It should be no secret to readers of Unlimited Hangout that I have a very negative view of the impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having on independent media and media in general. As someone who has been impersonated by AI daily on large video platforms for a few years now, I have come to acutely feel that AI is becoming a dangerous force that is making it increasingly difficult for well-meaning readers/viewers to distinguish between what is real and what is false. I don’t mean just for those hoping to view my content, as the personal issue I am facing is a microcosm of a much larger problem.
As a result, one might think that I would have been pleased, if not relieved, to see Substack, a large platform for professional writers, partner with an “AI detection tool.” Not only am I not pleased, but I have now taken the time to write an opinion piece explaining why I think this is bad and to also explain where I think a lot of this is going.
Substack’s new partner and, apparently, the AI detection tool of choice for most major media outlets right now is called Pangram. Pangram was founded in 2023, originally under the name Checkfor.ai, by Max Spero and Bradley Emi. Both Spero and Emi are Stanford graduates who, prior to Pangram, worked for companies like Nuro and Tesla where they both worked on AI self-driving car software (i.e. replacing human drivers with AI software). Both founders “have long been excited about the potential for AI to transform society” and say they created Pangram “to mitigate new issues caused by the proliferation of powerful generative AI models.”
I find it interesting that two Stanford graduates passionate about AI’s potential to “transform society” who then worked to facilitate AI-powered, human-free driving software decided to quickly pivot to “mitigate” issues caused by generative AI. A lot of the issues caused by generative AI were actually predicted years ago by figures like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Pangram co-founder Max Spero previously did work for Google). Schmidt, in a 2021 book authored with war criminal Henry Kissinger, essentially predicted that AI’s “transformative potential” would cause what he called “cognitive diminishment” in the masses and make it almost impossible for people to distinguish between what is real and what is not on their own. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schmidt and Kissinger’s preferred “solution” to this problem was that we become reliant on AI to distinguish for us what is real and what is not –– in other words, to let another AI become the arbiter of our reality.
Hellbound and Down 