Real Humans
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 7.24.25
Another post about AI? It seems to be all anyone can talk about.
And for good reason. If the technology progresses as currently theorized, it will significantly alter our informational and economic landscape. We are right to give it so much thought.
However, it is already tiresome scrolling through hours of AI-generated content in our feeds. The technology is at its worst when used by engagement farmers attempting to pump out content at a low cost. There exists so much more untapped potential than we currently experience.
Behind the scenes, experts are beginning to leverage AI as a tool to enhance their work, enabling creatives to access more productivity than previously imaginable. Journalists use it to transcribe interviews in seconds and surface obscure but relevant source material. Filmmakers experiment with generative tools to storyboard shots and simulate lighting environments before picking up the camera. Researchers deploy large language models to draft literature reviews or search through decades of archival material, freeing up time to focus on analysis. When used thoughtfully, these tools accelerate and amplify human intent rather than replace it.
This is the world we want to live in.
So how do we sift through the rapid churn of low-cost, AI-generated clickbait to discover what is truly worth our attention? Even the most used algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok struggle to filter AI-slop from quality content.
Fortunately, recent innovations in digital technology allow us to verify real humans online, remove bot accounts, and determine quality rankings using track records of credibility from trusted users, all without revealing any sensitive personal data. Aemula is fundamentally built on this technology to create a human-centric ecosystem of trustworthy news in a focused environment. Importantly, these systems achieve this while using transparent, open-source, community-governed algorithms.
Take back control of your attention. Don’t outsource your news curation to blackbox social media feeds full of AI-generated junk. Trust that your sources are real people sharing real news.
This week, we highlight writers discussing tradeoffs and predictions of the current trajectory of AI. We encourage you to explore their work and consider subscribing to support these writers directly!
Digital Native
Written by Rex Woodbury, a startup operator and investor who explores the intersection of people and technology through weekly essays on innovation, AI, and the evolving landscape of startups and digital culture.
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been leading in Late Night since the 2016 election. But the show has still lost a third of its audience in that time. When CBS announced last week that it will cancel Colbert—ending a 33-year run of The Late Show, which started with David Letterman in 1993—reports emerged that the show was losing $40M a year (!).
A $40M / year loss is a pretty shocking figure for a leading TV institution. What happened? TikTok ate Late Night.
We’re consuming content in bite-sized videos; young people don’t have the attention spans for 30-minute episodes of TV (and if they do, they’re scrolling their little screens while watching things on their big screens). Gen Z now spends a whopping 108 minutes per day on TikTok—nearly two hours.”
Open Questions
Written by Victor Kumar, a philosophy professor at Boston University whose work on evolution, morality, and social change informs his reflections on American political culture and more.
“Outsourcing specialized cognitive tasks—memory to your notepad, arithmetic to your calculator—frees up your mind for more worthwhile activities and can even scaffold your thinking, allowing you to ascend to new intellectual heights. Outsourcing reasoning, by contrast, means forgoing precisely what’s most valuable and can prevent you from ever leaving the ground. “What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of a mind at work,” writes poet Meghan O’Rourke in The New York Times.
Indeed, many college students seem to be sacrificing their intellect. In The New Yorker, Hua Hsu describes students brazenly cheating with AI, sometimes even fooling themselves about what they’re doing. One says, “Any type of writing in life, I use AI.” When assigned the work of a 19th century abolitionist—“obviously, I ain’t trying to read that”—the student prompts AI for a summary. But even the summary is too long, so he asks for bullet points.
Writing is thinking, according to an old saw as well as a recent Nature editorial, yet students are using LLMs to bypass not just writing but also reading. That’s hardly unprecedented—SparkNotes has been around for decades—but what is new is being able to condense the life out of literally any text. AI may thus contribute to an ongoing and alarming decline in the quality of literacy.”
AI Futures Project
Written by the AI Futures Project, a small research non-profit led by former OpenAI governance researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, with this piece written by Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten, as part of their work on preparing for AGI following their first major project, AI 2027.
“a study a year ago (ie already obsolete) found that 76% of doctors used ChatGPT for clinical decision-making. One member of our team (SA) is a medical doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area, and can confirm that this feels like the right number. He and growing numbers of his colleagues use language models regularly - often typing in a treatment plan and asking the AI if it sees any red flags or can think of anything being missed. This is in many ways a much deeper and more intimate use of AI than merely spitting out a sepsis probability, and it’s happened in a way that has mostly bypassed institutions. Even talking about doctors might be giving institutionalism too much credit: Redditors are already telling each other to skip the doctor entirely and go straight to the source. “ChatGPT is a shockingly good doctor”, says one heavily-upvoted post. “Seriously, this is life changing”.
LLMs might not be deciding how long you’ll stay in prison yet, but they probably are making a nontrivial difference in whether you go there in the first place. Rampant ChatGPT use is one of the worst-kept secrets of the legal profession, breaking into the public eye only when lawyers cite nonexistent cases and have to sheepishly admit their AIs hallucinated. A 2024 study found that AI Adoption By Legal Professionals Jumped From 19% to 79% In One Year.
In the StackOverflow survey of programmers, 62% said they already used AI to help code, with an additional 14% saying they “planned to soon”1. One popular product, Cursor, claims a million daily users generating almost a billion lines of code per day. Satya Nadella says AI already writes 30% of the code at Microsoft.
All of these numbers are the lowest they will ever be.”
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