What Happened Today: January 10, 2023

Biden also had classified docs; Macron tightens his belt; The Democratic Socialists aren't so socialist

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The Big Story

White House officials are trying to contain the blowback after reports on Monday that a cache of top-secret classified documents was discovered last November at the office President Biden kept at the University of Pennsylvania. Citing an unnamed source, CNN said on Tuesday that the documents include “U.S. intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom.” In light of the FBI raid of former president Trump’s Florida property last year that was initiated because he allegedly took classified documents from the White House, some Republican lawmakers have moved quickly to exercise their new oversight powers, with top members of the House Intelligence Committee calling for a “damage assessment” of the president’s handling of sensitive material.

On a Monday-night call with reporters, White House officials downplayed the significance of the cache, saying it was less than a dozen documents. However, they did not explain why the administration didn’t disclose the discovery in November, about a week before the midterm election, which is when President Biden’s attorneys initially turned over the classified files to the National Archives. 

Based on current reporting, it seems that President Biden’s attorneys quickly turned over the classified material. That would mark a key procedural difference to his predecessor, who spent months thwarting federal officials’ attempts to recover classified documents he’d taken from the White House before FBI agents recovered some 33 boxes of materials from his Mar-a-Lago estate. Still, the discovery of Biden’s documents could aid Trump’s lawyers as they wait to see if the Justice Department will bring charges against Trump for his potential breach of federal law on handling classified material. For now, Attorney General Merrick Garland will weigh opening up a criminal investigation into the Biden documents after he received the preliminary report on the documents from John Lausch Jr., one of the few remaining U.S. attorneys still remaining from the Trump administration. 

Read More:  https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/10/politics/classified-documents-joe-biden/index.html

In the Back Pages: The Post-Human Economy

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The Rest

→ Two Iranian men allegedly planning to use deadly doses of ricin and cyanide in a “Islamist-motivated” attack were apprehended by authorities in Germany the same day that German officials received a tip from U.S. law enforcement, said Herbert Reul, a German security official involved in the investigation. Without detailing how imminent the threat of the attack was, prosecutors asked a German court to continue to detain the suspects, who were only named by their initials. Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Fraser said in a statement that the country’s law enforcement has prevented 21 total Islamist attacks since 2000.

→ With the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic over, and his second term well underway, French President Emmanuel Macron is about to make good on the controversial pension- and retirement-age reforms he promised in 2017. Initially met with widespread condemnation and some of the largest worker strikes in decades, Macron has been trying to raise the legal retirement age up from 62, which is lower than most other advanced economies and starts even younger in France for some public workers. Put on ice in 2020 because of the pandemic, and then too divisive to bring up during his re-election campaign, Macron “has decided to go quick,” Renaud Foucart, a senior lecturer of economics at Lancaster University, told CNBC. Despite, or perhaps because of the inevitable worker strikes and public outcry, Macron will accelerate the negotiations to wrap up before the fall of this year. Those on smaller pensions could see a bump in income, some French analysts say, as a concession to those who will now need to work longer before retiring.

→ Number of the Day: 4.2 million

A quick glance at the latest census figures could lead one to believe America’s small towns and rural outposts are overflowing with former city dwellers making their escape during the pandemic. But the surge in rural population as counted by the Census Bureau has more to do with how the government categorizes an “urban area,” now defined as one of at least 5,000 residents—which has led to 4.2 million people once considered urban residents now being counted among the rural ranks. The reclassification will have a significant impact on which federal grants and funding these newly rural towns receive, though the new notion of a city could change again as the Census Bureau considered updating the century-old designation of 2,500 people to 10,000 to qualify as an urban area. If the census used the World Bank’s international standard of 50,000 people to qualify as a city, roughly 30% of the U.S. population would live in a rural district.

→ Author of more than 30 books of poems, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, and former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic died on Monday at the age of 84. Growing up in Belgrade, Serbia, during World War II before his family moved to Chicago when he was a teenager, Simic often took up the topic of the war, along with an eclectic range of high- and low-brow themes in his work. He started writing poems in the evenings after he moved to New York City to work a series of odd jobs in the late 1950s. Satisfying what he would describe as his “minimalist urge,” he found his early voice writing “about the simplest things,” he once said, threading philosophy, politics, and violence with reflections on food, sex, music, and the ordinary objects of life, like shoes and silverware. In an interview with The Paris Review, he said that “a ‘truth’ detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.”

Read More: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/09/27/night-watchman/

→ If you build the shortgrass, the bison will come—or so hopes American Prairie, a Montana organization that’s trying to restore a massive grassland ecosystem that relies heavily upon a thriving bison population. Though some 60 million bison once counted the American heartland as their home, a tiny fraction live in the United States now, with some 30,000 roaming free and the other half million raised as livestock. Since 2001, American Prairie has led the effort to bring 6,000 bison to settle on 500,000 contiguous acres to serve as the “keystone” species whose unique role as “ecosystem engineers”—responsibilities include churning up grasses with their hooves, practicing patterns of grazing, and leaving behind waste—buttresses a prairie’s worth of birds, bears, wolves, and river otters who’ve seen their own population numbers drop because of industrial farming and livestock expansion. Songbirds in particular do better with bison around as their hair helps insulate nests, increasing the survival rate for eggs by as much as 60%.

→ Quote of the Day:

Recent developments confirm that the [Democratic Socialists of America] DSA leadership has been thoroughly captured by middle-class careerists, opportunists, and Democratic Party-adjacent political operatives. The DSA is an appendage of the Democratic Party & an obstacle to the formation of a true workers’ party.

In a replay of the 1960s debates over the “New Left,” which elevated a radical cultural agenda over the traditional left-wing support for labor movements, the socialists are once again forming a circular firing squad. The statement above was released over the weekend by a faction known as Class Unity as it announced its split with the DSA, bringing into stark relief the ongoing divide within the socialist or socialist-ish flank of the Democratic Party. According to Class Unity, the schism was caused because the DSA has become a party of the professional classes, leftist in name only. Class Unity points to the November vote by three of the most prominent DSA members in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman, who failed to support striking railroad workers and forced them into a weak compromise. Instead of supporting American workers, the DSA has been “content to attach itself like a parasite to every bourgeois moral panic, left-progressive social fad, and amateur college campus-style protest movement orchestrated by the left wing of capital in the absence of an organized working class,” Class Unity charges.

→ Following PEN America’s critique of an incident it described “as one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory,” the Muslim Public Affairs Council has come out in support of Erika López Prater, the art history professor who was dismissed by Hamline University after Prater showed students a prized 14th-century painting that depicted the prophet Muhammad. While “we recognize the validity and ubiquity of an Islamic viewpoint that discourages or forbids any depictions of the Prophet,” MPAC wrote, “we also recognize the historical reality that other viewpoints have existed and that there have been some Muslims … who have felt no qualms in pictorially representing the Prophet.” MPAC added that “this is a testament to the great internal diversity within the Islamic tradition, which should be celebrated.” Prater has received some recent support from her former campus colleagues, even as administrators continue to justify the dismissal in the name of student safety.

→ While pundits continue to wonder why Republican lawmakers struggle to rack up electoral victories despite platform fundamentals supported by a majority of Americans, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene celebrated the beginning of her new term in the House with an artfully cringey montage of her parading in slow motion through the halls of Congress to the beat of Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.” The performance piece, however, didn’t sit well with Dre, who had the video pulled from Twitter after his lawyer fired off a cease and desist letter. “I don’t license my music to politicians, especially someone as divisive and hateful as this one,” his lawyer wrote, requesting, in effect, that Greene forget about Dre.

→ Longtime political reporter Blake Hounshell passed away on Tuesday morning, his family said in a statement shared with The New York Times newsroom, where Hounshell had worked since 2021. Houndshell arrived at the Times to run its popular On Politics newsletter after stints at Politico and Foreign Policy magazine. “Blake has suddenly died this morning after a long and courageous battle with depression,” his family wrote. 

Read More: https://mobile.twitter.com/liamstack/status/1612904118065963012

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Congress to Free the World by Armin Rosen

In Vilnius, an increasingly marginalized group of activists gathered to oppose autocracy

Jews of Rage by Naomi Seidman

The anger that fills the Yiddish original manuscript of Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is muted in the book that became the classic account of the Holocaust

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The Post-Human Economy

Artificial Intelligence chatbots like GPT reveal that the robots have already taken over

By Katherine Dee

We’re supposedly on the brink of an artificial intelligence breakthrough. The bots are already communicating—at least they’re stringing together words and creating images. Some of those images are even kind of cool, especially if you’re into that sophomore dorm room surrealist aesthetic. GPT-3, and, more recently, chatGPT, two tools from OpenAI (which recently received a $29 billion valuation) are taking over the world.

Each new piece about GPT-3 tells a different story of displacement: gone are the halcyon days of students writing original essays, journalists doing original reporting, or advertisers creating original ad copy. What was once the domain of humans will now be relegated to bots. The next technological revolution is upon us, and it’s coming for creative labor.

Timothy Shoup from the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies seems confident that with chatGPT and GPT-3, the problem is about to get much worse, and that 99.9% of internet content will be AI-generated by 2030. The future, in other words, will be by bots and for bots.

Estimates like this scare people because they’re couched in the language of science-fiction: a dead internet that’s just AI-generated content and no people. But isn’t that…a lot of what the internet is already? It’s not as though we don’t know this, either–we are all aware of not only bots but of the sea of bot-generated content that exists on every social media platform and in every Google search.

Take me, for example. I can’t stop watching content farm-generated videos on TikTok.

They’re simple: just an automated voice reading a Reddit post, usually overlayed on a clip from Minecraft or a mobile game. An increasing number of TikToks are like this—not viral dances nor recipes nor pranks, a generic content product engineered to command the maximum amount of human attention at the minimum possible cost to create.

They come in a few different templates. The Reddit posts, already mentioned; the uncanny valley of recipes that are just a hair off, like these odd, almost absurd cooking videos; voiceovers of news that could be true, or may very well not be. And then there are the “very satisfying” videos of people doing things like squeezing clay or letting slime drip between their fingers; random clips of Family Guy with a stock video of a person “reacting” to it. It’s a genre unto itself—there are even sub-genres.

This mass-produced shlock, the “pink slime” of internet content, is, as Vice reports about the TikToks, created as a low-effort way to generate ad revenue. You pull a couple of levers, turn a couple of dials, figure out what viewers like, what the algorithms like, and fire. It’s tough to pinpoint exactly how much of this content is out there. What we know is nebulous: a lot of online content is fake–that is, non-human. What exactly “a lot” means, of course, varies from source to source.

What’s trickier is the stuff that isn’t immediately ignored. The TikTok videos, for instance. I like them, and I’d imagine others like them because they’re easy to watch–they’re entertaining in the way watching a spinning top or a ball bounce is entertaining. You can do it for hours, and you’re not totally sure why. They’ve even adapted to the modern tendency to divide your attention: oftentimes a split-screen will feature a play-through of something like Minecraft or a mobile game set alongside a video of someone, say, squishing clay in their hands.

This isn’t a phenomenon new to TikTok, either.

One might recall the head-scratching YouTube videos geared toward children, which, in 2017, made headlines after reporter James Bridle pointed out how disturbing so many of them were, often featuring characters from kids’ TV programs but with the bots adding “keyword salad,” “violence,” and “the very stuff of kids’ worst dreams”—for example, Peppa Pig getting tortured at the dentist.

Then, of course, there’s what you might call the “Wish” phenomenon: tee-shirts, posters, wall decals, you name it, that serve a similar purpose. Again, mass-produced, bot-produced, not always sensical, and somehow, despite this, a great way to make a few extra bucks. And that’s just the interesting stuff—the stuff we might consume voluntarily, even if we know it’s garbage.

There’s SEO-generated content (once used to game Google searches), re-purposed and repeated content, and bot-generated responses on social media, like Reddit, Quora, and of course, Facebook and Twitter. It’s unclear how much of it is even viewed by actual people and how much of it is “bot-to-bot” traffic (for bots, by bots, all to generate clicks), but we know it’s everywhere.

We are also getting better at producing it. A marketing manager from South Florida, E., shared that her firm relies on that annoying SEO debris, this “digital trash” that already litters search results. E. asked to remain anonymous for fear of her comments putting her job in jeopardy. E. oversees the creation of keyword-laden landing pages that bait users who are trying to Google something.

She used to spend a lot of time clicking around websites like Upwork, looking for reliable contractors who could quickly generate copy for her. These days, though, she’s taken on much of the workload herself: she plugs something into chatGPT, does some minor editing, and up it goes. I asked E. if she thought that these contractor copywriting jobs would disappear, especially as the models get better.

To her, a lot of the industry is “fat.” That is, there’s a lot of completely unnecessary work that she doesn’t imagine disappearing overnight. While the contractor copy wasn’t always reliable, the AI wasn’t always either. If anything, she said, marketing firms like hers will eventually employ people to design prompts and edit AI-generated writing.

Online content isn’t the only or the most significant field that chatGPT and GPT-3 will transform. Fields like law, customer service, content moderation, and software engineering will also undergo massive changes.

In the case of law, a field notorious for its grunt work, the responsibilities of a first-year law school grad may drastically change. AI might be able to scan large documents for certain clauses or loopholes; complete directives like “add an NDA clause,”; or edit documents with an explanation of the changes. These are tasks that many people pay $500/hour for, and they will suddenly be instantaneous and free.

Not all of this is hypothetical, either. Detangle AI offers summaries of legal docs designed to be “actually understood.” Another company, Spellbook, uses GPT-3 to review and suggest language for contracts, touting itself as a “Copilot for lawyers,” riffing off Github’s Copilot, which is something like a super-intelligent autocomplete for engineers, a tool that’s completely transformed software documentation.

While this isn’t as sensational as AI defending someone in court or acting as a lobbyist (two stories that have recently made headlines), these are the types of changes that are less likely to get quashed by regulations or even just social norms… and more likely to happen “seemingly overnight.”

Customer service is one of the more interesting examples. We’ve all interacted with customer service chatbots—they’ve been commonplace since around 2017. They’ve also been improving each year, evolving from a limited (and frustrating) menu of options spit out at you from a pop-up into a service that, in some cases, is more pleasant to interact with than an actual customer service representative. According to Forbes, the AI-customer service niche is flourishing, with an explosion of startups such as Zoho, Levity AI, and Ada promising to make customer service even more frictionless.

We’ve long lived in a world with this type of automation, though—press 1 for this, press 2 for that—that’s nothing new. What happens, though, when AI for customer service isn’t just on the service end? For example, consumer-facing customer service apps like DoNotPay, use a large language model (LLM) to interact with customer service on behalf of its users. How many customer service interactions will include no human voice? What are the knock-on effects of that?

Security is now a growing concern. Anton Troynikov, a robotics engineer and researcher, points out that AI has a tendency to “hallucinate.” That is, it’s not always right–it’s not designed to be correct; it’s designed to be similar. Think sophisticated digital parrot, as opposed to a free-thinking digital assistant. If you’re dealing with something like a legal contract or your health insurance, you may not want to trust an AI to get all of the details right. But once the automation of these services becomes the industry standard (the way it already is when you call your cable or utility company) most people won’t have a choice. Contacting another person will become a luxury product, available only to the wealthy who can afford to pay the ‘conscious human being premium.’

People like Ryan McKinney, who founded Symbiose, a company that has been working on integrating AI and communication, argue that we should be optimistic. These are tools that increase not only our productivity but our ability to navigate a world that’s already changed and alienating. On our call, he offered the example of AI summarizing the contents of messages—a helpful tool, especially if you receive high volumes of communication. Once AI does that, what else can it do?

For Ryan, “AI can help us be more human.” Ryan thinks that AI supervision will explode—creating new jobs for people that will require more nuance, diligence, and domain expertise. “It’s a tool for leverage, not replacement,” he says. AI can free us from our more monotonous tasks, he believes, freeing us to do more meaningful work.

The argument echoes some of the more upbeat predictions from the late 1990s when proponents of globalization insisted that the loss of American manufacturing jobs would be offset as former factory workers were trained to take on new roles in the knowledge economy. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. But with the current pace of automation, jobs aren’t being sent overseas; they're being “offshored” to the mass server farms powering the algorithms. And while it’s certainly possible that the first generation of AI will create new jobs for human supervisors, those jobs would also be vulnerable to automation as the AIs improve.

Jon Stokes, a writer and the co-founder of the tech publication Ars Technica, argues that the work we eliminate for “productivity’s sake” serves an important purpose. Grunt work builds skill, and as corny as it might sound, it also builds character. Stokes anticipates sweeping generational gaps as the perceived necessity for this work disappears. It’s a point that’s easy to overlook in a world where work has been weaponized and where “intern-level” tasks like taking notes on calls or writing dry copy have been monetized beyond our wildest dreams and farmed out to low-skill workers.

Another person I reached out to, who founded a massively successful mobile gaming company during the original app bubble, was also skeptical about the AI breakthrough. His concerns were less social than Jon’s–his thinking was cynical, albeit intuitive. A super-intelligent autocomplete or even spell check is all well and good, and he understood the tendency for people to be utopian about it–but how can we be so sure it won’t bias the output? What if our content, code, or communications were deemed “problematic”? Wouldn’t it stand to reason that AI would prevent us from communicating certain things? One can take a gander at Dissident Right Twitter trolls to see what chatGPT won’t talk about.

Less divisively, in my own experience, I’ve hit a wall asking chatGPT about the occult and how to perform magic. The response I received was that these things are “outside of mainstream beliefs,” and “might be offensive to some people,” so the program couldn’t move forward. A friend, however—the writer Sam Buntz—had better luck. Maybe the problem was with how I phrased my prompt and not the question itself? Still a frustrating learning curve.

When I asked Nick Cammarata from OpenAI what he thought about this, he said, “Well, have you tried asking the model?”

Funny enough, I hadn’t. All I’d done was asked other people.