The lesson people like Natalia take from this is that it is imperative to be better about anonymizing your Instas and Finstas and various other social media accounts, lest you get caught up in something similar. Yes, the underlying behavior is reprehensible and itself should be addressed first and foremost, but few if any are all that interested in seriously understanding or engaging with the behavior, and prefer to condemn the person who said the bad thing and leave it at that.

Last week, Facebook unveiled its latest attempt to rein in its flagship product. In an effort to curb false news, it announced it would be allowing Facebook users to rank news outlets by trustworthiness, and consider those scores when deciding which news stories to display in users’ feeds. But this kind of minor algorithmic knob-fiddling may not be enough. Instead, Facebook should consider using what it’s learned with Instagram, which it acquired in 2012, to embark on a gut renovation.

You don’t need me to tell you how it feels to check Twitter and suddenly feel anxious because our president has tweeted something incendiary or untrue; to have the next hour of your day derailed because somebody is angry with someone else and you decide to follow the thread. As fun as it is to read other people’s thoughts, it’s much less fun to absorb hundreds of people’s emotions — especially on sites designed to compel us to absorb as much as possible.

The social contract of the internet seems to insist that there’s a nobility in weathering degradation. You can call me oversensitive, but the truth is I got far better than any human being should be at absorbing astonishing cruelty and feeling nothing. Undersensitivity was just another piece of workplace safety gear. The fact that we’ve learned to cope doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better. Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with the apocalypse. So, I left.

I categorically do not enjoy my own thoughts. 

A redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process.

These are developments we and the experts we spoke to warned about in our original article. They have arrived with terrifying speed.

It’s a noxious smoothie made of some of today’s worst internet problems. It’s a new frontier for nonconsensual pornography and fake news alike. (Doctored videos of political candidates saying outlandish things in 3, 2… .) And worst of all? If you live in the United States and someone does this with your face, the law can’t really help you.

Some users in a deepfakes Discord chatroom where enthusiasts were trading tips claimed to be actively creating videos of people they know: women they went to high school with, for example. One user said that they made a “pretty good” video of a girl they went to high school with, using around 380 pictures scraped from her Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Amidst the chatter, however, visible minority users quickly discovered that the app did a poor job matching them. East Asian users were matched with caricatures or generic Asian faces, while others found no match at all, prompting criticism that the app was, if not exactly racist, then at least biased. Here again, the choices made in designing a technology had led to some people being able to revel in seeing themselves, but left others to look into a mirror and see no reflection. It highlights a growing issue in which the increasing importance of technology in our lives is also accompanied by a troubling set of blind spots and biases that manifest through how tech is designed.

On the other hand, being nice to users – giving them free funky features to find art that matches their faces, as Google has recently done with its Arts & Culture app – still pays off, as it helps to fine tune existing AI. But for how long will tech firms need us to train them? The economics of data extractivism suggests that it won’t continue forever – it will stop once AI, trained with all that extracted data, works well enough. The future, in other words, belongs to the stingy, fee-charging Google of Cloud AutoML, not the generous, fee-waving Google of Arts & Culture.

Maybe knowing that we’re being monitored by judgmental algorithms could affect our behavior, too. If this is the case — if awareness of mechanical all-seeing eyes changes how we see and comport ourselves — then, well, how? I started thinking about a version of this question a few months ago, recording small instances where I could. What I ended up with was a list not of behavioral improvements or of flashes of self-aware accountability but of tiny, neurotic evasions.

Just as you can share reproductions of the Mona Lisa, someone could still copy and paste the image, but the provenance and price history of the original are accessible to all. The original of these works is identifiable and cannot be replicated, which is why they are called “provably rare.”

In hindsight, it was a waste, and Jobs led them all on a costly detour. While the publishing companies focused on the iPad, people were slowly starting to embrace smartphones. About 300 million smartphones were sold worldwide in 2010, according to research firm IDC, and Apple sold 7.5 million iPads in the first few months the device was for sale. Last year, Apple sold 44 million iPads, and people bought about 1.5 billion smartphones. The iPad is important, but it never became the ubiquitous, world-changing computer that Jobs pitched in 2010. 

We open Twitter, the hellfire burns our dry winter skin like paper, and see that a short story and a trilogy’s middle installment have triggered a reactionary sensibility; we stand up for them with a quickly manufactured consensus.

“It feels like a publicly traded company issuing a token to raise its stock price from the grave,” said Kyle Samani, a partner at the cryptocurrency trading firm Multicoin Capital. “I would not be sleeping very well if I was involved in this,” said Jill Carlson, a blockchain consultant.

What happens when you try to change behavior without behavioral science?

Christopher Priest broke the color barrier at Marvel and reinvented a classic character. Why was he nearly written out of comics history?

The notion that sex is fraught with ambiguity has made some kinds of assault difficult to describe and confront.