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Greetings from sunny Cape Cod! I filmed the brief right before I hit the road for a family trip, and while I’m catching rays and waves, I still wanted to deliver the latest in media, technology, and innovation. This week on the Brief, we cover Anthropic adding hidden watermarks to all generated text, a massive social addiction lawsuit grouping big tech companies together, and OpenAI releasing Computer History to access everything on your laptop.
My main reflection this week lives at the intersection of the 1st and 3rd stories, which share a similar theme: AI is penetrating every aspect of our lives, whether we want it to or not. Take LLMs, have you met someone who has never used ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini? Or better yet, have you personally ever asked an AI model to help you write an email, social post, or piece of work? To borrow a phrase from the Bible (not for religious means, but because Big Tech CEOs believe they are the new deities), “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” Once this AI watermarking is out in the wild, get ready to duck! Stones will be flying left and right, and undoubtedly we will see the deliciously ironic banter slamming AI-generated text in posts and comments that were also generated with AI.
The biggest question I cannot predict with any veracity is the mass population’s acceptance (or breaking point) with all of this synthetic media. Humans are wildly adaptable, so I can see two potential futures coming to fruition. The first is one where synthetic media insidiously creeps into every workflow, post, and piece of media that it gets subconsciously, then consciously normalized. The second is a true backlash and intellectual reckoning where the overuse of AI becomes a Scarlett letter, and breaking this social contract puts you on the outside. I am hoping for the latter, but I bet the Kalshi/Polymarket ‘prediction’ odds would be in favor of the former.