Zuckerberg Was Not That Cool: A.I.S. and the Social Media Phenomenology During Mark’s Rebranding Tour

During a recent rebranding tour, sporting Gen Z-approved tousled hair, streetwear and a gold chain, the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg let the truth slip: Consumers no longer control their social-media feeds. Meta’s algorithm, he boasted, has improved to the point that it is showing users “a lot of stuff” not posted by people they had connected with and he sees a future in which feeds show you “content that’s generated by an A.I. system.”

Spare me. There is nothing that I want less than a bunch of Jesus-as-a-shr Imp, pie-eating cartoon cats, and other A.I. slop. There is a silver lining. Our legal system is starting to recognize this shift and hold tech giants responsible for the effects of their algorithms — a significant, and even possibly transformative, development that over the next few years could finally force social media platforms to be answerable for the societal consequences of their choices.

Let’s get started with the problem. Section 230, a snippet of law embedded in the 1996 Communications Decency Act, was initially intended to protect tech companies from defamation claims related to posts made by users. The early days of social media made sense because we mostly chose what we saw based on whom we friends on sites such as Facebook. Since we selected those relationships, it was relatively easy for the companies to argue they should not be blamed if your Uncle Bob insulted your strawberry pie on Instagram.

Perplexity Pro: Harassing the News Industry with Copyright Violation in News Editorials – The New York Times, WIRED and the Wall Street Journal

This is not the first time Perplexity has run afoul of news publishers; earlier this month, The New York Times sent the company a cease-and-desist letter stating that it was using the newspaper behemoth’s content without permission. This summer, both Forbes and WIRED detailed how Perplexity appeared to have plagiarized stories. Forbes and Condé Nast sent the company cease-and-desist letters.

Dow Jones (the publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the New York Post—both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp—brought the copyright infringement lawsuit against Perplexity today in the US Southern District of New York.

A WIRED investigation from this summer, cited in this lawsuit, detailed how Perplexity inaccurately summarized WIRED stories, including one instance in which it falsely claimed that WIRED had reported on a California-based police officer committing a crime he did not commit. The WSJ reported earlier today that Perplexity is looking to raise $500 million and is the next funding round at an $8 billion valuation.

Perplexity is one of the reasons why the New York Post provided an example of fake sections of news stories. hallucination is when generative models produce false or wholly fabricated material to present it as fact.

In one case, Perplexity Pro began by repeating, word for word, the New York Post story about Jim Jordan sparring with the European Union Commissioner over internet regulation, but then followed them up with five paragraphs about free speech and online regulation.