2023 Villain Roundup
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #184 ❤️
2023 is finally coming to an end, and what a year it’s been.
AI has been in equal parts revolutionising and terrorising our lives, Elon Musk turned Twitter into a hellscape in so many ways, Sam Altman got kicked out of his own company, and then brought back in, and Mark Zuckerberg used AI for evil by creating a Kendal Jenner chatbot.
To see the year out in style, this week we’ll be bringing you a roundup of 2023’s biggest villains and boy oh boy there are a lot to get through…
Let's get into it.
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#1 - Elon Musk Rebranding Twitter to X
After traumatising staff, changing the platform beyond all recognition and ensuring trolls get their say, Elon Musk wondered what else he could do to destroy Twitter.
Replacing the name and the emblematic bird image with his favourite letter seemed to be the next logical step. I mean, what is the loss of up to 20 billion dollars of brand value, really, compared to the edgy genius of the letter X…
It has become increasingly difficult to continually dig deeper into what seem to clearly be the actions of a man devoid of logical thought, but we struggle on.
The rebranding from Twitter to X was apparently the first step in Musk’s goal to change Twitter from a social media platform to an “everything app” – including banking, shopping and other features from our daily lives. It’s also going to be “powered by AI”, you know, that thing that Musk thinks is going to bring about the end of the world and was on a mission against until OpenAI made a million dollars.
It also begged the question, did this lofty goal come before or after he failed at keeping it going as a social media platform.
Since then, Musk has said “GFY” to advertisers who want to blackmail him, endorsed antisemitic material on the platform (allegedly… but really he did) and lost a LOT of money.
Seems to be working well then….
#2 - Sam Altman Getting Kicked Out And Put Back Again
We all followed the drama at OpenAI with bated breath and an array of shocked facial expressions, let us jog your memory:
Sam Altman got kicked out of OpenAI by the board of directors, pretty much the entire company then created a petition to get him back (including some of the members of the board who got him booted). Then, Microsoft offered to hire them all including Altman. The finale so far - Altman is back, baby.
Now what?
What we actually found most fascinating about this isn’t the kicking out and reinstating of the CEO – been there done that, Apple and Twitter also got rid of and then reinstated their charismatic/problematic CEOs back in the day.
No, what was interesting here is the change this move signals for what OpenAI is as an organisation.
The company was founded in 2015 as a “non-profit” organisation “with the goal of building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity.”
In 2019 they then changed to a “capped profit” structure, noting that the technology was so important that companies needed to benefit from it, but that it brings “risks that must be safely addressed” – hence a board of directors with control over the company.
That board “addressed” what they considered to be “risks” last week – albeit risks that they haven’t clearly stated to the public – and were swiftly removed from their roles, and OpenAI are now in the process of setting up a governance structure that will guide them in a more commercial direction.
We wondered aloud, have they scrapped their original 2015 goals, which were already seemingly being watered down in favour of profit in 2019?
You know we HATE to agree with Elon Musk, truly, we do, but he recently tweeted (we still won’t say xed) that OpenAI’s new board needed directors “who deeply understand AI and will stand up to Sam.”
That’s not really what happened… Let’s see what 2024 brings.
#3 – Mark Z Creating Chatbots With “Personality”
The eye-popping faces we made when we read through this announcement for the first time cannot accurately be portrayed via words, but when we add a sarcastic “wow” at the end of a sentence, please imagine a raised eyebrow, an exaggerated eye roll, or a slow blink.
Mark Zuckerberg, famously the man with the least personality in the world, came up with he idea to introduce a range of AI-powered chatbots on Meta with “personality”. They’re not just about answering queries, “this is about entertainment”. Wow.
He noted that their main chatbot, which will be called “Meta AI” (something only a guy with a lot of personality could come up with) could be used in messaging with friends. You can ask the chatbot, for example, to settle an argument or a debate. Wow…
They also planned to pump out a range of chat bots with different personas, and celebrities such as Kendall Jenner will be lending their voices to the project. Can we put our finger on what kind of personality Kendal Jenner has? Oh yes, none!
The characters that were announced include a character called “Bru”, a “wisecracking sports debater” played by Tom Brady – a man who has never cracked wise in the entirety of his time on this earth – and a big brother who “will roast you” played by YouTube star MrBeast. Just, wow.
We did wonder at the time if he had been the victim of a stroke, and his current plans to build a huge underground bunker in Miami aren’t making us feel any better about the mans mental state…
#4 - Mark Zuckerberg (Again) Blocking Search on Threads
Congrats Mark, you’re in here twice! Okay you can share this one with Adam Mosseri, but still.
Remember when Threads introduced a “temporary” measure blocking searches for anything naughty, and we mean really ANYTHING. The search function simply wouldn’t provide results for any searches for keywords that “may show potentially sensitive content”.
Mosseri, the poster boy heading Threads along with Instagram, said that the company was trying to learn from their mistake, and want to “bias towards being careful”. Well, there’s careful and then there’s church camp.
Sure, Instagram search was criticized for leading to a lot of misinformation, and the ability to lead users down a rabbit hole when it came to conspiracy theories – especially when searching for anything in the realms of “vaccine” or “5G” brought you conspiracy prone anti-vax results in all the top searches.
But from there to disable all searches for potentially sensitive keywords is an aggressive leap, that showedfear that the app could get out of their control. (Don’t worry, nobody’s on it anymore so it won’t be a problem…)
You would get no results searching for “marijuana”, “murder” or “opiod”, and if searching “thin” or “skinny” would lead Threads to kindly suggest you get help because the search suggests you have body image issues. Yes, really.
While it may be more appealing to advertisers than X where everyone is simply going crazy, now more than ever, if they continue to be so “vanilla” there won’t be anyone to advertise to.
As far as rivalling what Twitter used to be, Bloomberg aptly noted that movements such as #MeToo would never have gotten off the ground on Threads, as if the content mentions the key words “sexual assault”, you ain’t finding it in the search.
We hate to mention the C word (censorship) but Elon Musk certainly will be…
#5 - Sam Bankman Fried Toast Being Scammer Of The Year
And so to our final villain of the year, you guessed it ladies and gentlemen, it’s Sam Bankman-Fried.
If you have been hiding away from this story you are not alone – it’s as complex as it is simple, but it involved lots of things that don’t make sense.
Things like Crypto (still a thing unfortunately, even after GameStop), Blockchain (still just a database), trading coins and then exchanges used to combine them all into a mess called FTX.
So, what did Sammy boy do? Well, apart from be an idiot pretending to be a genius pretending to be an idiot he made the mistake of defrauding people in a regulated market.
That regulated market being the good old US of A.
Basically, you can pretend to have a non-FIAT currency - FIAT = Real money, non-FIAT = Fake money, Fake Money = Crypto after you a have used real money to buy it.
But what you can’t do it take real money turned into fake money by investors who have invested in your fake currency and currency exchange, turn it back into real money without telling them, and buy a Mansion with it. Or something else fancy.
You also can’t then take it and put the real money into your own personal hedge fund.
Clearly Uncle Sam was unhappy with another man child taking the mick, arrested him and threw him in jail.
The best part of it all? His 2021 Time Magazine 30 under 30 (yuck) was rescinded in 2023, coincidentally timed with him being thrown into jail.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Bah Humbug
In keeping with our villain theme, this week’s bonus is a roundup of the top 10 worst Christmas ads of ALL time.
Highlights include Asda reinforcing gender stereotypes showing a mother doing everything to prepare Christmas, and the tagline “Behind every great Christmas there’s a mum, and behind every great mum there’s an Asda” and a Mr Kipling advert which includes a birth scene. Yes, really.
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