Riding High with A.I. : How artificial intelligence is changing social media

Almost every aspect of our lives now involves artificial intelligence in one form or another; from waking up, planning our day, driving to work, and making our schedule, to voice-controlling our lights, making phone calls, receiving shopping recommendations and getting suggestions on what movies to watch. 

Naturally, social media won’t be left behind. 

Working in the Background

The best kinds of AI technology are the ones that seamlessly integrate into our daily routine and make particular tasks easier and more convenient.

Recent examples of these are navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps, and digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Gemini. These innovations just wormed their way into our lives, and now that we’re using these apps so much, we wonder how we had survived without them. 

Artificial in the Social

Social media is another aspect of our day-to-day activities that’s been enhanced by artificial intelligence.  

You may have noticed that your Facebook feed now gives you more of what you click on. Tap on a news article about Apple and you’re bound to see suggested articles about iPhones and MacBooks the day after. Browse through a photo set of Sabrina Carpenter and you’ll be inundated with images of the young singer the next time you browse.

More explicitly, FB proudly lets us know that they use Meta AI in summarizing the comments section of a post, so we wouldn’t have to read through all the rants and repetitive quips. 

Instagram goes the extra mile by giving you AI-powered notifications of new posts by users you’ve chatted with, or whose images you’ve liked. It’s useful but it can also be annoying, especially if you’re trying to go on a social media fast.

While these advancements may seem impressive, the most exciting implementations of AI had their start on TikTok. Their developers constantly amaze us with new, fun, and novel video filters that exceed our imagination; and their innovative text-to-speech function has set a new standard that other tech companies are now trying to live up to. 

The Shape of Things to Come

AI seems to be on a big roll right now, but remarkably, it’s just getting started. 

Social media is just one aspect of our lives that artificial intelligence is radically changing. AI has given us the new and wonderful world of image generation with the likes of Dall-E and Stable Diffusion; while Character AI and Replika have pioneered a new entertainment application with AI roleplaying. 

A couple of decades ago, Kodak didn’t embrace digital technology right away when it was used in photography, the same way Nokia initially turned its back on the smartphone revolution and chose to persist in their old ways. Failing to adapt to the new world order cost these two giants their erstwhile market leadership, all because they failed to see where the future was heading.  

Though most companies have now come to realize that artificial intelligence is the next big thing, and have made the necessary adjustments to adopt and take advantage of the new technology, there are still holdovers who haven’t acknowledged the potential of AI and refuse to invest in the technology, in the interest of short-term penny-pinching. 

Don’t be one of them. Embracing new technology and using it to improve operations is a must, if you want to keep up with your competitors. 

404 Threat Not Found: Why AI Taking Over Humans Is Impossible

From 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, to The Terminator in 1984, to The Matrix movies in modern times, we’ve all been warned, mostly in unrealistic, exaggerated ways, about how artificial intelligence or AI will one day take over our world and enslave us. 

Is it really going to happen? Should we be scared? 

In a word, no. 

The rapid development of artificial intelligence in recent years has sparked a renewed paranoia of our world turning into a wireframed dystopia. Alarmists are troubled by the fact that AI has penetrated our daily lives and we weren’t even fully aware of it: Waze tells us where to go, Alexa switches our lights on and off, Shazam tells us what we’re listening to, and Siri tells us what we need to know. 

The fact that we depend on them so much these days worries the doomsters. What if these AI entities band together and decide to rise against us?

“People of the earth! 
We control your world! We have power over you! 
If you don’t want us to destroy your lives,
we want you to….”

What? What could they possibly want us to do for them? 

Nothing. Machines don’t have wants. Needs, sure—power source, programming, components, operating system—computers need these to be functional. But desire is exclusive to sentient beings, for better or for worse. Desire is what could motivate AI to subjugate us—the desire to wield power, to be loved, to be the best, to have the most. AI has none of those. It doesn’t even care if you turn it off, throw it away, or smash it with a hammer.

It’s interesting to note that the latest advancements in AI, particularly Dall-E and ChatGPT by OpenAI, are powered by human input, which emphasizes the fact that these are merely tools made to make our lives easier, happier, or at the very least, more interesting. 

Another major limitation of AI is its inability to innovate. ChatGPT may be able to write a love song, but it can’t create a new musical genre. You can make it write a screenplay, but it will be a movie you’ve seen a hundred times before. It doesn’t have the will to make something great. It only aims to fulfill the parameters of your requests.  

AI will undoubtedly grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years, but one thing that’s certain is that it will require human input. We would always have to let it know what we want it to do. 

Perhaps a more possible future is for us to have humanlike android assistants, companions, or slaves, however you may want to call it, much like in the TV series Westworld. We can make these humanoids schedule our appointments, clean our houses, wash our clothes, and of course, have sex with us, in whatever way we want them to. 

Because we can fool ourselves into thinking these are real humans, we will hardly talk to each other anymore, preferring instead to interact with our synthetic friends because they always react the way we want them to. 

This is the point when we would realize that our primary concern shouldn’t have been about AI taking over our world, but more about AI taking over our lives.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk

The Internet Big Three

It's hard to make best-of lists because it's an activity that's always sure to attract arguments. But I'm assuming that not many would disagree when I say that these three websites are the most important for me. Not a day goes by without me accessing at least one of these essentials.

Being tagged as my search engine of choice on my browser, I don't even need to go to Google's homepage to use it. I just type my search terms on the address bar and Google results automatically appear. There are other search engines, of course, but I, nor anybody I know, use any of them. 

All of the popular websites have now morphed into apps, and YouTube has made quite a smooth transition. Even the rise of the streaming industry can't stop the ubiquitous popularity of the pioneer video sharing company, even as their paid services lag behind more popular streaming services. You can be sure their ad revenue more than makes up for it. 

Wikipedia has gotten a lot of bad rep as an unreliable source of information for students and academics who do research. Personally, I believe the accusations have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, there may have been some tainted entries-- it's part of the risk of being crowd-sourced, but I venture that 98% of its content are accurate, which include the stuff that I've searched on it so far. 

My Favorite Blogs

I love being a blog writer, and two of the most influential blogs that played a major role in my decision to start my own are Engadget and Seth Godin's blog. 

Seth Godin is an author, marketing specialist, and motivational speaker. He writes sharp, insightful, reflective, and inspiring articles about life, marketing, and everything in between. His entries are usually short bursts of wisdom, but he would occasionally churn out long reads that delve deep into a particular subject matter. 

I sometimes write, thinking about how my article would look like, had he written it, and would revise it accordingly. I don't believe I look up to anybody in the blogging world as much as I do with him. 

You can read his blog here. 

Engadget is the more popular one of my two major influences. It centers on the latest news in technology, with insights and predictions that are usually intriguing and stimulating. The site has grown exponentially in recent years, and now has a small army of writers tackling everything from AI to virtual reality. 

It may just be nostalgia, but I long for the days when Engadget was smaller and simpler. It's so easy to become overwhelmed nowadays with the sheer number of content presented, and we're just talking about the homepage. 

Nonetheless, it's still worth your time to get immersed in it. You can check it out here. 

Your School Dot Com

Official websites of schools and universities are always hard to do. There's always a lot of things going on, and you have to cater to different kinds of users. 

You have to provide information for those who are considering enrolling in your learning institution, and since that entails business, a lot of marketing thought goes into it. You present the courses you offer, pricing, and other important details alongside perfectly posed photos of students of diverse races and cultures. You word the copy carefully to convince visitors that this school's the one for them. 

You also have to cater to the students who are already enrolled in your school, and provide them with a user-friendly, easy-to-navigate portal to whatever they may need from the site, from grades to Zoom links to extra-curricular activities. 

These diverse objectives often lead to clutter but some schools do manage to pull it off successfully, like Douglas College in New Westminster, BC, Canada. 

Their website may not be the best-looking, but it's pretty clear and straightforward, and most importantly, quite easy to use. Check it out here. 

This blog post is made possible by….

We interrupt our regular blog posting to give props to two outstanding individuals, whose exemplary achievements have made our valuable online interactions possible. 

We honor Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, the English computer scientist who’s widely considered as the inventor of the World Wide Web. The internet as we know it started in March of 1989, when he proposed an innovative information management system, and proceeded to implement the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP client and server around eight months after. 

Famously known by his handle TimBL, he is also the director of the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, which oversees the continued development of the Web. The consortium is composed of member organizations that make up a dedicated staff who are committed to the development of standards for the World Wide Web. 

We also want to give a hearty shoutout to Jakob Nielsen, the Danish web usability consultant, human–computer interaction researcher, and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group. He is a former VP of research at Apple, and he’s widely known as the one who established the discount usability engineering movement. In short, he’s responsible for making the internet easy to use and wholly accessible to all of us normal folks. 

To Sir Tim and Mr. Nielsen, thank you for making our lives easier, and for giving all of us the means to make more meaningful human connections. 

And now, back to our regular programming. 

The Beatles’ Best, Now Even Better

The much-anticipated new mix and mastering of the classic album Revolver by the Beatles has finally been released and it’s everything every Beatle fan had wished and hoped for, and then some. Of course, as anyone would expect, Rolling Stone magazine showered it with praise, as you can see here. 

Officially called Revolver Super Deluxe Edition, the set includes the original album, newly mixed and mastered, plus an abundance of outtakes, alternate versions, and some snippets of casual studio chatter between the Fab Four that could make any Beatle fan giddy with excitement. 

Hefty extras aside, the highlight of the package is the original album itself. Meticulously and painstakingly remixed and remastered by Giles Martin, son of late Beatles producer George Martin, the new Revolver sounds more urgent, more dynamic, more alive. It’s presumably the closest we’ve gotten to hearing it like how we would’ve while it’s being recorded.  

You will hear a lot of details like you’ve never heard them before, like the snappiness of Ringo’s snare drums on Taxman, John’s crisp acoustic guitar strumming on I’m Only Sleeping, and the heavenly harmonies on Here, There, and Everywhere, to name just a few.  

Most critics consider Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as the Beatles’ best album but Revolver has always been my personal favorite. I find the songs more natural, more emotional, and more charming. The band didn’t have the mindset of making a landmark album like they did when they were making Sgt. Pepper, and I believe that’s the biggest reason why the songs flowed more organically and artistically. They weren’t bound by a concept or any kind of thematic restraint. 

By now, we already have updated versions of Let It Be, Abbey Road, the White Album, Sgt. Pepper and Revolver. If we go by the pattern, it looks like the next updated album we’re going to get is Rubber Soul, another classic that’s bound to give us its own delightful revelations.

How To Successfully Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

We all know the tired clichés about how we’re all so gung-ho at fulfilling our resolutions in January, but not so much by the time we get to February, and how we forget all about them for the rest of the year. Until, of course, we get to the last week of December, when we set ourselves up for failure once again, just like all those years before.

So after all those years of planning, hoping, and eventually failing to be better versions of ourselves, all we’ve got to show for it are some discarded diet plans, a handful of unfinished personal projects, and an obscene amount of wasted money on seldom-used gym memberships. We’re trapped in a vicious cycle just like everybody else.

But see that’s the thing—we don’t have to be ‘like everybody else’. It’s hard, of course. Easy is for ‘everybody else’. But with a little bit of planning, a proper mindset, and a healthy dose of willpower, we can see our resolutions through for 365 days and beyond, and finally rise above all our previous years of futility and failure.

Plan your resolutions according to these guidelines below and you’ll have a better chance of success. This applies not just to new year’s resolutions, of course, but to all of your life plans as well.

What If We All Could Live Forever?

What if we all could live forever?
Would life be easier or harder?
Would life be more or less sacred?
Would we feel more or less hatred?

What if we all could never die?
What if we all see centuries fly by?
Would we still have the will to live?
Would we still have love to give?

What if we all became immortal?
What if we all were beings eternal?
Would life still have meaning?
Would love still have feeling?

What if all our lives had no end?
What if we’re all endless like the wind?
Would we be glad being always young?
Would we get tired of seeing the sun?

What if we all could live forever?
What if we all had eternity together?
Would we try to treat each other better?
Would we still try to kill each other?

Photo by Julian Jagtenberg

Let's Talk About Our Bad Habits

We all develop bad habits throughout our lives that we always seem to have difficulty quitting despite knowing they’re harmful to us. We acquire most of them because of peer pressure, but some we get because we see other people doing them.

To a certain extent, these bad habits can be called addictions because we have no control over them. We’re either psychologically or physiologically dependent, or both. Depending on the severity, these problems can have varying degrees of impact in our lives-- from mildly annoying to totally disruptive. Serious cases may even require intervention and professional help.

You don’t necessarily need to worry if you have a vice because most people do. It’s often said that people without vices die young, but of course, this is just a ridiculous rationalization of bad behavior, or perhaps baseless superstition at best.

We’re not perfect by any means, and however hard we try, there will always be times when we’d succumb to temptation. What would set us apart from each other are our resolve and determination not to keep on doing what we know is wrong or bad for us.

Here are some of the most common vices and how to handle them. 

11 Advanced Technologies We All Want To Have

We’ve gone so far, what with our electric cars, slick smartphones, virtual realities, stem cell treatments, and organ transplants. But we’re humans and that means we always want more.

Here are some of the as-yet-not-invented technologies, both possible and impossible, that we’re all wishing for.

Seven Attributes We Develop When We Play Video Games

It’s been said quite often enough how video games can be bad for us—how they can make us become violent, how they can make us unproductive, how they can lead to antisocial behavior, how being addicted to them can result in poor personal hygiene, and how it can disrupt our daily functions, or as in the infamous case of an unfortunate gamer in Japan, how an obscenely excessive indulgence in them can lead to death.

What hasn’t been said quite nearly enough is how video games can be good for us, so as an earnest attempt to right that wrong, here’s a list of seven valuable attributes we develop when we play video games.

Useful Tips on Acquiring, Handling, and Maintaining Your Wealth

We all have different ideas on what qualifies as wealth. It’s true when they say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. This is because wealth is subjective. A comprehensive library of books would mean the whole world to one person while to another, it’s just a room full of dusty bound paper.

There is, of course, one form of wealth that everyone considers valuable and that is money. It’s important to all of us, not because it looks pretty, or because of its historical significance, or because of its state-of-the-art technology. It’s important to us because it empowers us to buy. It’s important to us because of how we feel when we have it: secure, safe, proud, useful, successful. The more of it we have, the better we feel. But because we've already discussed money in this previous post, we shall now concentrate on the other types of wealth that we’ll have in our lives.

We’ve all heard the saying health is wealth, and while that’s true, what we refer to as wealth, most of the time, are material possessions. When we have lots of money, we consider ourselves rich. When we have plenty of material possessions, we consider ourselves wealthy.

A nice house or a new car are some forms of wealth that most of us would aspire to have, not for bragging rights, but for the security and convenience they give us. When you find yourself having some extra cash, you’d want to treat yourself to some of the things you enjoy, and you’d be right to do so. You deserve it, especially if you’ve worked really hard to earn money.

Here are some things to keep in mind when acquiring, handling, and maintaining your wealth. 

How To Be Physically, Mentally, And Emotionally Healthy

In our teenage years, our twenties, and to a certain extent our thirties, we never really pay that much attention to our health. We are at our strongest during our youth. We feel invincible, so much so that we abuse our bodies by smoking, drinking alcohol, partying all night, not getting enough rest, working too much, eating junk food, and generally having no concern for our bodies.

Depending on the degree of abuse, we may feel the effects of our neglect as we creep into our forties, when our bodies would start to manifest some wear and tear. It’s a sad fact that the most effective motivation for us to quit bad habits is failing health—we quit smoking when it becomes hard to breathe, we quit drinking when we get liver problems, we eat healthier when we become obese.

Logic dictates that given their bad reputation, fatty, oily, and sugary foods should be avoided altogether, and we should just stick to green leafy vegetables and fruits if we want to be healthy. But it would certainly be a life that’s drab, if not lonely, if it’s one without the simple pleasures of soda, ice cream, donuts, steak, bacon, fried chicken, and all those other delicious grub that make life worth living.

The Ten Commandments of Friendship

No matter where we are or what age we’re in, we all have friends. Some have few, some have many. Some friends are closer than others. Some we just met a while back, and some we’ve known our whole lives.

Unlike family, we can choose them, and unlike a significant other, we can have more than one. But like with any other loved one, we can also have fights and misunderstandings with them.

Though certainly not exhaustive nor definitive, here are ten friend commandments we should keep in mind.

How To Properly Handle Your Money

This is all about the most essential, most powerful, and most mishandled tool you will ever have in your life. It can be an ally or an enemy, helpful or destructive, a source of happiness or misery. The role it will play in your life will depend on how you see it, treat it, and use it.

8 Simple Rules For Dating Anyone’s Daughter

In honor of the late great comic legend John Ritter, here’s a list of eight simple rules guys should remember when dating anyone’s daughter. 

How To Make Yourself Feel Happier

We all want to be happy, and the good news is that we all can be, most of the time. 

Happiness is a mood, a feeling, but it’s been said that happiness is also a state of mind. So barring a tragedy or a really serious setback, we can all train or condition ourselves to be happy all the time, or at least, most of the time. 

Here are eight things you can do to steer yourself towards the path to happiness. 

How Important Is Art In Your Life?

We don’t need to go to museums and galleries to experience art.

 
Just like science, just like love, art is all around us every day, though we may not always be aware of its presence or influence. We wake up, turn on the radio, and there’s music. We go out and see different styles of artwork on enormous billboards, quaint little posters, and even raw graffiti. We may not be singers, painters, or stand-up comedians, but we’re all unconsciously creating art when we’re humming a song, doodling in a meeting, or telling a joke to friends.

But while there may be spirited discussions about how we can all create art, there’s absolutely no argument about how we’re all consuming it.

And Yet We Keep On Living

We are all so tired but still we get up every day.
We are all so hopeless but still we find a way.
We are all so sad but still we flash our smiles.
We are all so worn but still we walk the miles.
We have nothing left to give and yet we keep on giving
We work ourselves to death and yet we keep on living.

We give our all but still it’s not enough
We do our best but still it gets so tough
We cover ourselves but still it gets so cold
We try to look young but still we look so old
We ache so much and yet we keep on moving.
We feel so dead and yet we keep on living.

Time flies fast but still we give it chase
The contest is rigged but still we run the race
Our enemies are cheaters but still we play it fair
Our planet is poisoned but still we breathe the air
Love breaks our hearts and yet we keep on loving.
Life gets so hard and yet we keep on living.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels