It's also about distraction. The main point of the letter and the campaign behind it is slight-of-hand; to get the media obsessing over hypothetical concerns about hypothetical future AIs rather than talking about the actual concerns around current LLMs. They don't want the media talking about the danger of deepfaked videos, floods of generated disinformation, floods of generated scams, deepfaked audio scams, and on and on, so they dangle Skynet in front of them and watch the majority of the media gladly obsess over our Terminator-themed future because that's more exciting and generates more clicks than talking about things like the flood of fake news that is going to dominate every democratic election in the world from now on. Because these LLM creators would much rather see regulation of future products they don't have any idea how to build (and , even better, maybe that regulation can even entrench their own position) than regulation of what they're currently, actually doing.
I'd love to see this as a trend for 2024 but the international anti-democracy propaganda ecosystem that gets ramped up for major US elections every two years doesn't get ramped up for one-off special elections. By the time November of 2024 rolls around there will have been a months long tsunami of bullshit overflowing with stories of migrant caravans, crime waves, open borders, and the Democratic Party having satanic furry orgies with underage chimeras. And the credulous, semi-functioning smooth brains will believe it all and go vote for the GOP like they're told.
Because the first play the deadbeat's lawyer is going to make is to sue for custody because every day the deadbeat has custody is a day they don't have to pay child support for. Because of this many single parents don't want to go after their deadbeat ex's money because it will likely bring the deadbeat back into their life and, usually worse, their child's life. Now the child is probably going to have to spend time with a parent that does not give a shit about them and is only looking after them to save money and the parent that actually loves the child would rather forfeit money than put them through that.
The media keeps using that word, I do not think it means what they think it means. These people aren't questioning, they're not doubtful; they're convinced. They are certain that their position is the correct one and no amount of new information will change their minds.
It's important from a narrative standpoint in telling his own story of researching this; the point of these talks is much less about teaching kids the history of the co-creator of Batman than it is telling the story of the researcher and writer who put that history together. The point is to hopefully inspire a few kids to go down a similar path themselves.
It was presumed, since Bill Finger's only child was a gay man who died thirty years ago, that no heir to his estate existed. The researcher discovering that Bill had a granddaughter would lose its impact without the knowledge that his only child was gay.
Finger died in obscurity in 1974, with artist Bob Kane credited as Batman’s only creator. Finger’s only child was a son, Fred Finger, who was gay and died in 1992 at age 43 of AIDS complications. Bill Finger was presumed to have no living heirs, meaning there was no one to press DC Comics to acknowledge Finger’s work.
But Nobleman discovered Fred Finger had a daughter, Athena Finger. That, he said, is a showcase moment of the presentation he estimates he has given 1,000 times at schools.
“It’s the biggest twist of the story, and it’s usually when I get the most gasps,” Nobleman said. “It’s just a totally record-scratch moment.”
Nobleman’s research helped push DC Comics into reaching a deal with Athena Finger in 2015 to acknowledge her grandfather and Kane as co-creators. That led to the documentary “Batman & Bill,” featuring Nobleman.
And athletes get so much endorsement money off of the exposure they get playing for their teams that they should be paying the league for the privilege. And people who go on late night talk shows are pushing their latest projects; they should be paying the networks to be on the show. Professional orchestral musicians would never get to play in front of the crowds they do without the orchestra group, so they should pay to be members rather than collecting a salary. And don't even get me started on those moochers over on Youtube; they should clearly be paying Youtube for drawing millions of views, not the other way around.
Charging the people who create the value you rely upon for your business to survive seems like a great idea that should be rolled out all over the place!
But the basic idea of transitioning away from the ad model toward a user funded model is a good move.
There's some wishful thinking. This isn't going to be a "transition away from the ad model," this is absolutely going to be about adding revenue in addition to the ad model.
That way X can monotize people with hundreds of thousands and millions of followers. At that level, accounts become businesses on their own. A few promotional posts would easily pay for the account.
Those are the accounts that bring value to Twitter to begin with; you're suggesting people should be charged for the labor they're giving Twitter that drives traffic to the site. They already realized how unbelievably stupid it was to try to demand money from those accounts with the Twitter Blue roll out, they quickly backtracked and gave Twitter Blue for free to accounts with over 1 million followers. Many popular creators are willing to provide content for someone else's site for free, very few are willing to pay for the privilege. Twitter isn't the only game in town; if they start to charge people based on high follower counts they'll leave.
[Okay, we've got the solution: "Everyone needs to pay us to use Xitter." Now we just need to figure what we can sell as the problem that justifies that solution.]
Musk continued promoting his strategy of charging X users a monthly subscription as "the only way" he can think of "to combat vast armies of bots." He also took this opportunity to announce that X would soon be rolling out a lower-priced subscription tier for X users. According to Musk, the more users pay for subscriptions, the higher the cost of bots would be, and the better chance X will have of preventing bot-driven hate speech, misinformation, and other harm.
