Article

Comment

Digital

1 July 2024

5 min read

Browsing our bias

Should we curate our feeds for community or for challenge?

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A woman stands between two table, one of friends and the other more argumentative.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

“Would you like to continue using this app?”

I stare at the question on my phone screen. It’s there by design – I have it set to prompt me every five minutes so that I don’t fall into the trap of endless scrolling. Often, it’s enough to make me close the app and move on with my day.

Today, however, I’ve been doomscrolling - endlessly flicking through the discussions around the General Election. I have already told my phone I’d like to keep this social media app for another five minutes, and another five minutes, and another. I didn’t open X with any real hope of finding answers to my many questions about the upcoming election (the crucial one being: “who should I vote for?!”). From there, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. There is simply too much information, and I can’t always tell what is real or true. I can’t make it more than two or three posts before I stumble across yet another logical fallacy or false equivalency.

When my phone prompts me again to close the app, I pause. I have suddenly realised that I’m upset. It has taken the pop-up box on my phone to make me pause and notice that that I’m overwhelmed and helpless but I still feel like I need to speak, say something, anything useful. But maybe there is just nothing I can say. Maybe I can’t usefully add to this debate. Or perhaps I can’t usefully discuss it in this format.

There is little nuance in the discussion – people are simply yelling at one another.

I close the app to leave this angry space.

I’m not sure I have gained any real insight into the debate from this experience. I can’t help but think that many people are here only to assert their opinion. Nobody is here to listen. Nobody is here to learn. This sort of platform encourages us to speak, to be seen speaking, but doesn’t promote discussion and debate in a way that is constructive. Let alone create a safe well-lit space for it. It doesn’t take long to find someone supposedly invalidating another’s argument by pointing out a grammatical mistake. There is no grace here.

I’m wary of following or subscribing to users who have completely different viewpoints from my own because I am concerned about my own digital image.

I find this online space a difficult one to occupy. My feed is mostly friends and a couple of carefully chosen pages. There’s nothing that is going to particularly challenge me there. I don’t particularly want social media to challenge me. It’s comforting, more than anything – a way of staying in touch with friends and family (particularly during the pandemic) and keeping up to date with organisations I’m involved in.

I don’t tend to go on social media to engage in discussions or debates. I know that this leads to something of a confirmation bias. If I get all of my information from the same sources, and from the same people all the time, I’m not going to learn about other perspectives. If I follow the trade union that supports my workplace, it’s obvious that I will only receive information supporting one particular party. If the only people I follow are people who share similar views as mine, I will simply find myself with my own opinions and feelings being validated.

It’s also worth noting that, perhaps shamefully, I’m wary of following or subscribing to users who have completely different viewpoints from my own because I am concerned about my own digital image. I worry about someone opening my page and making assumptions about my views simply based on those I follow online. I know others share this concern. Public social media accounts are sometimes a delicate exercise in personal branding. I am likely confirming someone else’s bias with my social media presence. I’m almost definitely part of that cycle.

I find myself torn between wanting to use social media more effectively to learn from other people and wanting to make it literally a pastime.

There are certainly arguments to be made about whether this approach to social media is good or bad. It’s certainly comforting though. At the end of a long day, a video of my friend’s dog is going to improve my day just a little bit more than trying to pick apart the truth from the lies in social media and in politics more generally. It’s important that I remain conscious that this is the way I have chosen to use social media. I can’t be complacent.

If I engage with other perspectives and debates, I have to do so more consciously and deliberately. I try and drop in and out of those spaces through the news tabs, tags, searching specific people who I know hold different viewpoints, or looking up specific topics. It always runs the risk of falling into the trap I’ve found myself in today – scrolling through seemingly endless perspectives that I don’t agree with, people wishing harm on another for having a different perspective, a vicious “us and them” narrative that follows through every other post. I need to learn where I can find the most accurate and reliable information. More importantly, perhaps, I need to learn how to close apps when I find myself in angry spaces where debate cannot flourish (and I’m almost never going to find that in a comment section.)

Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll stop carefully curating my social media feeds – mainly as an act of self-perseveration. It’s not that I don’t care – it is never that I don’t care. Just that the 24-hour news cycle becomes too much when there is little that I can do. I’m not going to figure out who to vote for my scrolling arguments on X or Facebook.

I find myself torn between wanting to use social media more effectively to learn from other people and wanting to make it literally a pastime. There is certainly potential for learning - I can access real-time perspectives on almost anything. On the flipside, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern what is real and what is fake news, or simply AI generated. On the flip side, sometimes I just want to find out if anyone else was as confused by the answer to a TV quiz show as I was or just see a picture of a friend’s cat sunbathing on a windowsill.

How might we find this balance? Sadly, it seems that this is a conversation that’s now only worth having offline.

Article

Culture

Music

3 March 2025

4 min read

As creativity and AI battle, greed is the true enemy

Every string plucked, stitch sewn, brushstroke painted, is a sign we’re made for more than utility.

Alexandra Kytka-Sharpe

Alexandra is a writer exploring the role of faith in the arts, fashion, and design

A black and white list of music tracks reads: IS THIS WHAT WE WANT. THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT MUST NOT LEGALISE MUSIC THEFT.

1,000 artists, one message.

Is the battle between AI and creativity over before it began? A collective of 1,000 musicians have released a silent album to protest new government copyright laws that would make it easier for companies to train AI models without paying artists. The album, titled “Is This What We Want?,” has a tracklist that reads “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies.”

But this isn’t the first time that new technology has threatened the livelihood of musicians, nor the first time musicians have fought back. And the lesson to be learned from the past is that the real enemy of creativity isn’t technology- it’s greed.

Musicians on strike

The invention of the record player forever changed the music industry. It’s difficult to imagine a time when you could only hear music if someone was playing a live instrument. As music records grew rapidly in popularity, payments to the musicians behind the records lagged behind.

Up until the 1940s, record companies paid studio musicians only for the time in the studio. Playing records on live radio was cheaper than hiring big bands (which had previously been the norm) because the musicians wouldn’t see any revenue from their repeated use. But in August 1942, fed up at the lack of royalties paid from music records, the American Federation of Musicians went on strike.

The silence lasted nearly 2 years. During the strike, musicians were allowed to play for live radio but banned from playing on records.

At first, record companies relied on releasing music they had already recorded. But when it became clear that the strike would last longer than expected, they began to rely on acapella voices in place of big bands for new releases. The strike concluded in 1944 as record players conceded to the American Federation of Musicians and set up a system of paying royalties to musicians. The battle was over.

The technology creativity face-off

Technology has often seemed to be at odds with human creativity despite emerging from it. Human creativity invented the record player, but the record player threatened the human creativity of all those musicians playing live.

In a similar way, artificial intelligence was both invented by creative humans and trained on the work of other creative humans. And yet, its very existence seems to threaten the work of thousands. AI’s threat is felt in every corner of the creative industries- in music, illustration, art, film and photography. And it’s not just a worry for Top 40 singers. Generative AI threatens to replace graphic and web design for small businesses, music in the background of commercials and videos, illustrations on mass produced birthday cards and souvenirs- all areas of creative work where artists receive a modest income and don’t become household names.

Companies use technology as a mirage to hide the real threat behind its computer generated glow- the greed of the human heart.

he Christian faith offers a few truths that make sense of this tension between AI and creativity. The first is human creativity is not mere ornamentation- it is at the very heart of what it means to be made in God’s image. At the very beginning of the Bible, God is Creator. Unlike God, humans cannot make something from nothing. But we can produce wonders that inspire, that reflect the goodness, truth and beauty of the world God created for us. Every string plucked, stitch sewn, brushstroke painted, is a sign that humans were made for more than utility. We were made for transcendence.

The Christian faith also teaches that human selfishness gets in the way of the transcendental vision God has for us.

The invention of the record player created problems for musicians, but it was the unwillingness of companies to pay musicians fairly for their work that posed the real threat. Companies use technology as a mirage to hide the real threat behind its computer generated glow- the greed of the human heart.

As AI continues to be adopted, executives join the chorus speaking about the “threat of AI” and the need to prioritise human creativity. Yet the decisions of the same executives value human creativity in financial terms by the compensation (or lack thereof) that real artists receive.

Companies treat new technologies as inevitable– they might even tell employees that those who can’t learn to use new technology will be left behind. But the reality is that companies shape the direction of technological advancement. There is no “neutral” or “inevitable” direction to technology. Technology can solve human problems- but first humans decide what problems need solving. AI may help us solve problems that benefit all of us- like the work being done to synthesise proteins that can have great impacts in medicine and science.

But there is no reason companies must use generative AI for creative work. People may point to money and time saved, shareholder value created. And this is where the real contradiction lies. For creativity is not a problem that needs to be solved, but a gift for us to partake in.

Is This What We Want?

The album by “1000 UK Artists” contains the sound of empty music studios- a future the group fears if musicians are replaced with AI who were trained on their talent. Session musicians, cover artists, violinists who busk in the streets or play in weddings, all are in danger from AI being trained on their hard work for free.

Knowing that technology is never neutral, the album’s title “Is This What We Want?” poses a good question. What kind of world do we want to live in? What should our technology be building towards?

For me, I want a world that encourages real human creativity– the kind given to us by God, the original creative. I want a world where technology isn’t a way for the rich to become richer but for our communities to become better places for human connection. Technology should give us more time to create art, not less. The battle between creativity and AI is in the hands of lawmakers for now. But the battle to end human greed? That’s eternal.