Mind and Iron: A dead tyrant just came back to life to rustle up votes
Indonesia's gone bonkers. Also, Super Bowl aliens. And the false promise of Microsoft's Copilot.
Hi and welcome back to Mind and Iron. I'm Steve Zeitchik, veteran of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and head referee of this deadlocked Super Bowl.
We're coming at you a little earlier this week, to get at some of what we saw during said game, tech-wise and future-wise, before it fades under the Travis Kelce dancing photos.
Every week we offer all the future-world news a person could want, and all the insight and watchdogging to go with it. Please consider supporting our human-centric mission, emphasis on the human. Even just a pledge of a few dollars helps.
A quick housekeeping note that next Thursday we won't be arriving in your inbox due in part to Presidents Week and due in part to an appearance at the big MaRS Impact AI conference in Toronto, where I'll be hosting a panel with a slew of leading thinkers on the ripple effects of AI. There's still room to register for the conference (they offer virtual attendance if you can't make it to the city of questionable hockey teams). If you're there, please come over and say hi!
This week we'll examine what Sunday's jamboree said about, and did to, our collective sense of the future. We'll also dive deeper into Microsoft Copilot and how it’s trying to shift our perceptions of AI — not necessarily to the good.
Meanwhile, two global election campaigns make use of AI in very different ways — one that should reassure the heck out of us and the other that should scare the bejesus out of us. (Either way, we are involved.)
First, the future-world quote of the week.
“I am Suharto, the second president of Indonesia.”
—A 2024 campaign video from the dictator, who died in 2008.
Let's get to the messy business of building the future.
IronSupplement
Everything you do — and don’t — need to know in future-world this week
Super bowl sci-fi; what’s so shifty about Microsoft’s Copilot; AI-ing political prisoners.
1. THEY MAY NOT TELL US WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE, BUT SUPER BOWL ADS DO HINT AT HOW WE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE. The world's biggest companies peddling their vision of tomorrow, coupled with an ad industry programmed to know all our hopes and anxieties, can make for an unusually accurate snapshot.
Two years ago the Super Bowl brought the (often dark) promise of the metaverse and crypto, as an Oculus headset gave new life to an old theme-restaurant character and LeBron James told us to call our own investment shot. Last year, Big Game ads raised the specter (and jitters) of an emerging machine intelligence, with Dialpad AI saying it will help us “crush our sales goals” and Adam Driver referencing the singularity (for a website company).
Sure, it's easy to laugh —these ads sometimes possess a shorter shelf life than a cup of Oikos (SB ads 2020-2024). But these miniature visions of the future can also be more durable than you'd expect. Forty years ago we got Ridley Scott's famous “1984” spot. It accurately foresaw, in ways even Steven Jobs couldn’t have, the populist appeal of Apple products.
And while the Dot-Com Super Bowl c. 2000 is an exercise in nostalgia-cringe (this Wiki page is like rummaging through the world’s most embarrassing attic), the idea of mass digital commerce was captured and in some ways even birthed that (in)glorious January night.
So what did we get in 2024?
First, AI was back. A little in the backseat via Beyonce, riffing about a machine twin named BeyoncAI. More in the cockpit with Microsoft’s Copilot. Hang on for a second on that.
The metaverse was also back, with a spot for Crowdstrike dubbed “The Future” portraying some kind of hologrammy world whose Westworldian meaning I’m still trying to parse. (The Austin firm specializes in protection against cyberattacks, especially from global bad actors, so maybe this is our future even without the Man in Black.)
More meaningfully, the metaverse returned with an Apple Vision Pro-Snickers campaign timed to the Super Bowl, in which headset-wearers could join Steelers linebacker T.J. Watt in sharing “rookie mistakes.” The campaign slipped by unnoticed without an in-game spot or dangling of dark dystopias. But honestly, this may be what the metaverse looks like, a mix of slightly fun and decidedly branded material overlaying its way into our lives. (You can watch what one dude did with it here.) A sort of…light dystopia.
Perhaps the biggest zeitgeist topic during the game was aliens. No one was offering any extraterrestrial-related products. (I hope.) Jeff Goldblum promised the aliens easily-searchable apartments on Apartments.com, while Martin Scorsese was stuck in traffic as they hovered overhead in a Squarespace ad he directed. But both these ads are worth underscoring because they symbolize a shift we’re in the process of living through.
In each commercial, the evidence of life outside Earth is not seen as massively newsworthy — in fact in the Scorsese spot the aliens do everything possible to get our attention and fail, facepalming when they realize humans would rather watch cat videos on TikTok. (Check out the extended version, which is kinda brilliant.)
Indeed, we collectively raised our eyebrows at whistleblower David Grusch’s Congressional testimony this summer that the U.S. government is in possession of non-Earthly biological materials — then moved right on to the next Internet blow-up. The ad cannily gets at this — at how the combination of short digital attention spans and general jadedness has allowed us to shrug at developments that would have melted our 1999 brains.
But there’s another, less negative way to see it, in which we don’t so much as care less about the idea of sharing the universe with other life forms as we’ve become more scientific in acknowledging, given the infinitude of the universe and the growing pile of circumstantial evidence, the likelihood of that sharing. And so don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on this fact. A majority of Americans now believe that the military personnel who’ve reported seeing UAPs were witnessing evidence of non-Earthly life, according to a Pew poll, and the Super Bowl ads (and even the Grusch-off brush-off) help demonstrate that.
If anything, the eyerolling is now aimed at military agencies, who have been…not exactly forthcoming. This is significant — it means we can get on with trying to declassify stuff that’s been declassified for far too long and find out once and for all if there’s in fact anything to see here.
The idea that we all walk around believing aliens exist is, on its face, a little wacky. (It feels wacky.) But the evidence suggests we have these inclinations — and the Super Bowl spots suggest it too. The country’s biggest ad agencies can know us better than we know ourselves, and the fact that they’ve tacked this way tells us just how much our own attitudes have changed. We are in the UAP normalization era, removing stigma about the potential of life outside of Earth everywhere we go.
Which — for anyone who cares about science and discovery — is exactly where we should be. Stigma is the enemy of funding, of disclosures, of honest debates. Congress has been fighting its own battles in recent months over how much to demand transparency from the military with mixed results. As the stigma fades and the Super Bowl ads normalize, that war will only get easier.
2. OK, SO COPILOT.
Copilot is a chatbot launched a year ago, now unified across the Microsoft-verse, in which AI powers features that we can use on Windows and PCs. Last month, the company launched a new Copilot “key,” which executive vice-president Yusuf Mehdi described as the beginning of something big.
“In this new year, we will be ushering in a significant shift toward a more personal and intelligent computing future where AI will be seamlessly woven into Windows…This will not only simplify people’s computing experience but also amplify it, making 2024 the year of the AI PC.”
On one level, the Copilot ad, which you can watch below, was techno-optimist pap in this same spirit. We’ve seen this Madison Avenue subgenre before: Humans are helpless and hindered, until a Big Tech company flies in on fluttering cape. (Google’s Pixel 8 ad Sunday also made such promises, and manipulatively, with its depiction of a visually impaired man using the phone’s accessibility features to take photos of his new wife and child. But that’s at least a concrete use case.)
In Microsoft’s spot, titled “Watch Me,” people who generally couldn't build something or make a movie or earn their degree can now do so thanks to AI. “Your everyday AI companion,” the ad from agency Panay Films promises, as assorted users design a video game, develop a film and pass Organic Chemistry with Copilot’s friendly help.
It’s unclear from the spot how Copilot actually does this — maybe making searching for study materials easier, or generating some prefab illustrations you probably wouldn’t (or couldn’t legally) use in your movie anyway? These are not details to scrutinize; how the tech actually improves our lives is almost beside the point. “Don’t worry if AI will definitively create a whole new generation of filmmakers or pre-med students that wouldn’t have existed otherwise,” the ad is subtly conveying. “You should just feel good that it hypothetically can.”
On that level I don’t think this is really that big a deal, just some Silicon Valley overpromising on a product that is, at present, a long way from being transformative. But I think something else is going on with this ad — a kind of shift in AI messaging that we should be highly on guard against.
For a while now, AI execs have positioned the tech as something that will make our lives easier. It has been evident in Sam Altman presentations; it’s been clear from added features in utilitarian apps like Zoom; it jumps out in the promises of leaders of pretty much all the legacy companies.
But see, the problem with that messaging is that making your life easier, while nice, does not really offset some of the dangers that have been averred.
It is probably not worth, for instance, wiping away all of copyright to make our lives a little easier.
It also is probably is also not worth discarding pillars of democracy, as AI could with unchecked deepfakes.
Big Tech companies don’t really have answers for these questions. And rather than just saying that AI can do some pretty cool stuff but also poses some pretty big risks we need to navigate around — i.e., the truth — they need to go the other way and say that it’s doing SO much to change our lives that those risks suddenly seem like trifles.
They need to say, in short, that it is making our lives nobler. Because once you’re doing that, hazards like copyright erosion don’t seem quite as important. I mean, sure, we like creator protections, but do we like them so much we should take away a product that can turn us all into doctors or the developer of the next Fortnite?
I wondered if maybe this wasn’t actually the message — that I was being too cynical in thinking that Microsoft was trying to Eternal Sunshine our brains into forgetting about AI risks.
So I went and looked at what the company’s own people were saying about the ad. And, amazingly, I found this.
“We’re kind of over this era of being a victim or being afraid of what technology might do,” Kathleen Hall, Microsoft’s chief brand officer, told Adweek about the spot. “What we looked at is how is AI going to help people improve their lives and outcomes. And the product truth is it does that.”
!!
Like, read that again. “We’re kind of over this era of being afraid of what technology might do.” We are? We’re not. We won’t be. Microsoft WANTS us to be. Which is why they air ads like this. But we’re absolutely not. Nor should we be.
Btw, not for nothing are so many people in this ad under 30; the company knows the youthful rung onto which this toe can hold. All respect to my Young Millennial and Gen Z brothers and sisters, but if you listen to this uncritically you are being played. (I suspect most are not.)
That’s not to say we shouldn’t download Copilot (many people after the ad ran did). Maybe it will make life a little easier! And that’s a good thing! There’s been nothing so far to suggest it on its own poses grave dangers. Of course technological damage doesn’t happen like that — a few Harvard students creating a space for their dorm-mates to upload pictures wasn’t social-media addiction either. It’s the cumulative effect — the insidious march — that’s most dangerous, as the tech takes hold in our lives and eventually becomes too indispensable for us to do anything about.
The companies behind AI need to make big promises so this can happen — so we make it indispensable. The companies behind AI need to make big promises so we no longer really factor in the perils — about bias, or the clouding of truth, or cognitive declines — as we hand over the power to machines to think for us. Hall knows that, other Microsoft execs know that, everyone involved with the ad knows that. They just hope we don’t know that. Let’s keep reminding them that we do.
[Adweek]
3. FIRST THE BAD NEWS IN OUR BURGEONING ‘THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL DEEPFAKES’ SERIES.
The Indonesian election going on today is flat-out bonkers. Never mind that more than 200 million people will cast their votes across 6,000 inhabited islands in one of the world’s largest democracies.
Forget that the polling leader in recent weeks has been Prabowo Subianto, a 72-year-old former military general who is the former son-in-law of the brutal late dictator Suharto and who has been accused of kidnapping and torturing democracy activists in the 1990s.
Just know it’s been riddled — and I mean riddled — with AI deepfakes.
The most insane among them comes in the form of Suharto — who conducted many murderous anti-Communist purges over the course of his 30-year reign of terror beginning in 1967 — and died in 2008 as one of the most ignoble leaders of the 20th century. But he’s back, as a deepfake.
“I am Suharto, the second president of Indonesia,” he says in a video that appeared in recent weeks, before he goes on to endorse Golkar, his longtime party which — wouldn’t you know it — is supporting Prabowo. As CNN reports, the deputy chairman of Golkar says the video is “just to remind us how important our votes are in the upcoming election.”
Sure, and the IRS audits you just because they want to get to know what baseball team you root for.
The real point of the deepfake, of course, is either false nostalgia (bad) or outright intimidation (worse). Suharto ruled by fear for much of his tenure, and now Golkar can continue cowing people into voting for them by bringing him back. Who needs a new tyrant that could run afoul of all those pesky voter-protection laws when you can just resurrect the visage of the man who ALREADY haunts voters’ nightmares?
An X user CNN cited was hip to the game. “This is the state of our country today — bringing dead dictators back to life to fool and scare us into votes.”
[Update: as of Wednesday afternoon: Prabowo has claimed victory, though there has been no official word or concessions.]
As it happens this may not even be the craziest tech-based trick someone tried in the election in heavily digital Indonesia. That distinction belongs to the people who tried to get around a ban on using kids in political ads by — you guessed it — generating AI children.
As impersonation, the Suharto video isn’t fully convincing. But that doesn’t really matter — a lot of psychological research indicates even a video we know is false still can embed in our minds as truth. What also matters is that this opens up a whole new frontier in deepfakery — not just pretending your opponent did something they didn’t do but letting long-gone villains play a role too. In this new resurrectionist age, no political threat is ever past, no matter how retired or dead. It just comes back as AI.
But it’s not all bad news on the political front.
In an election a bunch of miles to Indonesia’s northwest, Pakistan saw a remarkably democratizing use of AI.
Imran Khan is a popular former prime minister and professional cricket player who was thrown in jail on trumped-up charges last summer. His party, PTI, had taken on the unpopular and military-aligned party PML-N and its unpopular brothers Nawaz and Shehbaz Sharif in Pakistan’s elections last week.
Many observers have called the whole process chaotic and corrupt, manipulated by PML-N. To wit: PTI was barred before the election from officially running, forcing them to turn to the escape hatch of independent parties. Plus with their leader in jail, they seemed doomed.
But Khan affiliates were able to create an AI replica of his voice. And over the past few months, they used it (over images of him) to get out the vote for the independent parties.
This proved to be a gamechanger, restoring to public consciousness someone the PML-N thought they had vanquished. It particularly helped given the electorate — while audio and video matters in any election, it matters even more in Pakistan, where the literacy rate is only about 60 percent.
So effective was the maneuver that when the votes were tallied last week, Khan’s independent parties took the most seats in Parliament, in what proved to be a stunning result.
On Saturday Khan gave a victory speech — well, his AI voice did. “I had full confidence that you would all come out to vote,” he (it) said. “You fulfilled my faith in you, and your massive turnout has stunned everybody.” (His allies are upfront that this is AI; they’re using this more as a support tool than deception.)
All this couldn’t of course fully neutralize the corruption — precincts where PML-N won were still filled with tons of irregularities (like, the party got more votes than voters). And in a move that could touch off protests and then some, PML-N this week said it was nonetheless able to put together a coalition to continue the premiership of the Sharifs. Technology can’t change human behavior.
But AI used this way should put the fear in totalitarians, who can no longer just banish their opponents. They can push them out of sight, hoping the electorate will forget about them. But some clever coding brings them right back.
The tale provides a telling — and encouraging — reversal of the Suharto case. AI may help despots return. But it can also, just as easily, make sure dissidents never really go away.
[CNN, NY Times, France24 and Vox]
—
4. FINALLY, IN THE SPIRIT OF TECH AND POLITICS AND THE SUPER BOWL, a quick word is warranted on an ad a Super PAC aired Sunday on behalf of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which of course mimicked John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential ad by using the same song and nearly all of the same still images.
The spot was notable not for its cutting-edge technology — it’s not like it deepfaked RFK Jr. into his uncle’s Berlin Wall speech. But it relied on the ubiquity of technological platforms, allowing all of us who never saw the original ad to hop on YouTube and find it, mentally drawing the JFK connection.
Unfortunately for the conspiracy-peddling junior Kennedy, technological platforms also allowed his cousin Bobby Shriver to skewer him. Shriver noted on X that his mother, JFK sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, "would be appalled by his deadly health care views.” RFK Jr., we hardly knew ye.
The Mind and Iron Totally Scientific Apocalypse Score
Every week we bring you the TSAS — the TOTALLY SCIENTIFIC APOCALYPSE SCORE (tm). It’s a barometer of the biggest future-world news of the week, from a sink-to-our-doom -5 or -6 to a life-is-great +5 or +6 the other way. Last year ended with a score of -21.5 — gulp. But it’s a new year, so we’re starting fresh — a big, welcoming zero to kick off 2024. Let’s hope it gets into (and stays) in plus territory for a long while to come.
THE POSSIBILITY OF NON-EARTHLY LIFE IS BEING NORMALIZED, OPENING THE WAY FOR MORE TRANSPARENCY. +2
MICROSOFT AND AI COMPANIES WANT TO DISTRACT US FROM DANGERS WITH QUESTIONABLE PROMISES. -3
AI BROUGHT BACK A DICTATOR BUT ALSO GAVE NEW LIFE TO A DISSIDENT: Slight edge to the negative. -0.5