Avoiding the Ouroboros
We can't always be going at each other.
Generally speaking, I try not to overtly discuss politics in public spaces. Not because I lack conviction, but because it's tiring to deal with all of the people who think they can "what about" you into oblivion on the internet. There's also the weird compounding factor that I coach "in the public" at multiple levels and I've already been "talked to" once in my coaching career about using a Cake lyric as a blurb on social media.
Anyways...
I want to discuss an observation I've made about the AI space in the last couple of weeks.
The Robots Win
There's this discourse around the internet about "shaming people who use AI," that seems to lack nuance. I know that the internet isn't a place for nuance, but a couple hundred words on a blog that no one reads might be a flag in the ground somewhere.
A Story
I grew up around the Spanish language. At times in my life I've been "proficient" at it, but for the most part I'm currently good at "hearing" it and not "speaking" it. Because of that, I watch a lot of content in both Spanish and English on the internet.
One of my favorite creators is a woman named Rebeca Coss Guerrero. She does a lot of cooking videos from her home and generally gives off the vibe of my tias and abuelita. A lot of the food she makes reminds me of stuff we had growing up and it's generally interesting to see how she does it given her environment.
She does not speak English.
The other night I'm doing my too frequent run on dopamine run on Instagram and come across one of her videos. Something was wrong though and I couldn't place it for a little bit. This was the normal content in a familiar space, but something just didn't sit.
She was speaking English.
In a bit of panic, I searched around to try and figure out how and why. Was she secretly fluent in English this whole time and her audience had finally reached a point where she was making videos in English?
It was definitely her voice.
That's when I noticed in the corner a little tag that said "translated with MetaAI." They had trained their AI on her content to the point that they could translate from Spanish to English, match her voice in a realistic way, and match the general pacing of the video. This all to the point that they managed to almost match up to her mouth movements.
My mind immediately went two places.
- Am I the only one this is happening to?
- How in the hell do I stop this from happening?
To test the first case, I sent the video to my wife who does not watch any Spanish speaking content and my good friend Kenny (from Oracle Tattoo) that has a similar family and language situation as I do. She received the video in English, he received the video in Spanish.
To solve the second case, I dug through all of the settings and finally found the correct place to turn this feature off.
The Realization
Meta, using their billions of dollars, had reached a point where they could not only track what language I may or may not be the most proficient in, but they could then translate a "big" creators content to Spanish without changing their voice. Meaning that they could be serving any content to anyone in any language, regardless of whether or not the creator of that content spoke that language.
Great for accessibility, terrifying for the implications.
If you can take someone's content, re-language it, and use the same voice you're probably not far from being able to just completely recreate their content.
If you can do this for someone who has 2m followers, maybe on the fly, what level of training are you doing and how many resources is that using?
Which leads me to the genesis...
The Implementation
That same day, a couple people I follow were sharing posts about "calling people out for using AI." I believe there was something broader in the zeitgeist, but as I've been using AI agents a lot lately, I had to stop and ponder.
I understand the broad implications of AI. The environmental damage it's causing, the mental and emotional damage it's causing, and the way it's effecting job markets and creative works.
However, the amount of AI I use in a day for coding projects or grammar checking is nothing compared to the amount I use every time I scroll reels on Instagram.
Every time I google a thing.
Every time I do anything on the internet right now.
We have to be careful to not let this turn into an "us vs us" thing instead of an "us vs them" thing.
The billionaires trying to become trillionaires on this stuff, modifying current events and history, and generally forcing their warped perception into the world are using AI more in a second than most people will use in their life.
They're just better at hiding it.
They're just better at burying it in everything you use to the point that you don't realize you're using it.
They're just better at feeding you the dopamine hit you need to overlook it all.
They're also the ones that don't want to pay for the power consumption.
Don't forget that.