One Million Dollars or One Million Followers? [Content Made Simple]

Issue #298: Facebook "transparency," ChatGPT, and more.

Chris Martin

Feb 16

TOP OF THE WEEK

Kids Want One Million Followers Over One Million Dollars—Makes Sense

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Quote:

For starters, the value of money has changed for kids growing up now, Samir said, with $1 million no longer being an impressively huge sum of money.
"Because kids have access to so many of their millionaire gamers and influencers on their TikTok, they're like, whoa, £1 million is not that much," Samir said. "It's very entrepreneurial, even how they thought about it, they were like, OK, if I have 1 million followers then I can turn it into maybe more than £1 million."

Commentary:

A lot of people may gasp in horror at the idea that children would rather have a million followers than a million dollars, but honestly that’s the better choice. You can turn a million followers into far more than a million dollars in a short period of time. And kids want to be creators more than anything today, so having a million followers would give them the eyes and ears they long for.

THE TRIVIA QUESTION

In what century was February 14th first declared to be “Valentine’s Day”?

Answer at the bottom.

HITTING THE LINKS

Link #1: Facebook is going to explain more about how machine learning decides the ads you see

Always encouraging to see commitments of transparency from Meta/Facebook. Always important to remember they probably won’t be telling the whole story.

External privacy experts and policy stakeholders suggested that the company increase its transparency about how machine learning helps pick which ads to show, Pavón says. “We are committed to using machine learning models responsibly,” Pavón wrote. “Being transparent about how we use machine learning is essential because it ensures that people are aware that this technology is a part of our ads system and that they know the types of information it is using.”

Link #2: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

This is the best thing I’ve read on ChatGPT and generative AI yet.

Given that large language models like ChatGPT are often extolled as the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, it may sound dismissive—or at least deflating—to describe them as lossy text-compression algorithms. I do think that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the tendency to anthropomorphize large language models, but there is another aspect to the compression analogy that is worth considering.

Link #3: Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first

🤡

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”
When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.