracking, shortform video monetisation hurdles, and fierce competition for a shrinking pool of ad money. Entrenchment played a big part in advertising became so lucrative in the first place. The return of many mastodon migrants to twitter is a striking recent example of entrenchment at work. People like what they know, and they resist the discomfort that accompanies radical changes. Great for maintaining the status quo, a disaster if the status quo implodes in on itself. The question of whether or not ad-reliant platforms can get ever more critical users onboard with new monetisation schemes and methods of ad delivery will be a decisive one. LINK

CYBERSECURITY LESSONS

Last week the bitcoin wallets of a Bitcoin core developer were completely emptied out by hackers. Bitcoin Core runs 97 percent of the nodes making up the bitcoin blockchain, so a lead dev being robbed blind makes for terrible optics. Two days prior I’d read an article about the intricacies of blockchain auditing. What a curious coincidence that ended up being. I was surprised at the degree of overlap between recent slack and twitter hacks, and this crypto crime. Critical flaws weren’t caught or fixed in time, in other words, a QA issue. Over the course of 2022 cybercrime and cyberwarfare merged together. What this means in practical terms is that mainstream cybersecurity incidents now resemble more and more the near instant, drastic, and frequently irreversible fallout of a crypto hack. LINK

COPIED HOMEWORK

Google alleged last week that the Competition Commission of India (CCI) copy-pasted parts of EU antitrust rulings against its android operating system. Whether these allegations are true or not is less an issue than the implications behind them. The 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ended up being used by countries around the world as a template. Ever since then, EU policies have gathered more and more momentum and led to stricter laws beyond EU borders. Google isn’t alone in wanting to avoid the EU’s global policy grip solidifying any more than it already has. If key growth markets such as India come under EU governance, even if only indirectly, it’ll be that much harder to contest them, as Meta and Apple are struggling to do at present. LINK

SOCIAL MEDIA ANXIETY

Australian healthcare workers such as psychiatrists and paediatricians have rung the alarm bell once more about the lack of insight into the impact of social media on teenagers. Meanwhile, several public schools in Seattle have sued over the student mental health crisis their student bodies are experiencing. Business models specifically targeting teenagers, such as ‘fast fashion,’ are also under fire for their environmental impact. Which makes counterarguments against blanket bans of apps such as TikTok all the more interesting. One use case that would be caught up in such a scenario is university researchers losing access to the app on work provided devices, at least in the case of proposed US bans. LINK

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