Gm. It’s going down, I’m yelling Reddittttt.

🏠 TECH

The Reddit Blackout

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has become the most hated man in tech seemingly overnight.

The controversy began with his decision to follow Twitter’s lead and start charging for access to Reddit’s API. A reasonable decision considering the value of data in our new AI reality, but one that ruffled many feathers due to the expensive pricing of $12,000 for 50 million API requests (for comparison, Imgur charges $166 per 50 million requests).

Third-party apps immediately called foul, including Reddit’s most popular third-party app, Apollo, which said they would be forced to fold under the new pricing.

So, they and other unhappy customers did what people do in this country when they are unhappy: they organized a protest. Specifically, over 700 of the most popular subreddits are going dark for at least 48 hours, including:

• r/funny (40M+ subs)

• r/gaming (30M+ subs)

• r/music (30M+ subs)

Unsurprisingly, this got the alarm bells going off in Huffman’s head. So, he did what any rational CEO would do and hosted an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit to explain his position and assuage people’s fear.

And it went about as well as Marie Antoinette trying to calm down a French mob. What was a disagreement over pricing has turned into a site-wide blood feud against Huffman, full of downvotes and finger-pointing.

So yeah, it’s a bit of a mess.

But with Reddit desperately seeking to become profitable in advance of its IPO, don’t bet on Huffman to back down anytime soon.

The Bottom Line: In our new world of tech companies emphasizing profitably, expect to see more social media sites follow Reddit and Twitter’s lead and monetize their data.

🏠 AI

Stable Diffusion Is (Very) Biased

Stable Diffusion is an amazing piece of technology. It’s turned me into a semi-capable artist, which, trust me, is no easy task.

However, it’s not perfect. A new Bloomberg investigation found that Stable Diffusion takes racial and gender disparities to an extreme even worse than those found in the real world.

The journalists had Stable Diffusion produce 5,100 images from written prompts related to job titles in 14 different fields, plus 3 categories related to crime. The results were…concerning:

• Image sets for every high-paying job were dominated by subjects with lighter skin tones, while the low-paying jobs were mainly populated by subjects with darker skin tones.

• Men produced far more men than women for every job except for low-paying jobs like housekeeper and cashier.

In both cases, Stable Diffusion was way off from what is actually happening in the real world:

• Only 3% of judges and 7% of doctors were portrayed as women, even though they make up 34% and 39% of those respective jobs in the real world.

• 70% of the fast-food workers were portrayed as dark-skinned, even though 70% of fast-food workers in the real world are white.

• 80% of the criminals were portrayed as dark-skinned, even though people of color make up less than half of the US prison population.

Although Stable Diffusion, like all AI models, are just parrots for the data they are trained on, this is obviously not what you want to see. A bias in these models could spell very bad news, especially when you consider that the police are starting to look into using text-to-image technology to create suspect sketches.

But, it’s still early days, and the open-source model will definitely improve over time.

The Big Picture: 90% of online content could be produced by generative AI by 2025. It’s imperative that biases are rooted out now.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

What else is going on?

• Tesla’s Autopilot crashes kind of a lot.

• Twitter has decided to just stop paying its Google Cloud bill.

• The FDA is getting closer to approving a new Alzheimer’s drug.

• Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown (annoyingly) worked.

Stat: 45%: The percentage of recruiters on LinkedIn who now search for candidates using skills data.

Rabbit hole: The Three Transitions (Vitalik Buterin)

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