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John Herrman

@jwherrman.bsky.social

7.8K followers 550 following 590 posts

posting about posts at new york magazine. have me on your podcast!

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John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 1d

it's only been a week but I'd bet a lot of early users are having experiences like this with Sora: manic, exploratory onboarding followed by something like a hangover. it's a pattern! nymag.com/intelligence...

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 5d

it was never a great situation, but I think a lot of users forget that the better days of twitter involved tension between users and the platform — the authentically good accounts and communities were always breaking it in small ways. was also torn between public markets and a frustrating weirdo ceo

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 5d

part of the big theoretical "twitter do-over" is this inevitable jack-brained dynamic, too

Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 5d

Bluesky is a site explicitly founded by cryptocurrency libertarians with the idea that it would be a decentralized platform where users would be free to choose the open-source moderation and algorithmic feed tools they wanted, and by accident acquired a power userbase that hates all of those things.

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 5d

Are people mad at the Bluesky ceo for a real reason or an internet madness reason?

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 5d

You're right, and as I mentioned in the post it's a real and interesting issue to work out. But I think solving the privacy issue with blanket confidentiality for conversations in which OpenAI's automated platform is analogous to the licensed professional would be hugely legally helpful to the firm

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 5d

Right, but the takedown paradigm is about UGC, and AI interactions have much more in common with direct publication — also, even in pure UGC environments, straightforward takedown compliance wasn't always enough for rightsholders (YouTube ContentID and its many children)

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 7d

OpenAI's maximalist "asking for infinite money" strategy has a legal counterpart, too nymag.com/intelligence...

The opt-out process for the new version of Sora means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyright material in videos the tool creates.
This is pretty close to the maximum possible bid OpenAI can make here, in terms of its relationship to copyright — a world in which rights holders must opt out of inclusion in OpenAI's model is one in which OpenAl is all but asking to opt out of copyright as a concept. To arrive at such a proposal also seems to take for granted that a slew of extremely contentious legal and regulatory questions will be settled in OpenAI's favor, particularly around the concept of "fair use." Al firms are arguing in court — and via lobbyists, who are pointing to national-security concerns and the Al race with China
- that they should be permitted not just to train on copyrighted data but to reproduce similar and competitive outputs. By default, according to this report, OpenAI's future models will be able to produce images of a character like Nintendo's Mario unless Nintendo takes action to opt out. Questions one might think would precede such a conversation — how did OpenAI's model know about Mario in the first place? What sorts of media did it scrape and train on? — are here considered resolved or irrelevant.

Coming from Altman, though, it assumes an additional meaning: He would very much prefer that his company not be liable for potentially risky or damaging conversations that its software has with users. In other words, he'd like to operate a product that dispenses medical and legal advice while assuming as little liability for its outputs, or its users' inputs, as possible — a mass-market product with the legal protections of a doctor, therapist, or lawyer but with as little responsibility as possible. There are genuinely interesting issues to work out here. But against the backdrop of numerous reports and lawsuits accusing chatbot makers of goading users into self-harm or triggering psychosis, it's not hard to imagine why getting blanket protections might feel rather urgent right now.
On both copyright and privacy, his vision is maximalist: not just total freedom for his company to operate as it pleases, but additional regulatory protections for it as well. It's also probably aspirational — we don't get to a copyright free-for-all without a lot of big fights, and a chatbot version of attorney-client privilege is the sort of thing that will likely arrive with a lot of qualifications and caveats. Still, each bid is characteristic of the industry and the moment it's in. So long as they're building something, they believe they might as well ask for everything.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 19d

wrong! history is actually a series of binding essays

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 20d

no joke, having two toddlers was when this really kicked me in the gut. two lines crossing on a really depressing graph

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 20d

with the same personal caveats and granting the limits of the perspective of a child: watching so much of the generation of gruff, stoic, intelligent men I grew up around lose complete control and turn into addled neurotic news freaks has been disconcerting and a little surprising

Reposted by John Herrman

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 20d

Fascinating to watch people strain to assemble a "radicalized online" theory from thin and incomplete evidence as they post amid some of the most openly vengeful, bloodthirsty, "radical" social feeds in memory nymag.com/intelligence...

Was Tyler Robinson radicalized online? To whatever extent it's a meaningful, coherent question, the best answer we have, based on what little evidence we have — and with the expectation that more will be revealed in the coming days, weeks, and months — is: maybe? We don't know. If and until we find out, though, the days since Kirk's shooting have posed a related question: What about everyone else?
If the popular theory of online radicalization is that people lose touch with their humanity - or are merely driven to ideological extremity or total alienation - in insular, ideological accelerative communities, there were abundant examples of this phenomenon in the week following Kirk's shooting. Seconds after Kirk was killed, a TikTok influencer streamed the scene mere feet away from the stage where it happened, frantically commanding viewers to subscribe to his channel as panicked bystanders screamed and fled. In the early stages of the manhunt, politically motivated users on X, and on forums like 4chan and Kiwi Farms, began constructing theories about how the shooter must have been trans and therefore predisposed to violence, laundering a preexisting shared obsession into the broader social-media conversation. Elsewhere on social media, defensive leftists convinced one another, with scant evidence and clear motivation, that Kirk must have been killed by a follower of far-right personality Nick Fuentes, who had feuded with him for years. (It seems like a version of this theory may have found its way to the writer's room at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, drawing the attention of FCC chair Brendan Carr and leading ABC to take the show off the air
"indefinitely.")

Before and after Robinson was identified, a small but not insignificant number of people cheered Kirk's death on public social-media channels, while right-wing internet users responded with an unprecedented mass doxxing campaign, collecting these posts and trying to get the people behind them fired, kicked out of school, or deported.
This was all cheered on by the J.D. Vance - "call them out, and hell, call their employer," the vice-president said while hosting Charlie Kirk's show. It was gleefully justified as revenge for the left's years of"cancel culture," and was accordingly broad, sweeping up people who had merely criticized Kirk, as well as bystanders who had, in fact, said nothing at all. Elsewhere on social media, and especially on X, some users simply — and comfortably — called for direct retribution and declared that the time had come for a national divorce and civil war.
Animated, horrified, inspired, or merely unmoored into a state of disorientation by the shocking (and widely viewed) murder of a polarizing figure, a vast range of people revealed, on purpose or by accident, how alien to one another their normative experiences had become, online and off. Many surely wondered, from each edge of this nightmarish discourse — although perhaps not as much as people who didn't enter the fray at all — in what world are people posting this stuff? In death as in life, Charlie Kirk has left a lot of Americans struggling to understand how their fellow citizens could possibly say or believe the things they do.

I don’t mean to suggest equivalence here. An obsessive, metrics-driven influencer is a freakish cautionary tale, not a militant slipping into terroristic threats. You might question the character or judgment of someone who publicly celebrates the death of public figure they hate, or vents crudely or angrily about their political opponents after seeing a video of the murder of an online personality they love or identify with, but they’re not participating in an organized online campaign, supported by elected officials, to have their enemies “thrown from civil society,” kicked out of school, fired from their jobs, or stripped of their driver’s licenses.

Fearful elected Democrats have been far more careful than scattered liberals and leftists on social media, retreating to platitudes about how violence is bad and speech should never be met with violence, and have been harshly censured by Republicans in cases where they offered anything but praise for Kirk, as in the case of representative Ilhan Omar — the right is, as usual, more aligned. The president claimed that the “radical left” was “directly responsible” for an act of “terrorism” and pledged to go after people and organizations that “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence.” His closest adviser, Stephen Miller, was more direct and spoke in the same voice as the burn-it-all-down contingent of Kirk’s online fandom. Kirk’s death was the result of “a vast domestic-terror movement,” he told Vance on Kirk’s show, before promising to use “every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 20d

it did lots of other things, too, but the positives tend to accrue in the form of individual success or satisfaction: these are fundamentally grimy marketplaces masquerading as communities, just a total disaster

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 20d

strong agree, from 2017: opaque commercial social platforms becoming the most vivid, accessible representation of discourse, democracy, the public sphere, the media, etc was a massive accelerant for cynicism/resentment/despair www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/m...

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 20d

The lesson isn't "EVERYONE is being radicalized by the internet" — a similarly appealing, pat, useless framework except for assigning blame and justifying censorship and privacy crackdowns — but rather a warning against imagining the internet as a distinct place or force. We've got bigger problems!

Of course, we don't really expect the many thousands of people saying this kind of stuff about the killing of a widely beloved and despised famous person to one day resort to violence. We understand them as downstream not just from a specific event and its fallout but from a terrifying and heavily politicized decline in Americans' trust and regard for one another. (Also, it should be said, as relatively rare public expressions of private sentiments more people might confide to friends or family, who are more likely to agree, understand, or simply feel comfortable knowing that they don't mean much.)
This should give us pause about the ritual of assigning such posts so much value in cases where violence actually occurs.
As a general theory explaining the ills of the world, "online radicalization" is a comforting fiction without predictive power, a way to contain shocking events with complicated, overlapping motivations inside arbitrary digital boundaries, a tempting method for dismissing deeper and more sinister problems as mere symptoms of a vague and external online menace, and as a tool for political blame or vindication.
"The internet" can usually no more provide us with the full story of why someone decided to kill another person than their isolated experiences at work, school, or home, which we hardly struggle to see as entwined and inseparable. But the grim incentives and cynical priorities of the commercial platforms that make it up might help explain how we come to see one another as irredeemable.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 20d

Fascinating to watch people strain to assemble a "radicalized online" theory from thin and incomplete evidence as they post amid some of the most openly vengeful, bloodthirsty, "radical" social feeds in memory nymag.com/intelligence...

Was Tyler Robinson radicalized online? To whatever extent it's a meaningful, coherent question, the best answer we have, based on what little evidence we have — and with the expectation that more will be revealed in the coming days, weeks, and months — is: maybe? We don't know. If and until we find out, though, the days since Kirk's shooting have posed a related question: What about everyone else?
If the popular theory of online radicalization is that people lose touch with their humanity - or are merely driven to ideological extremity or total alienation - in insular, ideological accelerative communities, there were abundant examples of this phenomenon in the week following Kirk's shooting. Seconds after Kirk was killed, a TikTok influencer streamed the scene mere feet away from the stage where it happened, frantically commanding viewers to subscribe to his channel as panicked bystanders screamed and fled. In the early stages of the manhunt, politically motivated users on X, and on forums like 4chan and Kiwi Farms, began constructing theories about how the shooter must have been trans and therefore predisposed to violence, laundering a preexisting shared obsession into the broader social-media conversation. Elsewhere on social media, defensive leftists convinced one another, with scant evidence and clear motivation, that Kirk must have been killed by a follower of far-right personality Nick Fuentes, who had feuded with him for years. (It seems like a version of this theory may have found its way to the writer's room at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, drawing the attention of FCC chair Brendan Carr and leading ABC to take the show off the air
"indefinitely.")

Before and after Robinson was identified, a small but not insignificant number of people cheered Kirk's death on public social-media channels, while right-wing internet users responded with an unprecedented mass doxxing campaign, collecting these posts and trying to get the people behind them fired, kicked out of school, or deported.
This was all cheered on by the J.D. Vance - "call them out, and hell, call their employer," the vice-president said while hosting Charlie Kirk's show. It was gleefully justified as revenge for the left's years of"cancel culture," and was accordingly broad, sweeping up people who had merely criticized Kirk, as well as bystanders who had, in fact, said nothing at all. Elsewhere on social media, and especially on X, some users simply — and comfortably — called for direct retribution and declared that the time had come for a national divorce and civil war.
Animated, horrified, inspired, or merely unmoored into a state of disorientation by the shocking (and widely viewed) murder of a polarizing figure, a vast range of people revealed, on purpose or by accident, how alien to one another their normative experiences had become, online and off. Many surely wondered, from each edge of this nightmarish discourse — although perhaps not as much as people who didn't enter the fray at all — in what world are people posting this stuff? In death as in life, Charlie Kirk has left a lot of Americans struggling to understand how their fellow citizens could possibly say or believe the things they do.

I don’t mean to suggest equivalence here. An obsessive, metrics-driven influencer is a freakish cautionary tale, not a militant slipping into terroristic threats. You might question the character or judgment of someone who publicly celebrates the death of public figure they hate, or vents crudely or angrily about their political opponents after seeing a video of the murder of an online personality they love or identify with, but they’re not participating in an organized online campaign, supported by elected officials, to have their enemies “thrown from civil society,” kicked out of school, fired from their jobs, or stripped of their driver’s licenses.

Fearful elected Democrats have been far more careful than scattered liberals and leftists on social media, retreating to platitudes about how violence is bad and speech should never be met with violence, and have been harshly censured by Republicans in cases where they offered anything but praise for Kirk, as in the case of representative Ilhan Omar — the right is, as usual, more aligned. The president claimed that the “radical left” was “directly responsible” for an act of “terrorism” and pledged to go after people and organizations that “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence.” His closest adviser, Stephen Miller, was more direct and spoke in the same voice as the burn-it-all-down contingent of Kirk’s online fandom. Kirk’s death was the result of “a vast domestic-terror movement,” he told Vance on Kirk’s show, before promising to use “every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 21d

I imagine there's some overlap but I'm talking about a pretty specific concept outlined here: www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-lang...

Large language models are cultural technologies. What might that mean?

Four different perspectives

www.programmablemutter.com

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 22d

what if Reddit except you always get a response and nobody gets mad at you

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 22d

lol

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 22d

vindicating I think for @himself.bsky.social, @alisongopnik.bsky.social, et al, particularly the drift toward GPT-as-reference-librarian usage

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 22d

OpenAI's "what is ChatGPT, anyway?" study is a little weird, sort of funny, but actually illuminating nymag.com/intelligence...

There are a few major caveats here. OpenAI's own researchers worked on the paper with Harvard economist David Deming under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research (in other words, the company is comfortable with this paper's findings). Additionally, the research, which is mostly an attempt to classify and sort a large set of messages, was done substantially by OpenAl's own models, which both automated the process and, the researchers say, helped preserve user anonymity. "No one looked at the content of messages while conducting analysis for this paper," the researchers claim, although they did validate their automations against human analysis used in smaller, previous studies we've talked about here before. The researchers' methodology is both fascinating and could insufficiently but not entirely inaccurately be characterized as: "We asked ChatT

The picture that emerges from this data matches this thesis pretty closely: ChatGPT, for many of its users, is a way to access, remix, summarize, retrieve, and sometimes reproduce information and ideas that already exist in the world; in other words, they use this one tool much in the way that they previously engaged with the entire web - arguably the last great "cultural and social technology" - and through a similar routine of constant requests, consultations, and diversions. One doesn't get the feeling from this research that we're careening toward uncontrollable superintelligence, or even imminent invasion of the workforce by agentic Al bots, but it does suggest users are more than comfortable replacing and extending many of their current online interactions
- searching, browsing, and consulting with the ideas of others - with an ingratiating chatbot simulation.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Sep 5

congratulations to all these great men of history, who will definitely be revered and celebrated for generations!

Karl Bode @karlbode.com · Sep 5

this whole video of tech CEOs kissing authoritarian ass is genuinely one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen in my life

absolute, feckless fawning by a long list of pudding-brained simps who should never be taken seriously on any subject ever again

Trump hosts top tech CEOs at White House: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Tim Cook & more

YouTube video by LiveNOW from FOX

www.youtube.com

Reposted by John Herrman

Kyle Chayka @chaykak.bsky.social · Sep 4

helpful @jwherrman.bsky.social column on the value and business models of AI coding startups nymag.com/intelligence...

How Investors Think AI Will Actually Make Money

“Learn to code” is taking on new meaning in Silicon Valley.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Sep 4

god what a grim product

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Sep 4

if "grandpa with fox on in the background" made you sad, wait until you meet "grandpa who watches 2000 daily reels of slop algorithmically targeted at his worst impulses and fears"

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Sep 4

clear act of war against old people and their families www.theverge.com/news/769460/...

Reposted by John Herrman

Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · Aug 22

My tests of the AI grader "agent" get a mention in this article about how everything AI everywhere all the time is now an agent.

John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · Aug 22

new chatbot? call it an agent. new software feature? sure, yes, agent. Old feature that's been there for years? It can be an agent if it wants to be, and how dare you suggest otherwise nymag.com/intelligence...

A few of Grammarly's new agents might fit such a definition, if you squint a little. The "AI Grader" tool claims to be able to estimate an assignment's grade by "looking up your instructor, "reviewing public teaching info," and "identifying key grading priorities." Setting aside whether such a feature is ethical, useful, or even functional - Jane Rosenzweig, director of the Harvard College Writing Center, found nothing redeeming in testing - such a feature might fit a bare description of an agent. You give it a task and it does a couple of unpredictable things in its attempt to fulfill it.
Same for the "Citation Finder, a tool that will, after your work is done, backfill it with "legit sources to back your claims." (Now is as good a time as any to ask: What the hell are we even doing with this stuff?)

A Grammarly feature that claims to offer "feedback inspired by real experts" seems to drift further from "agency." Then there are the rest of the new agents: simulated "reader reactions," a "humanizer," a "paraphraser." These sound an awful lot like features already contained in Grammarly, as well as things you could get by pasting your text into any major chatbot and asking for it. (Are the new included summarization features in iOS, Android, Windows, Office, and Google Docs agentic too?) Finally, Grammarly suggests, there's a "proofreader" agent, which can "refine grammar, clarity, structure, and more as you write." It's hard to find the agent here or even something new. Proofreading has been the entire thing with Grammarly for years, well before the company was talking about generative Al at all.