Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has the most popular YouTube account with over 450 million subscribers, or a little over 1 in 16 people in the world. His success with high-production, high-output stunt videos have made him the aspirational model for independent content creators everywhere: the actualization of the promise that, thanks to the internet, gatekeepers no longer stand in the way of viral fame and the riches that supposedly come with it.
Some might say that the extraordinarily famous content creators at the top represent the exception that proves the rule, but even Donaldson, no matter how agape his algorithm-pandering maw, can’t actually make money from YouTube. Financial documents revealed that the content arm of the MrBeast empire is a tremendous money loser — three straight years in the red, including a whopping negative $110 million in 2024. In fact, today all of those viral videos are just a marketing front for the real MrBeast business: a line of mediocre chocolate bars, available at your local Walmart. If the dream was that content creators were supposed to forge a new way to make money, the reality is that they’re relying on the oldest method: selling millions of people crap they don’t need.
In this series, The Verge dives into the ever-shifting, ever-fucked-up incentives that fuel the content machine across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. There was a time when the internet wasn’t constantly trying to sell us things. Now, what was once mostly contained to large commerce giants has encroached on every nook and cranny of the web. It’s eating the internet, swallowing the web whole and all of us with it. Maybe that’s why MrBeast’s mouth is always wide open.
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![Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’ | TechCrunch
Asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker answered, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”
Whittaker made those comments in a broader interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy, and Signal. She acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format a document here and there,” but insisted, “I don’t ask them questions. I’m very serious about my thinking and writing, and I don’t want the process of working through an idea […] to be foreclosed or eclipsed by the response of a system that’s averaging what’s already out there.”
As for Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping this year, Whittaker argued this scenario — where Copilot is eavesdropping on the family group chat to determine who wants want — means giving it “access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address [and] my calendar.”
“What you’ve just described is a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the context of Signal, it would constitute a kind of a backdoor.”
#Signals #Meredith #Whittaker #remember #chatbots #friends #TechCrunchMeredith Whittaker,signal](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/meredith-whittaker-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 "Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’ | TechCrunch
Asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker answered, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”
Whittaker made those comments in a broader interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy, and Signal. She acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format a document here and there,” but insisted, “I don’t ask them questions. I’m very serious about my thinking and writing, and I don’t want the process of working through an idea […] to be foreclosed or eclipsed by the response of a system that’s averaging what’s already out there.”
As for Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping this year, Whittaker argued this scenario — where Copilot is eavesdropping on the family group chat to determine who wants want — means giving it “access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address [and] my calendar.”
“What you’ve just described is a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the context of Signal, it would constitute a kind of a backdoor.”
#Signals #Meredith #Whittaker #remember #chatbots #friends #TechCrunchMeredith Whittaker,signal")
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