Adam

@ekimnazimkaya That's awesome.

@mosseri trial reels 👍

@ry_paddy I'm guessing you don't watch a lot of basketball...

This is an image you may have seen doing the rounds at some point. It explains why modern culture is getting really f*cking boring. When you run the numbers, the only places it makes sense to take a shot from are outside the D (3 points) or right next to the basket (2 points). As a result, nowadays every team in the NBA plays basketball this way. But it is not just basketball (or, famously, baseball) that has adopted “moneyball”. Like an incredibly contagious virus, the philosophy of moneyball has rapidly spread, infecting the entirety of human culture. In 2022, the 10 most popular films in the world included eight franchise sequels (Top Gun, Jurassic Park, Avatar, Minions, a Shrek spinout, three Marvel movies), and a rehash of Batman. In 2023, we got four sequels (two more Marvels, the umpteenth Fast and Furious instalment and Mission Impossible: Is it Possible Tom Cruise Is Still Making These Films) plus two spinouts from toys (Barbie, Super Mario). There was also a rehash of the Little Mermaid. To round things off, the angelic Timothée Chalamet brought us Wonka, a prequel to a film that was a rehash of a film that was a rehash of a book. Barely anything original makes it into the charts any more. We get moneyball movies instead, reliable content that is kind of sh*t but comfortably familiar. It’s the same story in music. The music industry has been getting steadily more data-driven (read: boring) since the early ‘90s. Studies indicate pop hits are getting more similar over time. Country is fast becoming one of the most popular music genres in the world, and it all sounds the same. So no, it’s not just you. Everything is getting more boring. ---- Maybe non-traditional media is different? Nah. Thanks to short form video on TikTok, Youtube and Instagram, you are now fed a constant, frustratingly addictive stream of the-same-but-slightly-different video clips whenever you open your phone. In the battle to monopolise your time, these algorithms optimise for easy to consume mental fast food that they know you’ll like just enough to keep watching. In spite of yourself, you are sucked in, scrolling and scrolling for just one more hit from the mind numbing bong of boring. This whole industry is about to get a steroid injection. As AI becomes more ingrained in our culture, the media we create and the very paper we write on gets embedded with universal, data-driven, computer generated “intelligence". This can almost wholly replace human curation, creation and even relationships. It is also where things start to get rather sinister. Tiktok has recently been openly paying people to pump out really, really dumb conspiracy theory content generated with AI. Last year, some lady “married” her chatbot. We are not far from a place where the vast majority of images, videos, news articles, movies, food recipes, psychological counselling programs, educational syllabuses, conversations or whatever you can think of are being generated almost entirely by algorithms, based on simple prompts. We are no longer creating. We are, in many ways, simply lending our voice to an algorithm. The world, as a result, becomes ever more shaped and optimised according to the goals of our corporate machine overlords. Their primary objective? To leverage the data you provide to generate profits. The risk is that each of us will end up trapped in a dumbed down algorithmic bubble of our own creation, exposed to far fewer ideas that challenge us, or bring us outside of our comfort zone. Everything you see taste feel think believe will be algorithmically predicted, narrowed, pre-ordained. Sounds really f*cking boring. ---- I am, however, an optimist. Things go in cycles. I do not think this will last. What makes you uniquely human is, in many ways, the exact opposite of all of this. It is the way that your right brain - the chaotic, emotional, intuitive, creative, big-picture part of it - balances your left - the rational, orderly, linear process manager. The part of you that feels things - joy, pain, love, humour, sadness and anger - is a key input in your ability to innovate. It will become increasingly valuable in a world that is saturated with data and sameness.2 In fact, this magic, when combined with AI, has the potential to unleash creativity and variety at never seen before scales. Things like this hilarious C3PO rap video from @daniel_eckler / @spacecadet can already be made by one person. We’ve come a long way from Will Smith eating spaghetti, in a very, very short space of time. The potential for the future is boundless. x.com/daniel_eckler/… I imagine the current excitement about AI feels a lot like the early days of the internet. A miraculous new technology promises a world where anything is possible, and anyone can be a part of it. But the internet, and in many ways the world, came to be controlled by a small number of companies, and steered to serve their objectives. AI may well push us further down that path. This is, in fact, exactly what the VC firms backing Open AI, Anthropic et al. are betting on.3 What we must be careful to protect going forwards is our humanity. Our emotions, our chaos, our randomness and its variety. The yin to AI’s yang. We still don’t really understand how the human brain works. Is it plugged into some sort of universal consciousness substrate? Does it work via some form of quantum mechanics? What is for certain is that it doesn’t work like a modern AI. You think, and create, in a very different, independent, unpredictable way. And that is exactly what makes the world interesting. --- Shout out to @DKThomp who inspired this post!

@ihammod_oh Should be fixed now

@mosseri any comment on this ?!

@MKBHD Queen Elizabeth II...

Who is the most photographed person of all time?

@julesterpak thanks for coming!

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) shares his thoughts about news/journalism on the platform:

@TaylorLorenz @digiphile @finkd @Meta I hear you, and we're working to support more searches quickly. We're trying to learn from last mistakes and believe it's better to bias towards being careful as we roll out search.

@digiphile @finkd @mosseri @Meta Either way, wholesale blocking searches to things like long covid is extremely irresponsible imo.

Please invest in public health, @finkd & @mosseri: instead of @meta creating an info void to fester, convert public interest into public knowledge with search results that link to Coronavirus.gov & Vaccines.gov + a whitelist of trustworthy verified accounts.

@MKBHD Still enjoying the Pixel Fold?

This solar roof review will be by far the most math I’ve ever done for 1 video…

@jasperhauser Are you based in Europe?

@MattNavarra we're working on it

The missing feature I want most on threads is a chronological feed If it wants to truly challenge twitter as THE real time text based social network for news and internet culture, it needs to nail that down As well as a trending / discovery tab and direct messaging.

@alex193a @rask_ai I'm actually trying to learn Italian, my kids speak it, but this video is making me feel like I have a long long way to go...

I was taking a look at @rask_ai and to test it, I tried to make @mosseri speak in Italian 😬

Just FYI 👀

@MattNavarra sorry about that, working on it...

The threads notifications sickness is real

@derekeb Yes

.@mosseri Q: Does Threads follow Instagram safety policies and default users under the age of 16 to the app’s most restrictive content settings?

🎉 Threads 🎉 Threads is our new app, built by the Instagram team, for text updates and joining public conversations ✨ We’re hoping Threads can be great space for public conversations, and we’re very focused on the creator communities that already enjoy Instagram. Available now on iOS and Android in over 100 countries. See you there ✌🏼

@MKBHD I switched back to Android recently because of this.

It's actually impressive how bad Siri still is

@MikeIsaac 💪🏼 explore game my friend

preeeeetty clever 🐣 🥚 🔊

🧵 1/? nytimes.com/2023/07/03/tec…

@alexeheath 👋🏼

Looks like Meta is doing a pre-order launch for Threads, its Twitter competitor, in the App Store. Says it will be available July 6th apps.apple.com/us/app/threads…

@wongmjane It's an app that makes profile pictures of you using GenAI trained on other pics of you?

Tried out the Korean AI profile picture app and they look like my nonexistent cousins at best

📣 New Supervision Tools 📣 We want to make sure our apps are as supportive as possible for teens, which means involving parents and guardians more in their teens’ experiences, and offering teens controls to help ensure the time they’re spending on Instagram is meaningful. Check out familycenter.meta.com for more info ✌🏼