Is Substack suppressing my editorial?

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

Am I being silenced?
Toys “R” Us advertising goes AI
European vs. US innovation

If that’s enough to get the duct tape planted, read on…

AI Collision 💥 is AI silencing me?

You’ve seen in the last week that I’ve written two pieces based around the upcoming UK general election.

I was pretty clear that I’d be trying to give some insight as to the importance (or lack thereof) of AI in this election cycle, and what the promises may or may not be around this key driver of economic growth for the UK.

And thus far, all parties have met and exceeded my expectations that they’d give sod-all importance to it whatsoever.

So well done politicians, you have all played to form 👏👏👏.

However, something weird now seems to be going on…

And I get the feeling that perhaps I’m being silently silenced, suppressed, and shadow banned.

Shh Emoji [Free Download All Emojis] | Emoji Island

What’s even more weird is that it may very well be AI that’s at the heart of this problem.

Let me explain…

I’ve been writing AI Collision 💥 for about nine months. This will be my 84th edition I send out to you.

In all that time, slowly but surely the number of subscribers to this free publication has been on the rise.

We started with zero, and just recently marched past 2,000.

Just on that, I should also say a big THANKS to you for being one of those 2,000, knowing that my ramblings are being read for that many people is humbling to say the least!

Now having said that…

I want to ask you something…

I want you to tell me if you think this is weird or I’m just being paranoid.

In the nine months and (now) 84 posts our subscriber numbers have ticked up, on a daily basis. There was a spot here or there (usually a weekend) where maybe for a day, but no more than two we didn’t have a new subscriber find us.

And new subscribers come to us through many avenues. Sometimes you forward something on to someone you think might enjoy the content, sometimes other Substack writers recommend us, sometimes Substack itself will put us forward to readers it thinks might enjoy the work.

A lot of these kinds of recommendation things are done in a “backend”, thanks to algorithms and machine learning. It’s all data driven and it picks up on key terms, phrases, content, and will then suggest to you or other things you might like.

We’re all somewhat familiar with these things because we get it pumped into our eyeballs every day. Be it through Google, or Facebook, Instagram, Netflix’s “We think you’ll like” and Spotify all have AI-driven engines that push content to people.

Substack (I assume) is no different. I very much doubt there’s a dude reading all this and then going, “Oh I think Bob who subscribes to Semiconductors-Anonymous Substack should read this too.”

Now, here’s the weird thing I want to ask you about…

When I sent the AI Collision to you on 20 June with the title, “Win the AI vote, win the electoral vote” we got two new subscribers on the morning of 21 June and then zero new subscribers to AI Collision since.

Not one.

That’s now five days without so much as one new subscriber.

We also published to you this week another piece saying, “I asked AI to vote in the UK election 🇬🇧 This is who it voted for 🗳️”.

And still, no new subscribers.

In nine months, 83 posts, over 60,000 views of my editorial content, we’ve never gone more than two days without a new subscriber…

Until I said that I’d be covering the election over the next couple of weeks and added that into the headlines.

So I ask…

Suppression of views in an election cycle is nothing new of course. In fact, only a few days ago the leader of the Reform UK party and contributor to our friends over at Fortune & Freedom Nigel Farage posted this on his X.com feed:

Note: about two and half hours later the account was reinstated. But I guess we should ask if the Tories, Labour, Greens or Lib Dems have had their accounts suspended at all during this campaign.

And of course we know for a fact that prior to Elon Musk taking over Twitter (now X.com) there was known suppression of voices, views and shadow banning of people on that platform.

I simply ask, how do we know that doesn’t still happen on places like Facebook, Google… Substack?

And if these things still do occur, is it human intervention, or is it the algorithms and AI on the backend making these calls?

What if the AI has a particular political persuasion? Only this week we got three different possible voting outcomes from all three different AI.

What’s not to say those AI coerce and guide you when using them to see what it wants you to see?

OK, that’s far enough down that rabbit hole. And by no means am I important enough to be shadow banned (maybe?) but it does bring me back to a topic of conversation from a while back – perhaps the real conversation we need to have around AI and the real focus needs to be the unbiased, ethical, freedom of speech enabled AI rather than AI that thinks it knows what’s best for us.

Isn’t that after all just replacing one thing with the same?

AI gone wild 🤪

Check this out!

Source: Toys “R” Us

What you see above is an advert for Toys “R” Us.

It’s (kind of) like any other advert you might see except one thing: this ad is made entirely using OpenAI’s Sora video creation AI.

It’s the first advert completely using Sora.

Is it perfect? No.

Is it better than a lot of the non-AI junk ads you see out there. Yes.

Is it going to fast become a standard part of advertising using AI? You betcha!

But the real question is what does it make you feel?

I know asking what you feel about an AI-created advert for Toys “R” Us is a strange request. But it’s important, to at least ask yourself the question.

Are you thinking more about the ad and its content? Or are you thinking more about whether you like the fact it’s made by AI or not?

For me, the latter. At least for now. Mainly because I can tell it’s AI off the bat, and I’m judging the realistic qualities of it.

But when I try and drop that bias to the side, it’s pretty good. And I like it. And it tells a story. So I don’t really care if I’m being told a great story by AI.

The point is I want to be told a great story. Humans can do that well, and also very poorly. Who cares if AI can do it well. Chances are, just like us, it will also do it very poorly.

Which is the real point here. I think soon enough we’ll stop judging these things by the quality of the AI and just go back to the quality of the content.

That’s what matters, and I don’t think AI has a robotic foot to stand on when it comes to the human power of telling a ripping good story.

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

man in black suit jacket and black pants figurine

Boom 📈

Wearable Devices (NASDAQ:WLDS) up 16%
Bigtincan Holdings (ASX:BTH) up 10%
AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) up 4%

Bust 📉

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) down 10%
Taiwan Semi (NYSE:TSM) down 5%
Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ:LTRN) down 16%

From the hive mind 🧠

Remember Metallica vs. Napster? We looked into this somewhat a couple weeks ago (check it out here). We’re now seeing the music industry getting their back up again, this time about two AI start-ups they say are ripping them off. Trust us when we say this is just the beginning for the music industry vs. AI wars to come.
AI in music is one thing, AI in warfare… well that’s a whole different kettle of fish. And we would expect that after a UK election, the US election cycle starts to really drill into the impact of AI on war, in order to try and keep the incumbents in power.
Prince Constantijn has a great point here. And I think his point can also be summed up by a wonderful meme I saw this week that you can see below.