The Vibe Shift in Content Moderation: AIGC in the new UGC

 
Today (February 24, 2023), I was quoted (next to other experts) in a Washington Post article by Will Oremus & Nitasha Tiku:
 

The right's new culture-war target: 'Woke AI'

It discusses how social media content moderation wars are moving into the AI culture war.

"ChatGPT praised Biden but not Trump. The right is furious."

 
Here, I would like to share my additional thoughts. I'm calling it "AIGC in the new UGC."
 
The Vibe Shift in Content Moderation:
The battlefield moves from user-generated content to AI-generated content

The bigger picture? We are coming full circle.
 
First was the tech backlash against Big Tech, specifically social media algorithms.
For the past 5 years, the tech coverage has focused on phenomena such as hate speech, disinformation, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and rabbit holes.
 
The tech industry needed something to distract us from this tiring mess and all the content moderation battles that came to define Web 2.0 and UGC (User-Generated Content).
But Web3/crypto failed miserably, and the technology behind the Metaverse is not ready yet.
 
That paved the way for Generative AI, which has actual use cases.
OpenAI's tools, like DALL-E and ChatGPT, were the wishful "backlash to the Techlash."
Because "finally, something to be enthusiastic about!"
The fact that those tools didn't come from Big Tech made it more exciting.
 
Now, we're back in the same territory of content moderation, biases, safeguards, who designs and controls the safeguards, and why there's no regulation on this disruptive thing. It sounds familiar because it is. 

We're back to Big Tech controlling big technology.

Current events are freaking people out because we are dealing, once again, with our information ecosystem.
People on one side ask Microsoft for more guardrails, while others tweet, "Oh my god, they killed Sydney!".
It's manifesting the social media's culture war in this technology.
 
Nothing will prevent those new accelerating debates over AI content moderation.
Why?
Because for two decades of social media, we haven't figured it out, and we are not even sure what "getting it right" even looks like (nobody would ever be satisfied).
 
How could we expect AIGC (AI-Generated Content) to be any different from UGC (User-Generated Content)? 

It is literally trained on it.
 
Conclusion? Generative AI companies should brace themselves. 

Techlash is coming.