Also also worth noting… The whole idea of memetics is that cultural artifacts like images and tools influence the behavior of individuals who encounter them.
So insisting that tools don’t influence behavior while posting memes to try to get that proposition to replicate is just deeply strange.
The whole idea of memetics is that cultural artifacts like images and tools influence the behavior of individuals who encounter them.
So insisting that tools don’t influence behavior while posting memes to try to get that proposition to replicate is just deeply strange.
Who said that it has no influence in behaviour? And we cannot make adjustments to handle or mitigate/enhance some of it?
Is it like how some people connect video games to violence and ignore the influence of other factors?
The tool has influence, but there are a lot of other factors too.
But you can surely understand how I could see AI as a tool which is exceptionally capable of carrying the philosophy of the “nerd reich”, compared to most other tools.
So it’s only a short walk from there to “well if AI isn’t a meaningfully potent vessel for their ideology then basically nothing is, so there’s no case that merits an abundance of caution.”
Do you have similar views on it. How do you rate them?
I do have similar views on social media, including Lemmy.
I think there are some anti-human biases baked into the structure of something like Reddit, where the headline+body are more accessible than the linked content, comments are ranked and nested, threads only stay relevant for a short period of time, and the most karma-maximizing strategy is to use someone’s comment as fodder to address a silent but large audience instead of actually directly speaking to the original commenter.
But yaknow, here I am, commenting on Lemmy anyway. 🫠
It’s not only ownership of a tool that directs how it gets used. A tool naturally makes some actions easier and more salient, while other actions become more difficult and fade into the background.
Take the gesture priority of iOS and Android. iOS took a radical departure from PDAs by activating scroll gestures more easily than text selection.
You can technically do both actions on both devices, but that tiny change in gesture priority turned smartphones into content-scrolling (and therefore content-consumption) machines.
It arises from the structure of the software, not who controls it. Apple didn’t decide to make people into content zombies, they just decided to put one handler ahead of another in the list of handler functions.
Every digital tool is faced with a million similar tiny dilemmas, where it can’t handle every use case at once, so it has to pick which behaviors to encourage. The way those dilemmas get resolved ends up deeply embedded into the tools themselves.
Note for those who missed it:
This is in reference to another thread, featuring an AI-generated meme: https://lemmy.ml/post/53349754
Also, worth noting that Audre Lorde’s famous “master’s tools” quote is often misunderstood: https://thinkpeakstudio.com/blog/quote-explained-audre-lorde-september-2026/
Also also worth noting… The whole idea of memetics is that cultural artifacts like images and tools influence the behavior of individuals who encounter them.
So insisting that tools don’t influence behavior while posting memes to try to get that proposition to replicate is just deeply strange.
Thank you for the link
Who said that it has no influence in behaviour? And we cannot make adjustments to handle or mitigate/enhance some of it?
Is it like how some people connect video games to violence and ignore the influence of other factors?
The tool has influence, but there are a lot of other factors too.
Or are you saying that tools should not be used?
Okay fair, you didn’t assert no influence.
But you can surely understand how I could see AI as a tool which is exceptionally capable of carrying the philosophy of the “nerd reich”, compared to most other tools.
So it’s only a short walk from there to “well if AI isn’t a meaningfully potent vessel for their ideology then basically nothing is, so there’s no case that merits an abundance of caution.”
Social media and the internet is also similar in that POV, right?.
Do you have similar views on it. How do you rate them?
Anyway, the USAmerican Reich and similar folk controlling it is indeed the issue, right?
I do have similar views on social media, including Lemmy.
I think there are some anti-human biases baked into the structure of something like Reddit, where the headline+body are more accessible than the linked content, comments are ranked and nested, threads only stay relevant for a short period of time, and the most karma-maximizing strategy is to use someone’s comment as fodder to address a silent but large audience instead of actually directly speaking to the original commenter.
But yaknow, here I am, commenting on Lemmy anyway. 🫠
It’s not only ownership of a tool that directs how it gets used. A tool naturally makes some actions easier and more salient, while other actions become more difficult and fade into the background.
Take the gesture priority of iOS and Android. iOS took a radical departure from PDAs by activating scroll gestures more easily than text selection.
You can technically do both actions on both devices, but that tiny change in gesture priority turned smartphones into content-scrolling (and therefore content-consumption) machines.
It arises from the structure of the software, not who controls it. Apple didn’t decide to make people into content zombies, they just decided to put one handler ahead of another in the list of handler functions.
Every digital tool is faced with a million similar tiny dilemmas, where it can’t handle every use case at once, so it has to pick which behaviors to encourage. The way those dilemmas get resolved ends up deeply embedded into the tools themselves.