James Steinhof at TruthOut tells us that “Buzzfeed’s AI-Produced Content Experiment is a Glimpse Into a Bleak Future.” Once Buzzfeed outsourced some of its more clickbaity works to AI – which doesn’t get sick, doesn’t have families, and doesn’t need to go on vacation to recharge from stress – its stock prices went up, though, really, fuck the stock market that we’ve made into a god. Other corporations will see the promise of “reduced labor costs” – you love having your work described as a “cost,” don’t you? – and hope for a similar goosing of their stock prices. Any teacher can tell that a ChatGPT-produced essay is BS, but our boldest and brightest entrepreneurs will pretend there’s no difference between writing produced by real people and writing produced by a machine that’s guessing at what being a human is like. The question is why we, as civilized people, would tolerate such a thing.
David Sirota at The Lever notes that a private hedge fund industry rag has said, and I quote, that “private equity returns are a major threat to pension plans' ability to pay retirees in 2023.” So there’s the danger to pensions we’ve been hearing about for the last couple of decades! I kid, of course – banksters have been using pension-related hysteria to justify gobbling up public pensions themselves, even though they don’t do any better than other investment firms, though they do charge more on commission. I guess the truly enterprising right-winger would blame the Fed’s interest rate hikes for all of that, since one of the (highly awesome and entertaining!) side effects of those rate hikes has been all the money that hedge funds have lost over the last year or so. But I doubt we’ll see that, not when there are transgender athletes and anti-racist books and litter boxes to whine about.
Finally, the incomparable Matt Stoller explains why a judge ruling against our FTC in its suit against Meta for buying a virtual reality competitor might be a “pyrrhic victory” for Meta. Long story short: “what we have learned is that the judge ruled against the FTC on the facts, but not on the underlying legal theory,” meaning that the Judge did agree that “acquisitions of nascent companies can hurt competition and that companies not currently in a marketplace can still have influence over the marketplace,” but ruled that our FTC simply didn’t make that case well enough. Courts have spent the last 40 years trampling on such theories in antitrust law, even though there’s plenty of precedent for them, so that’s actually a big deal. Folks, this is why we always try to do the right thing – even when we fail, we set an example (or even a precedent!) for those who follow us.
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