By: Samir Chopra
A couple of decades ago, I strolled through Washington Square Park on a warm summer night, idly observing the usual hustle and bustle of students, tourists, drunks, buskers, hustlers, stand-up comedians, and sadly, folks selling oregano instead of good-to-honest weed. As I did so, I noticed a young man, holding up flyers and yelling, 'Legalize Marijuana! Impeach George Bush! [Sr., not Jr., though either would have done just fine.]." I walked over, and asked for a flyer. Was a new political party being floated with these worthy objectives as central platform issues? Was there a political movement afoot, one worthy of my support? Was a meeting being called?
The flyers were for a punk rock band's live performance the following night--at a club, a block or so away. Clickbait, you see, is as old as the hills.
Clickbait works. From the standard 'You won't believe what this twelve-year old did to get his divorced parents back together' to 'Ten signs your daughter is going to date a loser in high school', to 'Nine ways you are wasting money everyday' - they all work. You are intrigued; you click; the hit-count goes up; little counters spin; perhaps some unpaid writer gets paid as a threshold is crossed; an advertiser forks out money to the site posting the link. Or something like that. It's all about the hits; they keep the internet engine running; increasing their number justifies any means.
Many a writer finds out that the headlines for their posts changed to something deemed more likely to bring in readers. They often do not agree with these changes--especially when irate readers complain about their misleading nature. This becomes especially pernicious when trash talking about a piece of writing spreads--based not on its content, but on its headline, one not written by the author, but dreamed up by a website staffer instructed to do anything--anything!--to increase the day's hit-count.
A notable personal instance of this phenomenon occurred with an essay I wrote for The Nation a little while ago. My original title for the essay was: was Programs, Not Just People, Can Violate Your Privacy. I argued that smart programs could violate privacy just like humans could, and that the standard defense used by their deployers--"Don't worry, no humans are reading your email"--was deliberately and dangerously misleading. I then went to suggest granting a limited form of legal agency to these programs--so that their deployers could be understood as their legal principals and hence, attributed their knowledge and made liable for their actions. I acknowledged the grant of personhood as a legal move that would also solve this problem, but that was not the main thrust of my argument--the grant of legal agency to invoke agency law would be enough. (These arguments were drawn from my book A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents.)
My essay went online as Programs Are People, Too. It was a catchy title, but it was clickbait. And it created predictable misunderstanding: many readers--and non-readers--simply assumed I was arguing for greater 'legal rights' for programs, and immediately put me down as some kind of technophilic anti-humanist. Ironically, someone arguing for the protection of user rights online was pegged as arguing against them. The title was enough to convince them of it. I had thought my original title was more accurate and certainly seemed catchy enough to me. Not so apparently for the folks who ran The Nation's site. C'est la vie.
As for Beyonce, I have no idea what she thinks about the singularity.
Note: This post was originally published--under the same title--at samirchopra.com
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