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The caption is short and to the point. Even better, ChatGPT suggested hashtags with a lot of traction. For example, #EatBetterFeelBetter has more than 12 million views, according to the platform.

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How TikTok Holds Our Attention

By Jia Tolentino

Marcella is eighteen and lives in a Texas suburb so quiet that it sometimes seems like a ghost town. She downloaded TikTok last fall, after seeing TikTok videos that had been posted on YouTube and Instagram. They were strange and hilarious and reminded her of Vine, the discontinued platform that teen-agers once used for uploading anarchic six-second videos that played on a loop. She opened TikTok, and it began showing her an endless scroll of videos, most of them fifteen seconds or less. She watched the ones she liked a few times before moving on, and double-tapped her favorites, to “like” them. TikTok was learning what she wanted. It showed her more absurd comic sketches and supercuts of people painting murals, and fewer videos in which girls made fun of other girls for their looks.

When you watch a video on TikTok, you can tap a button on the screen to respond with your own video, scored to the same soundtrack. Another tap calls up a suite of editing tools, including a timer that makes it easy to film yourself. Videos become memes that you can imitate, or riff on, rapidly multiplying much the way the Ice Bucket Challenge proliferated on Facebook five years ago.

Marcella was lying on her bed looking at TikTok on a Thursday evening when she began seeing video after video set to a clip of the song “Pretty Boy Swag,” by Soulja Boy. In each one, a person would look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and then, just as the song’s beat dropped, the camera would cut to a shot of the person’s doppelgänger. It worked like a punch line. A guy with packing tape over his nose became Voldemort. A girl smeared gold paint on her face, put on a yellow hoodie, and turned into an Oscar statue. Marcella propped her phone on her desk and set the TikTok timer. Her video took around twenty minutes to make, and is thirteen seconds long. She enters the frame in a white button-down, her hair dark and wavy. She adjusts her collar, checks her reflection, looks upward, and—the beat drops—she’s Anne Frank.

Marcella’s friends knew about TikTok, but almost none of them were on it. She didn’t think that anyone would see what she’d made. Pretty quickly, though, her video began getting hundreds of likes, thousands, tens of thousands. People started sharing it on Instagram. On YouTube, the Swedish vlogger PewDiePie, who has more than a hundred million subscribers, posted a video mocking the media for suggesting that TikTok had a “Nazi problem”—Vice had found various accounts promoting white-supremacist slogans—then showed Marcella’s video, laughed, and said, “Never mind, actually, this does not help the case I was trying to make.” (PewDiePie has been criticized for employing anti-Semitic imagery in his videos, though his fans insist that his work is satire.) Marcella started to get direct messages on TikTok and Instagram, some of which called her anti-Semitic. One accused her of promoting Nazism. She deleted the video.

In February, a friend texted me a YouTube rip of Marcella’s TikTok. I was alone with my phone at my desk on a week night, and when I watched the video I screamed. It was terrifyingly funny, like a well-timed electric shock. It also made me feel very old. I’d seen other TikToks, mostly on Twitter, and my primary impression was that young people were churning through images and sounds at warp speed, repurposing reality into ironic, bite-size content. Kids were clearly better than adults at whatever it was TikTok was for—“I haven’t seen one piece of content on there made by an adult that’s normal and good,” Jack Wagner, a “popular Instagram memer,” told The Atlantic last fall —though they weren’t the only ones using the platform. Arnold Schwarzenegger was on TikTok, riding a minibike and chasing a miniature pony. Drag queens were on TikTok, opera singers were on TikTok, the Washington Post was on TikTok, dogs I follow on Instagram were on TikTok. Most important, the self-made celebrities of Generation Z were on TikTok, a cohort of people in their teens and early twenties who have spent a decade filming themselves through a front-facing camera and meticulously honing their understanding of what their peers will respond to and what they will ignore.

I sent an e-mail to Marcella. (That’s her middle name.) She’s from a military family, and likes to stay up late listening to music and writing. Marcella is Jewish, and she and her brothers were homeschooled. Not long before she made her video, her family had stopped at a base to renew their military I.D.s. One of her brothers glanced at her new I.D. and joked, accurately, that she looked like Anne Frank.

In correspondence, Marcella was as earnest and thoughtful as her video had seemed flip. She understood that it could seem offensive out of context—a context that was invisible to nearly everyone who saw it—and she was sanguine about the angry messages that she’d received. TikTok, like the rest of the world, was a mixed bag, she thought, with bad ideas, and cruelty, and embarrassment, but also with so much creative potential. Its ironic sensibility was perfectly suited for people her age, and so was its industrial-strength ability to turn non-famous people into famous ones—even if only temporarily, even if only in a minor way. Marcella had accepted her brush with Internet fame as an odd thrill, and not an entirely foreign one: her generation had grown up on YouTube, she noted, watching ordinary kids become millionaires by turning on laptop cameras in their bedrooms and talking about stuff they like. The videos that I’d been seeing, chaotic and sincere and nihilistic and very short, were the natural expressions of kids who’d had smartphones since they were in middle school, or elementary school. TikTok, Marcella explained, was a simple reaction to, and an absurdist escape from, “the mass amounts of media we are exposed to every living day.”

TikTok has been downloaded more than a billion times since its launch, in 2017, and reportedly has more monthly users than Twitter or Snapchat. Like those apps, it’s free, and peppered with advertising. I downloaded TikTok in May, adding its neon-shaded music-note logo to the array of app icons on my phone. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, which, in recent years, has invested heavily and made major advances in artificial intelligence. After a three-billion-dollar investment from the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, last fall, ByteDance was valued at more than seventy-five billion dollars, the highest valuation for any startup in the world.

I opened the app, and saw a three-foot-tall woman making her microwave door squeak to the melody of “Yeah!,” by Usher, and then a dental hygienist and her patient dancing to “Baby Shark.” A teen-age girl blew up a bunch of balloons that spelled “ PUSSY ” to the tune of a jazz song from the beloved soundtrack of the anime series “Cowboy Bebop.” Young white people lip-synched to audio of nonwhite people in ways that ranged from innocently racist to overtly racist. A kid sprayed shaving cream into a Croc and stepped into it so that shaving cream squirted out of the holes in the Croc. In five minutes, the app had sandblasted my cognitive matter with twenty TikToks that had the legibility and logic of a narcoleptic dream.

TikTok is available in a hundred and fifty markets. Its videos are typically built around music, so language tends not to pose a significant barrier, and few of the videos have anything to do with the news, so they don’t easily become dated. The company is reportedly focussing its growth efforts on the U.S., Japan, and India, which is its biggest market—smartphone use in the country has swelled, and TikTok now has two hundred million users there. ByteDance often hacks its way into a market, aggressively courting influencers on other social-media networks and spending huge amounts on advertising, much of which runs on competing platforms. Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told me that investors normally look for “organic growth” in social apps; ByteDance has been innovative, she said, in its ability and willingness to spend its way to big numbers. One former TikTok employee I spoke to was troubled by the company’s methods: “On Instagram, they’d run ads with clickbaity images—an open, gashed wound, or an overtly sexy image of a young teen girl—and it wouldn’t matter if Instagram users flagged the images as long as the ad got a lot of engagement first.”

In April, the Indian government briefly banned new downloads of the app, citing concerns that it was exposing minors to pornography and sexual predation. (At least three people in India have died from injuries sustained while creating TikToks: posing with a pistol, hanging out on train tracks, trying to fit three people on a moving bike.) In court, ByteDance insisted that it was losing five hundred thousand dollars a day from the ban. The company announced plans to hire more local content moderators and to invest a billion dollars in India during the next three years. The ban was lifted, and the company launched a campaign: every day, three randomly selected users who promoted TikTok on other platforms with the hashtag #ReturnOfTikTok would receive the equivalent of fourteen hundred dollars.

TikTok is a social network that has nothing to do with one’s social network. It doesn’t ask you to tell it who you know—in the future according to ByteDance, “large-scale AI models” will determine our “personalized information flows,” as the Web site for the company’s research lab declares. The app provides a “Discover” page, with an index of trending hashtags, and a “For You” feed, which is personalized—if that’s the right word—by a machine-learning system that analyzes each video and tracks user behavior so that it can serve up a continually refined, never-ending stream of TikToks optimized to hold your attention. In the teleology of TikTok, humans were put on Earth to make good content, and “good content” is anything that is shared, replicated, and built upon. In essence, the platform is an enormous meme factory, compressing the world into pellets of virality and dispensing those pellets until you get full or fall asleep.

ByteDance has more than a dozen products, a number of which depend on A.I. recommendation engines. These platforms collect data that the company aggregates and uses to refine its algorithms, which the company then uses to refine its platforms; rinse, repeat. This feedback loop, called the “virtuous cycle of A.I.,” is what each TikTok user experiences in miniature. The company would not comment on the details of its recommendation algorithm, but ByteDance has touted its research into computer vision, a process that involves extracting and classifying visual information; on the Web site of its research lab, the company lists “short video recommendation system” among the applications of the computer-vision technology that it’s developing. Although TikTok’s algorithm likely relies in part, as other systems do, on user history and video-engagement patterns, the app seems remarkably attuned to a person’s unarticulated interests. Some social algorithms are like bossy waiters: they solicit your preferences and then recommend a menu. TikTok orders you dinner by watching you look at food.

After I had watched TikTok on and off for a couple of days, the racist lip-synchs disappeared from my feed. I started to see a lot of videos of fat dogs, teen-agers playing pranks on their teachers, retail workers making lemonade from the lemons of being bored and underpaid. I still sometimes saw things I didn’t like: people in horror masks popping into the frame, or fourteen-year-old girls trying to be sexy, or rich kids showing off the McMansions where they lived. But I often found myself barking with laughter, in thrall to the unhinged cadences of the app. The over-all effect called to mind both silent-movie slapstick and the sort of exaggerated, knowing stupidity one finds on the popular Netflix sketch show “I Think You Should Leave.” Some videos displayed new forms of digital artistry: a Polish teen-ager with braces and slate-blue eyes, who goes by @jeleniewska, makes videos in which she appears to be popping in and out of mirrors, phones, and picture frames. Others drew on surprising sources: an audio clip from Cecelia Condit’s art piece “ Possibly in Michigan ,” from 1983, went viral under the track label “oh no no no no no no no no silly” after a sixteen-year-old found the film on a list of “creepy videos” that had been posted on YouTube.

I found it both freeing and disturbing to spend time on a platform that didn’t ask me to pretend that I was on the Internet for a good reason. I was not giving TikTok my attention because I wanted to keep up with the news, or because I was trying to soothe and irritate myself by looking at photos of my friends on vacation. I was giving TikTok my attention because it was serving me what would retain my attention, and it could do that because it had been designed to perform algorithmic pyrotechnics that were capable of making a half hour pass before I remembered to look away.

We have been inadvertently preparing for this experience for years. On YouTube and Twitter and Instagram, recommendation algorithms have been making us feel individually catered to while bending our selfhood into profitable shapes. TikTok favors whatever will hold people’s eyeballs, and it provides the incentives and the tools for people to copy that content with ease. The platform then adjusts its predilections based on the closed loop of data that it has created. This pattern seems relatively trivial when the underlying material concerns shaving cream and Crocs, but it could determine much of our cultural future. The algorithm gives us whatever pleases us, and we, in turn, give the algorithm whatever pleases it. As the circle tightens, we become less and less able to separate algorithmic interests from our own.

One of TikTok’s early competitors was Musical.ly, a lip-synching app based in Shanghai that had a large music library and had become extremely popular with American children. In 2016, an executive at an ad agency focussed on social media told the Times that Musical.ly was “ the youngest social network we’ve ever seen ,” adding, “You’re talking about first, second, third grade.” ByteDance bought Musical.ly the following year, for an amount reportedly in the vicinity of a billion dollars, and merged the app with TikTok in August, 2018. In February, the Federal Trade Commission levied a $5.7-million fine against the company: the agency found that a large percentage of Musical.ly users, who were now TikTok users, were under the age of thirteen, and the app did not ask for their ages or seek parental consent, as is required by federal law. The F.T.C. “uncovered disturbing practices, including collecting and exposing the location” of these children, according to an agency statement. TikTok handled this in a blunt, makeshift fashion: it added an age gate that asked for your birthday but which defaulted to the current date, meaning that users who failed to enter their age were instantly kicked off the app, and their videos were deleted. TikTok did not seem terribly worried about the complaints that followed these deletions. It was now big enough not to care.

A few months after TikTok arrived in the U.S., a nineteen-year-old rapper and singer from Georgia named Montero Lamar Hill uploaded a song that he had been trying for weeks to promote as the basis of a meme. Hill, who goes by the stage name Lil Nas X, had spent much of his teens attempting to go viral on Twitter and elsewhere. There is a sweetness to his self-presentation, which seems optimized for digital interaction; he wears ten-gallon hats and fringe and glitter, a laugh-crying-cowboy emoji come to life. “The Internet is basically, like, my parents in a way,” he told the Times this spring, after people began making videos featuring a snippet of his song “Old Town Road,” in which they would drink “yee yee juice” and turn into cowboys and cowgirls. The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April, and stayed there longer than any song ever had.

Certain musical elements serve as TikTok catnip: bass-heavy transitions that can be used as punch lines; rap songs that are easy to lip-synch or include a narrative-friendly call and response. A twenty-six-year-old Australian producer named Adam Friedman, half of the duo Cookie Cutters, told me that he was now concentrating on lyrics that you could act out with your hands. “I write hooks, and I try it in the mirror—how many hand movements can I fit into fifteen seconds?” he said. “You know, goodbye, call me back, peace out, F you.”

TikTok employs an artist-relations team that contacts musicians whose songs are going viral and coaches them on how to use the platform. Some videos include links to Apple Music, which pays artists per stream, though not very much. Virality can thus pay off elsewhere, relieving the pressure for TikTok to compensate artists directly. It is, these days, a standard arrangement: you will be “paid” in exposure, giving your labor to a social platform in part because a lot of other people are doing it and in part because you might be one of the people whom the platform sends, however briefly, to the top.

If you are one of those people, TikTok can be a godsend. Sub Urban, a nineteen-year-old artist from New Jersey, got a deal with Warner Records after millions of TikTokers started doing a dance from the video game Fortnite to his song “Cradles.” In August, a twenty-one-year-old rapper from Sacramento who goes by the name Stunna Girl learned that a song of hers had gone viral on the app, and soon signed a record deal with Capitol. TikTok also offers artists the uniquely moving experience of watching total strangers freely and enthusiastically produce music videos for them. Jonathan Visger, an electronic artist known as Absofacto, told me that it had changed his entire outlook on his career to see nearly two million TikToks all set to his 2015 single “Dissolve,” a heady pop song that inspired a meme in which people appeared to be falling through a series of portals.

“I think the song worked well for the platform because the lyrics are ‘I just wanted you to watch me dissolve, slowly, in a pool full of your love,’ ” Visger told me recently. “Which is a lot like ‘I’m on the Internet, I want to be seen, and I want you to like it.’ ” I asked him if he’d been thinking about the Internet when he was writing it. “No!” he said, laughing. “I was thinking about unrequited love.”

ByteDance is developing a music-streaming service—which will likely launch first in emerging markets, such as India—and it is currently negotiating the renewal of old Musical.ly licensing agreements with the three companies that control roughly eighty per cent of music globally. ByteDance also has acquired a London-based startup called Jukedeck, which has been developing A.I. music-creation tools, including a program that can interpret video and compose music that suits it. Incorporating such technology into TikTok could give ByteDance total ownership of content created within the app. Multiple people at TikTok and ByteDance told me that they were not aware of any plans to add this sort of tool, but TikTok’s plans have a way of abruptly changing.

In some respects, what’s sonically valuable on TikTok isn’t any different from what has long succeeded on radio; no pop-songwriting practice is more established than crafting a good hook. But the app could begin to influence composition in other ways. Digital platforms and digital attention spans may make hit songs shorter, for instance. (“Old Town Road” clocks in at under two minutes.) Adam Friedman has begun producing music directly for influencers, and engineering it for maximum TikTok success. “We start with the snippet, and if it does well on TikTok we’ll produce the full song,” he told me. I suggested that some people might think there was a kind of artistic integrity missing from this process. “The influencer is playing a central role in our culture, and it’s not new,” he said. “There’ve always been socialites, people of influence, the Paris World’s Fair. Whatever mecca that people go to for culture is where they go to for culture, and in this moment it’s TikTok.”

TikTok’s U.S. operations are currently based at a co-working space in a generic four-story building on a busy thoroughfare in Culver City, in Los Angeles. I visited the office twice this summer, after an extensive e-mail correspondence with a company spokesperson. The first person TikTok offered for an on-the-record chat was a twenty-year-old TikToker named Ben De Almeida, who lives in Alberta and, on the app, goes by @benoftheweek. De Almeida first went viral on TikTok with a video that noted his resemblance to the actor Noah Centineo, best known for his roles on “The Fosters” and in teen movies on Netflix. De Almeida wore red striped pants and a yellow shirt and was accompanied by a handler; he radiated good-natured charisma. When I extended my hand, he immediately went in for a hug. “I’m excited to share what it’s like to be a TikToker,” he said.

De Almeida was in L.A. for the summer, “collabing,” he told me. He said that he’d “always wanted to be a creator,” using the term that has become a catchall identity for people who make money by producing content for social platforms. He’d grown up admiring YouTubers, “people like Shane Dawson and iJustine,” and had begun making online videos when he was twelve. He used to post videos on Snapchat, but he got on TikTok in November and now has two million followers. In conversation, De Almeida, like other TikTok teens I talked to, mixed the ecstatically strange dialect of people who love memes—a language in which every word sets off a chain of incomprehensible referents—with the sort of anodyne corporate jargon I associate with marketing professionals. “In this generation, you get steeped in the culture of online video,” he said. “You naturally pick up on what can be a trend.” He pulled out his phone and showed me one of his early TikTok hits, in which he pretended to put a can of beans in the microwave and burn his mom’s house down.

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Later that day, in West Hollywood, at an outpost of Joe & the Juice, I met with Jacob Pace, the ebullient twenty-one-year-old C.E.O. of a content-production company called Flighthouse. Pace wore a charcoal T-shirt and had the erratic energy of a champion sled dog on break. Flighthouse has more than nineteen million followers on TikTok, and its videos reflect an intuitive understanding of its audience: Pikachu in a baseball cap, dancing; a girl eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in a bowl full of milk. Pace has fifteen employees working under him to make TikToks, some of which serve as back-end marketing for record labels that have paid Flighthouse to promote particular songs. He was about to travel to New York to present to ad agencies. “What gets me out of bed in the morning is creating and impacting culture,” he said. Figuring out how to make TikToks that people liked and related to was, he said, like “helping to perfect a machine that will one day start running perfectly.”

Many of the people whose professional lives are dependent on or tied to TikTok were eager to talk to me, but that eagerness was not shared by people who actually work for the company. A former TikTok employee told me, in a direct message, “As strategic as it appears from the outside it’s a complete chaos on the inside.” After my first visit to the L.A. office, I sent a TikTok representative a list of questions asking for basic information, including the number of employees at the company, the number of moderators, the demographics of its users, and the number of hours of video uploaded to the platform daily. The representative informed me, weeks later, that there were “a couple hundred people working on TikTok in the US” and “thousands of moderators” across all of TikTok’s markets, and she said that she couldn’t answer any of the other questions.

TikTok’s primary selling point is that it feels unusually fun, like it’s the last sunny corner on the Internet. I asked multiple TikTok employees whether the company did anything to insure that this mood prevailed in the videos that the app served its users. Speaking with an executive, in August, about the app’s “Discover” page, I asked, “What if the most trending thing was something that you didn’t want to be the most trending thing? Would you put something else in its place?” The executive said that doing so would run counter to TikTok’s ethos. A few weeks later, the online trade magazine Digiday reported that TikTok had begun sending select media companies a weekly newsletter that previewed “ the trending hashtags that the platform plans to promote .” A copy of the newsletter that I obtained lists such hashtags as #BeachDay and #AlwaysHustling, and it instructs, “If you’re interested in participating, make sure to upload your video no earlier than one day before the hashtag launch.” Later, a representative told me that the company might choose not to include certain hashtags on the “Discover” page, and that TikTok was interested in highlighting positive trends, like #TikTokDogs.

TikTok employees in Los Angeles declined to talk in any detail about their relationship to ByteDance headquarters, in Beijing, and everyone I spoke to emphasized that the U.S. operation was fairly independent. But one former employee, who left the company in 2018, described this as a “total fabrication.” (A ByteDance spokesperson, in response, said that the markets were becoming more independent and that much of that process had happened within the past year.) TikTok’s technology was developed in China, and it is refined in China. Another ex-employee, who had worked in the Shanghai office, said that nearly all product features are shipped out from Shanghai and Beijing, where most of ByteDance’s engineers are based. “At a tech company, where the engineers are is what matters,” the writer and former Facebook product manager Antonio Garcia-Martinez told me. “Everyone else is a puppet paid to lie to you.”

The direct predecessor of TikTok is Douyin, a short-video platform that ByteDance launched in China in 2016. Douyin is headquartered in Shanghai, and ByteDance says that it has more than five hundred million monthly active users. Zhou Rongrong, a twenty-nine-year-old Ph.D. candidate at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Beijing, who has studied Internet art in China, said that most young people in the country are on Douyin. In particular, she said, the app has opened up new kinds of economic potential for people outside the country’s traditional centers of power. “For example, I had no way before to see these ways that rural people can cook their dishes,” Zhou said. Douyin has given rise to influencers like Yeshi Xiaoge—the name means “brother who cooks in the wilderness”—who films himself preparing elaborate meals, and who has released his own line of beef sauce. Rural administrations have begun advertising their regions’ produce and tourist attractions on the app.

Though it remains broadly similar to TikTok, Douyin has become more advanced than its global counterpart, particularly with respect to e-commerce. With three taps on Douyin, you can buy a product featured in a video; you can book a stay at a hotel after watching a video shot there; you can take virtual tours of a city’s stores and restaurants, get coupons for those establishments, and later post geo-tagged video reviews. Fabian Bern, the head of a marketing company that works closely with Douyin influencers, told me that some power users can make “fifteen to twenty thousand U.S. dollars” on a shopping holiday like Singles’ Day.

So far, TikTok has concentrated more on expanding its user base than on offering opportunities for e-commerce. If TikTok wants to keep growing, it will need to attract more people who are no longer in their teens, and it will need to hold their attention. Many people are not terribly interested in even the choicest memes the world has to offer; in August, the Verge reported that a “significant majority” of new TikTok users give up on the app after thirty days. Bern thinks that TikTok content will soon become more mature, as has already happened with Douyin, which now contains micro-vlogs, life-style content, business advice, and videos from local police. Selected users on Douyin can upload videos as long as five minutes. Fictional mini-dramas have begun to appear.

“This meme content, people will get bored with it,” Bern said. “And companies are, like, ‘We cannot make this type of content or we’ll damage our brands.’ ”

ByteDance’s founder, Zhang Yiming, was twenty-nine when he started the company, in 2012. Zhang, who rarely gives interviews, was raised in Fujian Province, the son of a civil servant and a nurse, and attended university in the northern port city of Tianjin. He briefly worked at Microsoft in China, and bounced between startups for a while. He then pitched Chinese investors on the idea of a news-aggregation app that would use machine learning to provide people with whatever they wished to read. The app, called Jinri Toutiao, was launched within the year. Its name means “today’s top headlines.” It’s a bit like Reddit, if Reddit were guided by A.I. rather than by the upvotes and downvotes of its readers.

Like TikTok, Toutiao starts feeding you content as soon as you open it, and it adjusts the mix by tracking and analyzing your scrolling behavior, the time of day, and your location. It can deduce how its users read while commuting, and what they like to look at before bed. It reportedly has around a hundred and twenty million daily active users, most of whom are under thirty. On average, they read their tailored feeds for more than an hour each day. The app has a reputation for promoting lowbrow clickbait.

In China, daily life has become even more tech-driven than it is in the U.S. People can pay for things by letting cameras scan their faces; last year, a high school in Hangzhou installed scanners that recorded classrooms every thirty seconds and classified students’ facial expressions as neutral, happy, sad, angry, upset, or surprised. The Chinese government has been assembling what it calls the Social Credit System, a network of overlapping assessments of citizen trustworthiness, with opaque calculations that integrate information from public records and private databases. The government has also set benchmarks for progress in artificial-intelligence development at five-year intervals. Last year, Tianjin announced plans to put sixteen billion dollars toward A.I. funding; Shanghai announced a plan to raise fifteen billion.

There are two principal approaches to artificial intelligence. In symbolic A.I., humans give computers a set of elaborate rules that guide them through a task. This works well for things like chess, but everyday tasks—identifying faces, interpreting language—tend to be governed by human instinct as much as by rules. And so another approach, known as neural networks, or machine learning, has predominated in the past two decades or so. Under this model, computers learn by recognizing patterns in data and continually adjusting until the desired output—a correctly labelled face, a properly translated phrase—is consistently achieved. In this sort of system, the quantity of data is, broadly speaking, more important than the sophistication of the program interpreting it. The sheer number of users that Chinese companies have, and the types of data that come from the integration of tech with daily life, give those companies a crucial advantage.

Chinese tech companies are often partly funded by the government, and they openly defer to its requests, turning over user messages and purchase data, for instance. Tencent, which owns WeChat, has a “Follow Our Party” sign on a statue in front of its headquarters. The Wall Street Journal has reported that a ByteDance office in Beijing includes a room for a cybersecurity team of the Chinese police, which the company informs when it “ finds criminal content like terrorism or pedophilia ” on its apps. Last year, ByteDance was ordered to suspend Toutiao and to shut down a meme-centric social app called Neihan Duanzi—the name means something like “implied jokes”—because the content had become too vulgar, too disorderly, for the state. Zhang issued an apology, written in the language of government control. ByteDance had allowed content to appear that was “incommensurate with socialist core values, that did not properly implement public opinion guidance,” he said.

Three days later, the Times reported that the Chinese government had deployed facial-recognition technology to identify Uighurs, a Muslim minority in the country, through its nationwide network of surveillance cameras. China has imprisoned more than a million Uighurs in reëducation camps, in Xinjiang, and has subjected them to a surge in arrests, trials, and prison sentences. In August, I asked a ByteDance spokesperson about the fear that the massive trove of facial closeups accumulated on its various products could be misused. Even if people trusted ByteDance not to do anything sinister, I said, what if a third party got hold of the company’s data? The spokesperson told me that the data of American users was stored in-country—TikTok’s data is now kept in the U.S. and Singapore, the rep said—and noted, nonchalantly, that people made their faces available to other platforms, too. Of course, U.S. tech companies often don’t seem answerable enough to the government—or, rather, to the public. The American system has its own weaknesses.

Dinesh Raman, an A.I.-alignment researcher in Tokyo, who has studied ByteDance as a consultant for some of its investors, spoke with a mixture of alarm and admiration about the company’s A.I. capabilities. “The system is doing billions of calculations per second,” he said. “It’s data being transmitted at a scale I’ve never seen before.” Raman insisted that TikTok had kept its platform tightly policed in part through its algorithm, which, he said, is able to identify videos with dangerous content. (TikTok’s moderators are trained to apply different standards to every market, the company told me.) He pointed me to the “Gaga Dance” challenge, a meme on Indonesian TikTok that asked users to mirror the poses of cheerful yellow stick figures that floated across the screen. The A.I., he suggested, was training itself in pose estimation, a deep-learning capability with major surveillance implications. OpenPose, a program developed at Carnegie Mellon, has been used by a Japanese telecom company to alert shopkeepers to customers whose movements supposedly signal that they are likely to steal something.

The Chinese government is more interested in surveilling and controlling its own citizens than it is in monitoring foreign nationals; one of the reasons that ByteDance launched TikTok as a separate entity from Douyin was to establish a firewall between the Chinese state and users outside China. But state interference can cross borders. In August, Facebook and Twitter revealed that they’d found evidence of a Chinese-government campaign to spread disinformation about the protests in Hong Kong, which began in June by calling for the withdrawal of an extradition bill and have since widened in scope, demanding democratic reforms.

If you pull up the hashtag #HongKong on TikTok, you’ll find plenty of videos, but few, if any, about the protests. The hashtag #protest elicits demonstrations from around the globe—London, Melbourne, South Africa, and, especially, India—but almost none from Hong Kong. (On Instagram, both #HongKong and #protest call up plenty of such images.) Meanwhile, a search for one of the primary Chinese-language hashtags that Hong Kong protesters have used on other platforms yields a small handful of videos, with a total of a hundred and ten thousand views. (As the Washington Post noted, in a piece investigating the relative absence of the Hong Kong protests on TikTok , videos hashtagged #snails have more than six and a half million views.) It’s true that the Hong Kong user base is not large, relatively speaking—TikTok told me that the app had fewer than a hundred and fifty thousand daily active users there—though that is the case for Twitter, too, and videos from the protests have gone viral on that platform. TikTok is generally thought of as a place for goofing off rather than for engaging in political discourse, and a TikTok executive dismissed the idea that the company was manually or algorithmically suppressing Hong Kong-related content. But one of the risks of giving our attention to entertainment governed by privately controlled algorithms is that those who own the algorithms will always be able to say that they are merely delivering what we want to see.

A platform designed for viral communication will never naturally be politics-free. In August, a new sort of video started appearing on Douyin. Uighurs in China were using the app’s editing suite to place themselves against a backdrop of loved ones who have disappeared, as sad string music plays. In one, a tearful young woman wearing a yellow shirt holds up four fingers, one for each person in the photo behind her. It may be a double signal: “four” and “death” are pronounced similarly in Mandarin. Douyin has deleted many of these videos, although, like everything that goes viral on TikTok, they have found an audience on Instagram and Twitter.

TikTok is not the first social-media app to begin its life with an air of freewheeling fun. The darker and more complicated parts of life never stay away forever. A college student from Philadelphia recently went viral with a multipart video account of her relationship with the rapper and onetime Vine star Riff Raff, which began when she was seventeen. A Miami student was arrested after his videos were interpreted as threats to shoot up schools. TikTok may figure out how to maintain or enforce a jovial vibe more effectively than its predecessors have—but, even if it does, the kids who made it popular may get bored and move on to the next thing.

Whatever comes along will likely owe something to TikTok. Facebook has already released a TikTok clone, called Lasso, which flopped, and the app researcher Jane Manchun Wong recently discovered that Instagram has been testing TikTok-like features. A.I.-powered algorithms are becoming central to the ways that we process our everyday existence. Someday, other companies could use ByteDance’s A.I. systems the way they now use Google’s cloud-computing services: like a utility—gas or electricity for the new A.I.-driven world.

“People say TikTok will run out of money, that it’s going to end up like Vine,” Bern, the marketer, said. “But TikTok has one of the biggest companies in China behind them. ByteDance is way ahead of everyone else already, in terms of the way they use A.I. They know everything about a person. They can give that person everything they want.”

In August, I took the train from Atlantic Terminal, in Brooklyn, to Patchogue, on the South Shore of Long Island, where the eighteen-city Boys of Summer teen-influencer tour was stopping for the day. It was sultry and cloudless, and as I walked up to the designated venue on Ocean Avenue I saw a pack of girls, who looked to be thirteen or fourteen, in jean shorts and braces and tube tops, and a few floppy-haired boys who looked slightly older—TikTok-famous heartthrobs named Sam and Josh and Payton, who were hugging their fans, taking selfies, accepting scrunchies as offerings and stacking them on their arms. “I love you,” the girls yelled. “I love you, too,” the guys said back. Video-making had been incorporated into this ritual in a startlingly seamless way: before one girl could finish asking a TikToker to make a video saying hi to her friend Adrianne, the TikToker was halfway through a video saying hi to her friend Adrianne.

Inside the venue, parents were drinking Michelob Ultra and staring into the middle distance. Kids were making TikToks everywhere, phones propped up on bar railings; they were moving on and off the Internet, dead serious about getting their content. In the meet-and-greet line, I talked to a blond fourteen-year-old in a white bucket hat named Dylan Hartman, who has more than half a million followers, and whose videos often feature him shirtless, brushing his hair back, lip-synching to rap. “That’s the one they all want to marry,” a mom who was chaperoning her daughter and a friend whispered to me. Another TikToker, Grasyn Hull, was wearing a “Virginity Rocks” shirt that a fan had given him. “I make memes and stuff, and I just blew up,” Hull said.

The crowd was almost entirely female, and about three-quarters of the TikTokers were male; occasionally, a sharp hormonal whiff of agony and longing would enter the air. Nearly everyone was white, and nearly everyone was mouthing along to hip-hop and doing viral dances, making sinuous, jerky movements. This is the way people learn to move, perhaps, when the ruling idea is that your physical presence should pop when viewed on a smartphone. I watched Zoe Laverne, a blond social-media star, make content on outstretched phones as reflexively and smoothly as a President shakes hands along a receiving line.

Then the lights went down and the children started screaming. The m.c. asked us to raise our left hands and promise, in unison, to have a “lit time.” Later, in line at the merch table, I talked to a thirteen-year-old girl named Beau, from New Jersey, who told me that a good TikToker was someone who “did things that made you want to watch them.” She’d been on short-form-video platforms since the third grade, when she downloaded Musical.ly. Many of the kids I talked to said that TikTok made them feel connected to other people their age. The memes surfaced glancing sensations that might otherwise be forgotten, or stay private: what it was like to sit in the back seat while your mom drove around listening to Calvin Harris; what it was like to be little, and sleepless, standing nervously outside your parents’ bedroom door at 3 A . M .

I had stopped impulsively checking TikTok after a month—I already have enough digital tools to insure that I never need to sit alone with the simple fact of being alive. But I could understand being thirteen and feeling like the world would be better if as many people as possible could be seen by as many people as possible all the time. I could imagine experiencing a social platform as a vast, warm ocean of affection and excitement, even if that ocean needed money that it could generate only by persuading you not to leave. I wondered how many baby siblings of these TikTok fanatics were at home, sitting in front of iPads, adrift in an endless stream of YouTube videos. Perhaps the time had come to let the algorithm treat the rest of us like babies, too. Maybe it knows more about what we like than we do. Maybe it knows that if it can capture our attention for long enough it won’t have to ask us what we like anymore. It will have already decided. ♦

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By Tad Friend

By Amanda Petrusich

By Margaret Talbot

How TikTok has become world's top application using AI

TikTok recommendation engine utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to elevate content to app users, and enables makers to create recordings with Augmented and Virtual Reality visual effects, immersive content, music infusion, filters and technology improvements.

M Umer Mirza

Machine Learning and Data Science Expert

More posts by M Umer Mirza.

TikTok recommendation engine utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to elevate content to app users around the world, and enables makers to create recordings with Augmented and Virtual Reality visual effects, immersive content, music infusion, filters and other technology enhancements. If you are looking for extreme entertainment, but you don't like to spend hours on your smartphone, TikTok is the answer. If you like short dance videos, lip-syncs, comedy, parody, or other talent videos, TikTok offers a one-stop solution. There may not be any online user who does not know about Tiktok.

Tiktok is built in 2016 by ByteDance , a Chinese internet technology company. After a successful merger with Musical.ly, Tiktok was finally launched for the United States on August 2, 2018. TikTok has become the most downloaded app in 2018 and 2019.

What Made TikTok the Highest downloaded mobile App?

Some people count the number of downloads to rank the most rated app. For this, TikTok yet stays the giant with more than 2 billion app downloads globally. Tiktok stands at 4 th position with 800 million active users. Facebook, Messenger, and Whatsapp hold the top position in social media app ranking.

Of course, the content published in TikTok is fantastic and addictive. But we cannot disregard the algorithm behind this app that keeps the user flooded with the videos of interest. This article is solely confined to the backend artificial intelligence programs that made TikTok user-friendly and more interactive. This discussion includes critical features and their respective AI programs for TikTok.

How is TikTok Different from other Apps? The Recommendation Engine!

Recommendation engines are data filtering tools that work on the interest of a particular user. For this purpose, they use algorithms and searched data and then mention it as a recommendation in the sidebar of a particular platform. You can compare them with a ‘’shopkeeper guy.’’ When you ask him for a specific item, he also shows you some other products. At the same time, these products are based on the interest you have shown previously. With the rising number of data finders on search engines, the amount of data providers also raised. Moreover, particular platforms also use recommendation engines to keep the user on their site for a long time.

There must be a reliable data basis that collects and stores information and show it in real-time. It will then favor a variety of abstract layers like algorithm, serving, and application layers to appear on the front. Ultimately, it resolves many business person’s issues.

Typically, there are two standpoints for TikTok; the one represents the creator side while the other covers the consumer's side.

1-  Content Creator

TikTok supports content producers with AI to create viral content. Its robust AI system suggests the producers about keywords, hashtags, video editing, and attractive music selection.  

2-  Consumer Side

TikTok’s efficient algorithm notices the likes and comments of the users. It also focuses on their retention time on a particular video and then offers them the video of their interest.  

What will Appear First in a New TikTok User’s Feed?  

TikTok lowers inconvenience by not forcing the audience to sign-up first. It gets information about your taste by the first video you watch and the time you spent on it. The original content that appears in your TikTok feed is based on the data you provide during signing-up on the app. TikTok’s archetype traces your location, age, and gender to show you the content that matches the above-provided information. After it, TikTok will show you data related to your first search on the engine.

The primary purpose of every app is to engage the audience for a longer time by reducing the exit rate. TikTok efficiently shows you the most loved video by the audience in your location. After getting enough information about your interest, it will trace your metrics and offer a final score.

If you click on a celebrity video, it will add it to your favorites. Then next time when you come on the app, you’ll see related videos on top as a recommendation. Further, it analyses your curiosity to favor you with precise recommendations.  

There are several theories related to TikTok’s algorithms. The user experience and expert analysis make their basis.

Batch Theory

When a user uploads a video, it undergoes through different batch pools to distinguish its content from others. In this scenario, the algorithm traces its watching history, personal preferences, location. Your content becomes famous if it gets more likes, sharing, and comments than usual. So, the algorithm assigns a score to your content based on the points mentioned above.

Finally, if the algorithm finds your content impressive, then it exposes your unique content to a big audience. According to this theory, it will take a week or more to become a celebrity. It also includes that engage more audience in trending topics to get more promotions.

Delay Momentum

This theory suggests the data uploaders not to delete their content; it doesn't matter how rough it is. Some users also share their experience that some pieces of their content were not so appealing. They started using the app less than before, and they eventually saw a rise in their audience. In this way, TikTok cares about its users and feel them they are essential to its community. The TikTokers get passion and start producing new content to retain the audience.

Authority Ranking

This theory suggests that the success of your account to be viral is only depends on your introductory videos. If you succeed in gaining some likes and views, then TikTok’s AI considers you a perfect match. Now the algorithm provided you the audience, and you, in return, have to sustain it with fantastic content.

Three primary pillars help TikTok archetypes are:

• Tagging the content
• Producing user-profiles and user scenarios and
• Training and helping recommendation algorithms.

Here is a detailed conversation about them.

Data and Features

Firstly., we consider what data is? Recommendation model comes with the user's fulfillment by providing the User Generated Content. For this information, input data comes from three-dimension.

Content Data TikTok is widely in use over the world; thus, it also has a variety of information. Every type of content has a unique taste and should be in different categories. So, the system should be strong enough to show specific data in a specific recommendation.

User Data This data includes the user's personal information like age, gender, career, and demographics. It also adds some hidden features form ML-based customer clustering.

Scenario Data As its name shows, it tracks user's preference shifts and uses scenarios on variable scenarios. For instance, what kind of video a user loves to watch while traveling, working, jogging, and many more.

Once the data collection is done successfully, then the four critically planned features are introduced into the recommendation engine.

Correlation Features

They correlate the content characteristics with user tags, containing keywords, theme tag, source matching, and arrangement tag. Moreover, they also represent latent features like vector separation between content and the user.

User-Scenario Features These tags monitor scenario data like physical location time, and date of content uploaded with event tags.

Trend Features They represent a worldwide trend that becomes a hot topic in a specific time. However, they also denote top keywords, trending themes, and user interaction with them.

Collaborative Features These features work based on a collaborating filtering strategy. It equilibrates the bias recommendation (narrow) and generalized recommendation (collaborative). Furthermore, this feature not only records data of an individual but also a group of related people with the same interests. It also traces their interests, impression click-through rate, themes, and keywords. In this way, the above-discussed features decide what to show in a particular scenario to a particular user.

TikTok Recommendation System

After video uploading, the robust algorithm uses a highly-efficient NLP and computer vision system for video analysis. Just like humans, it read every part of your video, including audio, video images, captions, and hashtags. Then it assigns it a specific category according to the content and context of the material.

The working strategy of TikTok will shock you. It exposes every new coming data to a small audience and evaluates your hard work based on the viewer's interest. After all, it will decide a score for your video as:

Moreover, its robust AI system also distinguishes between looping and non-looping videos. Looping content doesn't help to make you viral. If your video catches the high score, it means your video is in the right list of TikTok’s algorithm. It will share your video with the right audience having the same head and heart.  

Your video doesn’t go viral if it's unable to get the rank, as mentioned above. But still don’t lose heart, Delay Momentum Theory works here. Now you are well familiar with how TikTok retains the audience for more significant periods.  

Intangible Goals

In the recommendation model, all objectives, including clicks, likes, dislikes, comments, re-posts, and reading time, are assess-able. The algorithms use this information rightly and then show it as a prediction precisely. But there are some other imperceptible objectives; for them, the recommendation engine can’t provide quantifiable information.

For the maintenance of a healthy and user-friendly environment, TikTok is going to overpower all violent content. The platform is deciding to remove all content related to pornography, scamming, pomposity, and even political news. Therefore, there is a dare need of a compatible model that can deal with this severe issue efficiently. Content Audit System supports to achieve this kind of perfection.

TikTok’s Algorithms

A classic machine learning is in use to formulate the recommendation objectives to solve the incoming problems. So, algorithms as collaborative, Logistic Regression model, filtering model, GBD, factorization Machine, and deep learning are serving to solve them.

However, the recommendation system for industrial-grade needs a flexible and expandable ML platform. It helps to train a variety of models to construct experimental channels quickly. Finally, stack them all over one another to get their extraordinary performance in no-time. Consider the connection between LR and DNN, SVM, with CNN as an example.

The content classification algorithm and TikTok user’s profile algorithm still need improvement.

Training Mechanism

TikTok prefers online training process in real-time that comes with less computational demands and quick feedback. Thus, these mechanisms help steam and flow product information.

They capture the behavior and actions of the users, then send it to the next model to reflect the information on the next feed. You can relate it now when you click on a particular video; the training system updates your recommendation feed instantly. So, be aware, all of your actions are under consideration of powerful AI installed in TikTok.

Most probably, Strom Cluster is favoring the TiikTok by real-time data collection. It provides instant details about clicks, likes, posts, comments, and sharing data. Their highly efficient system also contains model parameters and extraordinary features servers. You can call them a feature store and model store. The Feature Store has the power to store and serve ten million unique features and planned vectors. While the Model Store helps to preserve provision models with adjusted parameters.

We can summarize the overall process in five steps:

• The online server involves real-time data capturing and then feeding it into the Kafka.
• Storm cluster uses the data coming from Kafka and product features.
• For the construction of new training sets, the feature store gathers updated features and recommendation labels.
• Online training pipelines are responsible for the retention of model parameters. Thus, they also stock them in the model store.
• Last but not least, they update the recommendation list on the client-side and then record new feedback. The primary focus is on the user's activities, and then they circulate the entire information again.

How does TikTok's Recommendation Engine work with a Consistent Flow?

No platform happily reveals its core algorithm to the tech society or share it publicly. Here is simplified version of TikTok engine workflow:

Greeks use reverse engineering techniques to provide information from hidden treasure. Therefore, we gathered the segmented information about TikTok’s algorithm coming from different organizations and strategies. Here are some major conclusion points:

The Initial Move: Duo-Audit Strategy for Screening UGC (User Generated Content)

Every day, millions of users are busy uploading a variety of content on TikTok. The machine review system can efficiently detect dodges produced due to malicious content. At the same time, the manual review has not worth it in this scenario. Hence, TikTok uses a duo-review system for broadcasting audiovisual-data as its primary algorithm.

For a better understanding of manual and machine reviews, you can focus on some key features.

Machine Review Frankly sharing, the Duo-Audit System of TikTok works based on the computer-vision theme. Its highly-developed to read not only your keywords but also images and video content. Machine review focuses on two major tasks:

• It scans the content to identify if there are any cracks or pauses in video clips. Furthermore, it also verifies the written content to be copy-right free and original. If the machine find violation or suspected activity, it instantly marks the content as yellow or red for public review.
• Secondly, it extracts images and critical components from the video; then, the Duo-audit algorithm scans it thoroughly. It compares the concerning data with previously stored one to recognize its originality. But the system points out the duplicated content in real-time and stops traffic towards that plagiarized content. The recommendation engine also avoids showing this type of data in the user's feed.

Manual Review It covers three areas:

• Video Title
• Cover Thumbnail
• Video Keyframes

The Duo-audit system declared suspicious content moves towards technicians to review it again. If they found the same, then they have the right to delete the video and also hang the user's account.

First Move:  Cold Start

You can judge that the whole information moves in an Information Flow Funnel in the recommendation engine. All right, when the content successfully passed the duo-audit review, then ultimately, it goes towards cold start traffic pool. For instance, if your first video stands by the first step, then as a reward, TikTok exposes your video to over 200-300 related viewers. Now it depends on your video quality and standard that if people like, share, or comment on it. It’s a great chance to gain exposure up to thousands of audiences.

A new content creator and a social influencer compete at this step as both have similar starting ideas. But the difference is in their followers (influencer with thousands of followers).

Second Move: Metric Based Weighing

As we are going further, the algorithm system is becoming more interesting than the previous step. What's next? Let's discuss this.

If the video successfully passes the traffic pool test and gets a significant number of views, then it’s a perfect match. Now the information goes for data collection and analyses. The metrics analysis includes likes, comments, repots, shares, and video retention time.

These initial metrics help the recommendation engine to give weightage to the content. It decides your overall account score based on high-quality content production. If the engine loves your content, it offers you an extra 10,000 to 100,000 traffic. It posts the unique content in the top 10% of the feed.

Third Move: User Profile Amplifier

The information coming from the second step of the traffic pool undergoes further testing to make the final decision. In this step, the algorithm decides about user profile amplification based on the performance of the content. Then it transfers the content in a specific group related to its audience. It might be concerned with sports, dance, or fashion lovers.

Its healthy system works on the principle of supposing what you demand with high proficiency. The recommendation engine builds the right connection between the user group and the content. So that it will serve you with the best service, it can provide you.

Fourth Move: Boutique Trending Pool

Precisely, less than one percent of the content goes to Trending Pool. The magnitude of the content exposure in this category is far more than others. The trending content appears in every user's feed without any specification or differentiation. For example, your interests don’t matter when it comes to the information related to ‘’Black lives matter.’’  

Extra Move: Time Lapse Ignition

Another fascinating fact about the TikTok algorithm is that your video may take some time to rank high in searches. TikTok users can notice an eventual rise in the view count of their specific video. Consequently, a single video becomes the cause of ignition that starts your rising zone. If we go in detail, there could be two factors responsible for this drastic change as:

Is your old video dead on TikTok?

First, there is a famous TikTok algorithm with a nickname Gravedigger. It works to find the best old content. For this purpose, it scrapes data about a specific topic and comes out with the most appropriate and high-quality content. If you are experiencing significant traffic to your channel or account suddenly, it means Gravedigger selected your content. The algorithm mostly prefers vertical videos to drive traffic to your account.  

How your video becomes trending in TikTok?

Secondly, Trendy Effects. If one of your videos approaches one million views, then through trendy effects, it will drive traffic to your main page. Thus, your one ranked video favors the ranking of other content, and ultimately your account earned more traffic than before. The vertical creators share their funny cat videos that most cat lovers alike. And after watching your ranked video, they'll land to your main page, from where they will watch the remaining content of your naughty cat.

Sadly, the Traffic Exposure is Not a Long-term Achievement

If we summarize the above conversation, we said that the flow funnel attracts unique information. It passes the tests of duo-audit, weighing repetition, and amplifiers. Then ultimately reward creators account with high traffic, user interaction, fans, and high exposure.

But this traffic doesn’t last for more than a week on your account as people's interest changed. They start searching the same content with other keyword terms. Thus, the hot traffic coming to your account reduces slowly, and subsequently, it comes to normal.

Is TikTok hard for new upcoming talent?

Quite the opposite!!! The primary factor is that TikTok wants to raise new upcoming talent to lessen the unintentional biases. That's why the algorithm updates and welcome new content creators to get exposure. It never relays on the same content; thus, everyone gets equal chances to appear in a trendy pool.  

There is another factor that you must consider. If your content is not getting much views or interactions, then TikTok observes your activity and behavior. So, if it feels that the user stops producing further content, it will lift him by lifting his content. The user again starts producing content after watching success.

This cycle is the secret behind why people spent too much time on the platform without getting tired. It keeps your values high and boosts you to create more content for more fun.

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A message promoted in a new Olivia Dunne video has prompted a stern response from her college institution.

Not long after LSU’s superstar gymnast posted a TikTok clip this week in paid partnership with Caktus AI, an artificial intelligence tool with a focus in education, the university issued a statement cautioning the usage of such platforms without calling out specific programs, per reports.

“At LSU, our professors and students are empowered to use technology for learning and pursuing the highest standards of academic integrity,” the statement read, according to The Advocate .

@livvy @caktus.ai will provide real resources for you to cite at the end of your essays and paragraphs;) #caktus #foryou ♬ original sound – Coach

“However, using AI to produce work that a student then represents as one’s own could result in a charge of academic misconduct, as outlined in the Code of Student Conduct.”

The video features Dunne  — who boasts more than seven million followers on TikTok — using Caktus AI while typing on her laptop before giving the camera a thumbs up.

“Need to get my creativity flowing for my essay due at midnight,” Dunne wrote over the clip, adding, “Caktus.AI >ChatGPT,” in reference to a different AI tool.

Caktus AI describes itself as “the first ever educational artificial intelligence tool,” per its website.

Regarded as one of the most influential college athletes , Dunne has a massive social media following that also expands to Instagram with 3.7 million fans.

The 20-year-old gymnast, who returned to the sport last week after being sidelined with injuries, led the top 10 female NIL moneymakers ranking by On3 Sports in October, based on the company’s proprietary NIL valuation metric that measured athletes by performance, influence and exposure.

Dunne is valued at $2.3 million, per On3 Sports.

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Estelle Erasmus

How to Resist the Temptation of AI When Writing

Whether you're a student, a journalist, or a business professional, knowing how to do high-quality research and writing using trustworthy data and sources, without giving in to the temptation of AI or ChatGPT , is a skill worth developing.

As I detail in my book Writing That Gets Noticed , locating credible databases and sources and accurately vetting information can be the difference between turning a story around quickly or getting stuck with outdated information.

For example, several years ago the editor of Parents.com asked for a hot-take reaction to country singer Carrie Underwood saying that, because she was 35, she had missed her chance at having another baby. Since I had written about getting pregnant in my forties, I knew that as long as I updated my facts and figures, and included supportive and relevant peer-reviewed research, I could pull off this story. And I did.

The story ran later that day , and it led to other assignments. Here are some tips I’ve learned that you should consider mastering before you turn to automated tools like generative AI to handle your writing work for you.

Identify experts, peer-reviewed research study authors, and sources who can speak with authority—and ideally, offer easily understood sound bites or statistics on the topic of your work. Great sources include professors at major universities and media spokespeople at associations and organizations.

For example, writer and author William Dameron pinned his recent essay in HuffPost Personal around a statistic from the American Heart Association on how LGBTQ people experience higher rates of heart disease based on discrimination. Although he first found the link in a secondary source (an article in The New York Times ), he made sure that he checked the primary source: the original study that the American Heart Association gleaned the statistic from. He verified the information, as should any writer, because anytime a statistic is cited in a secondary source, errors can be introduced.

Jen Malia, author of  The Infinity Rainbow Club  series of children’s books (whom I recently interviewed on my podcast ), recently wrote a piece about dinosaur-bone hunting for Business Insider , which she covers in her book Violet and the Jurassic Land Exhibit.

After a visit to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Malia, whose books are set in Philadelphia, found multiple resources online and on the museum site that gave her the history of the Bone Wars , information on the exhibits she saw, and the scientific names of the dinosaurs she was inspired by. She also used the Library of Congress’ website, which offers digital collections and links to the Library of Congress Newspaper Collection.

Malia is a fan of searching for additional resources and citable documents with Google Scholar . “If I find that a secondary source mentions a newspaper article, I’m going to go to the original newspaper article, instead of just stopping there and quoting,” she says.

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Aarian Marshall

Eric Ravenscraft

Your local public library is a great source of free information, journals, and databases (even ones that generally require a subscription and include embargoed research). For example, your search should include everything from health databases ( Sage Journals , Scopus , PubMed) to databases for academic sources and journalism ( American Periodical Series Online , Statista , Academic Search Premier ) and databases for news, trends, market research, and polls (t he Harris Poll , Pew Research Center , Newsbank , ProPublica ).

Even if you find a study or paper that you can’t access in one of those databases, consider reaching out to the study’s lead author or researcher. In many cases, they’re happy to discuss their work and may even share the study with you directly and offer to talk about their research.

For journalist Paulette Perhach’s article on ADHD in The New York Times, she used Epic Research to see “dual team studies.” That's when two independent teams address the same topic or question, and ideally come to the same conclusions. She recommends locating research and experts via key associations for your topic. She also likes searching via Google Scholar but advises filtering it for studies and research in recent years to avoid using old data. She suggests keeping your links and research organized. “Always be ready to be peer-reviewed yourself,” Perhach says.

When you are looking for information for a story or project, you might be inclined to start with a regular Google search. But keep in mind that the internet is full of false information, and websites that look trustworthy can sometimes turn out to be businesses or companies with a vested interest in you taking their word as objective fact without additional scrutiny. Regardless of your writing project, unreliable or biased sources are a great way to torpedo your work—and any hope of future work.

Author Bobbi Rebell researched her book Launching Financial Grownups using the IRS’ website . “I might say that you can contribute a certain amount to a 401K, but it might be outdated because those numbers are always changing, and it’s important to be accurate,” she says. “AI and ChatGPT can be great for idea generation,” says Rebell, “but you have to be careful. If you are using an article someone was quoted in, you don’t know if they were misquoted or quoted out of context.”

If you use AI and ChatGPT for sourcing, you not only risk introducing errors, you risk introducing plagiarism—there is a reason OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is being sued for downloading information from all those books.

Audrey Clare Farley, who writes historical nonfiction, has used a plethora of sites for historical research, including Women Also Know History , which allows searches by expertise or area of study, and JSTOR , a digital library database that offers a number of free downloads a month. She also uses Chronicling America , a project from the Library of Congress which gathers old newspapers to show how a historical event was reported, and Newspapers.com (which you can access via free trial but requires a subscription after seven days).

When it comes to finding experts, Farley cautions against choosing the loudest voices on social media platforms. “They might not necessarily be the most authoritative. I vet them by checking if they have a history of publication on the topic, and/or educational credentials.”

When vetting an expert, look for these red flags:

• You can’t find their work published or cited anywhere.
• They were published in an obscure journal.
• Their research is funded by a company, not a university, or they are the spokesperson for the company they are doing research for. (This makes them a public relations vehicle and not an appropriate source for journalism.)

And finally, the best endings for virtually any writing, whether it’s an essay, a research paper, an academic report, or a piece of investigative journalism, circle back to the beginning of the piece, and show your reader the transformation or the journey the piece has presented in perspective.

As always, your goal should be strong writing supported by research that makes an impact without cutting corners. Only then can you explore tools that might make the job a little easier, for instance by generating subheads or discovering a concept you might be missing—because then you'll have the experience and skills to see whether it's harming or helping your work.

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AI for Good blog

Tiktok and ai for good: the next generation.

• 3 June 2022

By Alexandra Bustos Iliescu

TikTok may have rose to popularity as a dance and music social app, but, with nearly 1 billion monthly active users within six years since its launch, TikTok is now a key social channel to reach young audiences and inspire the next generation of AI for Good innovators, builders, and content creators.

That’s why AI for Good has launched our newest community channel, @itu_aiforgood on TikTok

It’s undeniable that the rapid success of this platform was accelerated by the younger generation, with 65% searching for sources of entertainment on their devices [Source: Forbes ]. But it now disrupting the current social media landscape offering new and fun ways to build social connections by sharing inspiring content.

Watch some of our latest videos here :

@itu_aiforgood Youth and #Ai! #tiktok #original #new #fyp #foryoupage #foryou #aiforgood ♬ original sound – AI for Good

At AI for Good, we already know the many ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) is improving our lives, elevating our sciences and industries, and empowering society to achieve a better future. Technological advancements have progressed in lockstep with younger generations, also termed digital natives, who have a natural affinity for technology. As a result, it’s critical to discover ways to reach younger generations, the shapers of tomorrow, and teach them about AI in short, simple, innovative, and creative ways. By capturing solutions in 60-second videos (or less!), we seek to pique interest and shed light on artificial intelligence. Our goal is for users who stumble across the AI for Good TikTok video to ponder on artificial intelligence, how it is now changing their lives, and its future potential.

Don’t worry if you are not a technical expert. You don’t have to be an Engineering PhD to appreciate the advancements in robotics for good, AI for health treatments or the incredible power of AI artists to create wonderful and thoughtful pieces of artwork.

We know that ‘technical’ vocabulary in AI could deter young people from learning about AI due to the apparent complexity of the topic. As a result, our TikTok channel debuted with the goal of creating content for anybody, interest in artificial intelligence through dynamic, instructive, and engaging videos. We want to expand our worldwide reach to emphasize how AI is being used to unearth practical applications for UN SDGs with global impact

Follow @itu_aiforgood on TikTok for key statistics, United Nations stories and case studies, robotics videos, the current and future of artificial intelligence, and creative challenges inviting TikTok users to duet and stitch our video and participate to our challenge to “learn, build, and connect.”

TikTok’s snowball effect has managed to reach and capture the attention of people of all ages, particularly youth, and has challenged the ways we interact and exchange information. At AI for Good, we’ve made the jump onto the social media’s bandwagon! WE invite young generations and those young at heart, to share videos with us, ask questions about AI and learn how we can shape our AI future together!

Join us on TikTok at @itu_aiforgood

Civic participation in AI and digital health governance: The role of young people in Kenya and beyond

How Voiceitt is revolutionizing accessibility through AI

Innovate for impact: Submit your use cases and apply to be an AI for Good scholar

• Innovation & Creativity
• Robotics for Good

• AI for Good Global Summit

For important information regarding the classification, please go to the Division’s  website and review the last two questions in the Q&A page. Please be advised that the utilization of this list by AI for Good is exclusively for the purpose of ticketing for the 2024 AI for Good Global Summit, unless otherwise specified

Please fill in the form below

Application Deadline: 1 November 2024

Organization*

Organization country* --- Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Cabo Verde Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Congo Costa Rica Cote d'Ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Oman Pakistan Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Qatar Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syrian Arab Republic Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kindom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Viet Nam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe

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Application Deadline: 1 June 2024

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Company Country* --- Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Cabo Verde Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Congo Costa Rica Cote d'Ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Oman Pakistan Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Qatar Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syrian Arab Republic Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kindom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Viet Nam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe

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Solution/Product description (one-liner)*

What is your solution and what is the value proposition (uniqueness) of the solution/product?*

Describe clearly the use/role of Artificial Intelligence in your idea?*

Which UN Sustainable Development Goal(s) does your idea aim to achieve?*

Select the UN Sustainable Development Goal(s) relevant to your project/speaking proposal* GOAL 1: No Poverty GOAL 2: Zero Hunger GOAL 3: Good Health and Well-being GOAL 4: Quality Education GOAL 5: Gender Equality GOAL 6: Clean Water and Sanitation GOAL 7: Affordable and Clean Energy GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure GOAL 10: Reduced Inequality GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production GOAL 13: Climate Action GOAL 14: Life Below Water GOAL 15: Life on Land GOAL 16: Peace and Justice Strong Institutions GOAL 17: Partnerships to achieve the Goal

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7 Best AI Tools for TikTok Video Content Creation

Scale your video content 350% faster, with a fraction of the cost.

Shoot once, Edit with AI, then Publish the next minute.

TikTok’s explosive growth has spurred an entire ecosystem of third-party tools. 

While native TikTok AI features are useful, they might not be enough to help you dominate this saturated platform. Enter AI tools tailored for TikTok—these powerful allies can be game-changers for your content strategy. 

Best AI tools for TikTok

Here’s a curated list of the best AI tools for TikTok, designed to help you create video content faster:

• Canva 

1) Vizard.ai: Repurposing videos with AI magic

Vizard.ai specializes in repurposing your existing videos into fresh content that resonates with the TikTok audience. 

Leveraging AI algorithms, Vizard.ai can identify the key segments of your videos and reshape them to fit the TikTok format, all while maintaining the essence of your message.

Key features:

• AI-driven video segmentation ( AI clipping)
• AI smart cut and autofocus
• Easy video editing by altering transcripts
• AI subtitling and translation
• Format transformation
• Automatic video summarization
• AI Social caption generator

How to use it:

• Head over to Vizard.ai to sign up
• Upload your existing video content
• Vizard automatically transcribes your video
• Click AI clipping to start the smart cutting process
• The tool then generates fully formatted shorts for TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram Reels and Stories
• Review and fine-tune the AI-generated TikTok video
• Download, share, or publish directly to your TikTok account from Vizard dashboard

With Vizard.ai, you can easily breathe new life into older video content, making it an excellent choice for content creators who want to maximize their output with minimal effort.

2) Pictory: Turning articles into TikTok Shorts

Pictory offers a powerful platform for transforming articles or scripts into visually engaging TikTok Shorts. Its AI-powered summarization and customization options make it a compelling choice.

• Script-to-video conversion
• Article-to-video conversion
• AI-powered summarization
• Go to Pictory’s website.
• Input your script or article.
• Customize the autogenerated video as needed.
• Leverage the AI-powered summarization for concise content.

3) FlexClip: The all-in-one TikTok suite

FlexClip comes with a multitude of editing tools specifically designed to generate TikTok videos. 

Its AI capabilities are what truly set it apart, offering automated script generation and text-to-video conversions.

• AI script generator
• AI text-to-video tool
• AI text-to-speech for voiceovers
• Navigate to FlexClip’s website .
• Use the AI script generator to come up with video topics and content.
• Use the AI text-to-video tool to generate a video based on the script.
• Utilize the text-to-speech feature for a voiceover if needed.

4) Nova AI: Translation and subtitles made easy

Nova AI aims to fast-track your TikTok video creation process with three AI-powered features.

• Auto-subtitle
• Text-to-speech (TTS)
• Visit Nova AI
• Upload your video. (You can also upload from TikTok and YouTube)
• Use the auto-subtitle feature to add captions.
• Use the translate feature for global reach.
• Use the TTS feature for an audio overlay
• Edit your video with functionalities such as cropping, trimming, merging, TikTok cutter, auto-clipping, etc.

5) InVideo: Effortless TikTok video editing

InVideo’s AI-powered TikTok video editor brings a new layer of sophistication to your videos. 

It enables you to script, edit, and add a variety of creative elements seamlessly.

• AI TikTok video editor
• Wide selection of transitions, effects, filters, and fonts
• Scripting assistance
• Visit the InVideo website.
• Choose a template or start from scratch.
• Import or create a TikTok video.
• Leverage the AI editor and creative elements to make your video stand out.

6) Canva: The design giant with AI capabilities

Canva might be your go-to for social media graphics, but did you know it also has AI tools? 

Although not tailored for TikTok, these AI features can significantly improve your workflow.

• Magic Eraser
• Magic Write
• Magic video background remover

Now, with the introduction of Canva Magic Studio, you can start your creation from a simple prompt. 

The Magic Design feature lets you input any media to transform it into customized creatives that match your content and context. Your creative is built from Canva’s library of images, fonts, and design elements.

When it comes to video content, Canva Magic Design makes it super easy to quickly edit your videos by instantly combining clips and even images to create Short videos that you can use for TikTok or YouTube Shorts.

7) CapCut: Basic video editing with AI-driven features

While CapCut offers basic video editing features, its AI-driven elements like filters, effects, and a massive music library make it stand out as a TikTok tool.

• Cut, reverse, change speed
• Advanced filters and effects
• Massive music library
• Download the CapCut app
• Import your TikTok video
• Use the AI-enhanced features to fine-tune your video

Does TikTok use AI?

Yes, TikTok uses AI in a number of ways, including:

a) Recommendation algorithm : TikTok’s “For You” page is powered by a complex AI algorithm that learns about each user’s interests and preferences over time. 

The algorithm takes into account a variety of factors, including the videos users watch, the accounts they follow, and the videos they like and comment on. 

This allows TikTok to recommend videos that are likely to appeal to each user individually.

b) Content creation tools: TikTok offers a variety of AI-powered content creation tools, such as filters, effects, and transitions. 

These tools make it easy for users to create engaging and visually appealing videos without any prior editing experience.

c) Moderation : TikTok also relies on AI to moderate content on the platform and identify and remove videos that violate its Community Guidelines. 

This includes videos that promote hate speech, violence, or misinformation.

d) Accessibility: TikTok uses AI to make its platform more accessible to users with disabilities. For example, TikTok offers AI-powered captions and audio descriptions for videos.

In addition to these specific examples, TikTok is also using AI to develop new features and improve the overall user experience. 

For example, TikTok is developing AI-powered features that can automatically generate captions for videos and translate videos into different languages.

Using AI tools for TikTok can significantly elevate the quality of your content and the efficiency of your workflow. 

These seven tools offer various AI features that can help you edit, optimize, and even automatically generate TikTok videos. 

Tailor your tool selection to your specific needs, and get ready to see your TikTok presence soar.

Now you can create SEO optimized blog posts that is up-to-date with the power of AI.

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Last update on 2024-03-31 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

Guestposting on The PennyMatters has since been discontinued. Do not contact us on the same.

• March 9, 2024

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• TikTok Content Ideas Generator

Looking for new ideas for your next TikTok video? Get access to our free TikTok content idea generator and create engaging content that stands out.

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Guest Essay

A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture

By Erik Hoel

Mr. Hoel is a neuroscientist and novelist and the author of The Intrinsic Perspective newsletter.

Increasingly, mounds of synthetic A.I.-generated outputs drift across our feeds and our searches. The stakes go far beyond what’s on our screens. The entire culture is becoming affected by A.I.’s runoff, an insidious creep into our most important institutions.

Consider science. Right after the blockbuster release of GPT-4, the latest artificial intelligence model from OpenAI and one of the most advanced in existence, the language of scientific research began to mutate. Especially within the field of A.I. itself.

Adjectives associated with A.I.-generated text have increased in peer reviews of scientific papers about A.I.

Frequency of adjectives per one million words

Commendable

A study published this month examined scientists’ peer reviews — researchers’ official pronouncements on others’ work that form the bedrock of scientific progress — across a number of high-profile and prestigious scientific conferences studying A.I. At one such conference, those peer reviews used the word “meticulous” more than 34 times as often as reviews did the previous year. Use of “commendable” was around 10 times as frequent, and “intricate,” 11 times. Other major conferences showed similar patterns.

Such phrasings are, of course, some of the favorite buzzwords of modern large language models like ChatGPT. In other words, significant numbers of researchers at A.I. conferences were caught handing their peer review of others’ work over to A.I. — or, at minimum, writing them with lots of A.I. assistance. And the closer to the deadline the submitted reviews were received, the more A.I. usage was found in them.

If this makes you uncomfortable — especially given A.I.’s current unreliability — or if you think that maybe it shouldn’t be A.I.s reviewing science but the scientists themselves, those feelings highlight the paradox at the core of this technology: It’s unclear what the ethical line is between scam and regular usage. Some A.I.-generated scams are easy to identify, like the medical journal paper featuring a cartoon rat sporting enormous genitalia. Many others are more insidious, like the mislabeled and hallucinated regulatory pathway described in that same paper — a paper that was peer reviewed as well (perhaps, one might speculate, by another A.I.?).

What about when A.I. is used in one of its intended ways — to assist with writing? Recently, there was an uproar when it became obvious that simple searches of scientific databases returned phrases like “As an A.I. language model” in places where authors relying on A.I. had forgotten to cover their tracks. If the same authors had simply deleted those accidental watermarks, would their use of A.I. to write their papers have been fine?

What’s going on in science is a microcosm of a much bigger problem. Post on social media? Any viral post on X now almost certainly includes A.I.-generated replies, from summaries of the original post to reactions written in ChatGPT’s bland Wikipedia-voice, all to farm for follows. Instagram is filling up with A.I.-generated models, Spotify with A.I.-generated songs. Publish a book? Soon after, on Amazon there will often appear A.I.-generated “workbooks” for sale that supposedly accompany your book (which are incorrect in their content; I know because this happened to me). Top Google search results are now often A.I.-generated images or articles. Major media outlets like Sports Illustrated have been creating A.I.-generated articles attributed to equally fake author profiles. Marketers who sell search engine optimization methods openly brag about using A.I. to create thousands of spammed articles to steal traffic from competitors.

Then there is the growing use of generative A.I. to scale the creation of cheap synthetic videos for children on YouTube. Some example outputs are Lovecraftian horrors, like music videos about parrots in which the birds have eyes within eyes, beaks within beaks, morphing unfathomably while singing in an artificial voice, “The parrot in the tree says hello, hello!” The narratives make no sense, characters appear and disappear randomly, and basic facts like the names of shapes are wrong. After I identified a number of such suspicious channels on my newsletter, The Intrinsic Perspective, Wired found evidence of generative A.I. use in the production pipelines of some accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of subscribers.

As a neuroscientist, this worries me. Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? Einstein supposedly said : “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” But what happens when a toddler is consuming mostly A.I.-generated dream-slop? We find ourselves in the midst of a vast developmental experiment.

There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models. As A.I. capabilities ramped up in 2022, I wrote on the risk of culture’s becoming so inundated with A.I. creations that when future A.I.s are trained, the previous A.I. output will leak into the training set, leading to a future of copies of copies of copies, as content became ever more stereotyped and predictable. In 2023 researchers introduced a technical term for how this risk affected A.I. training: model collapse . In a way, we and these companies are in the same boat, paddling through the same sludge streaming into our cultural ocean.

With that unpleasant analogy in mind, it’s worth looking to what is arguably the clearest historical analogy for our current situation: the environmental movement and climate change. For just as companies and individuals were driven to pollute by the inexorable economics of it, so, too, is A.I.’s cultural pollution driven by a rational decision to fill the internet’s voracious appetite for content as cheaply as possible. While environmental problems are nowhere near solved, there has been undeniable progress that has kept our cities mostly free of smog and our lakes mostly free of sewage. How?

Before any specific policy solution was the acknowledgment that environmental pollution was a problem in need of outside legislation. Influential to this view was a perspective developed in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, a biologist and ecologist. Dr. Hardin emphasized that the problem of pollution was driven by people acting in their own interest, and that therefore “we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.” He summed up the problem as a “tragedy of the commons.” This framing was instrumental for the environmental movement, which would come to rely on government regulation to do what companies alone could or would not.

Once again we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. And so far, major A.I. companies are refusing to pursue advanced ways to identify A.I.’s handiwork — which they could do by adding subtle statistical patterns hidden in word use or in the pixels of images.

A common justification for inaction is that human editors can always fiddle around with whatever patterns are implemented if they know enough. Yet many of the issues we’re experiencing are not caused by motivated and technically skilled malicious actors; they’re caused mostly by regular users’ not adhering to a line of ethical use so fine as to be nigh nonexistent. Most would be uninterested in advanced countermeasures to statistical patterns enforced into outputs that should, ideally, mark them as A.I.-generated.

That’s why the independent researchers were able to detect A.I. outputs in the peer review system with surprisingly high accuracy: They actually tried. Similarly, right now teachers across the nation have created home-brewed output-side detection methods , like adding in hidden requests for patterns of word use to essay prompts that appear only when copy-pasted.

In particular, A.I. companies appear opposed to any patterns baked into their output that can improve A.I.-detection efforts to reasonable levels, perhaps because they fear that enforcing such patterns might interfere with the model’s performance by constraining its outputs too much — although there is no current evidence this is a risk. Despite public pledges to develop more advanced watermarking, it’s increasingly clear that the companies are dragging their feet because it goes against the A.I. industry’s bottom line to have detectable products.

To deal with this corporate refusal to act we need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to legislatively force advanced watermarking intrinsic to generated outputs, like patterns not easily removable. Just as the 20th century required extensive interventions to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require extensive interventions to protect a different, but equally critical, common resource, one we haven’t noticed up until now since it was never under threat: our shared human culture.

Erik Hoel is a neuroscientist, a novelist and the author of The Intrinsic Perspective newsletter.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

TikTok bill, racing toward House passage, faces a minefield in the Senate

The house vote, set for wednesday, is expected to mark the first time a chamber of congress has passed legislation that could lead to a ban of a social media platform.

The House on Tuesday was speeding toward a vote Wednesday on a bill that could lead to the forced sale or nationwide ban of TikTok, reigniting the battle over a massively popular video app that has come to epitomize Washington anxieties over the growing power of social media and China’s influence.

The legislation is widely expected to pass the House, but it lacks a companion measure in the Senate and faces an uncertain path there, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) pledging in an interview to block any measure that he felt violated the Constitution. Paul’s opposition squelched a similar legislative effort a year ago.

Americans “choose to use TikTok to express themselves,” Paul said Tuesday. “I don’t think Congress should be trying to take away the First Amendment rights of [170] million Americans.”

President Biden has said he would sign the legislation if it cleared Congress.

While proponents say the bill would not ban the app outright, the legislation is an existential threat to TikTok, a cultural juggernaut used monthly by as many as 170 million people nationwide. The legislation would require TikTok’s parent company, the Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, to sell the app within 180 days or see it barred from the Apple and Google app stores and web-hosting services in the United States.

TikTok, however, has pointed to comments from the bill’s supporters, including in its initial announcement, that specifically described it as a ban. China has vowed to block any sale by using export-control measures.

In a letter to members of Congress on Monday, TikTok executive Michael Beckerman said the bill raised “serious constitutional concerns” and was “being rushed through at unprecedented speed without even the benefit of a public hearing.” He added, “You have preconceived notions about TikTok based on what you read in the media — rather than facts or reality.”

A vote to approve would mark the first time a chamber of Congress has greenlit legislation that could lead to the nationwide prohibition of a social media platform.

Congressional lawmakers and federal officials have warned for years that TikTok’s ByteDance ownership might allow the Chinese government to seize Americans’ personal data or shape the app’s video recommendations for political gain.

Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the leaders of the House select committee on China, introduced the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act last week. The bill was rushed to consideration by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which approved it on a 50-0 vote Thursday.

Supporters of the House bill say they expect to garner at least 350 votes Wednesday, enough to clear the necessary two-thirds approval.

“It’ll be overwhelming,” said Mark Montgomery, a former congressional staffer who has advised the committee on this and other technology issues and has worked closely with Gallagher.

Senior Biden administration officials have lent support to the committee’s effort to craft a bill, including Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco as well as top officials at the National Security Council and in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who have voiced concerns that China might use the app to gain access to users’ personal data or use it to influence Americans’ political opinions.

Federal officials, however, have provided no public examples of the Chinese government harvesting Americans’ data or altering TikTok’s algorithms in the five years since they launched a national security investigation into the app. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, highlighting the risks, has said any tweaks to the app’s algorithm would be “something we wouldn’t readily detect, which makes it more of a pernicious threat.” Said another U.S. official, “The concern is very real and based on known behavior by the CCP,” or Chinese Communist Party.

TikTok officials have said the company is not owned, controlled or influenced by the Chinese government.

The bill’s critics — a diverse mix of civil liberties groups, progressive Democrats and hard-right Republicans — have argued that it represents a government overstep of Americans’ free-speech rights. Gallagher rejected that position this week, saying the bill was “about foreign adversary control of a social media application … not about shutting down speech.” He added, “As long as the ownership structure has changed, TikTok can continue, and Americans can say whatever the heck they want on the platform.”

Even some of the bill’s supporters, however, have questioned whether it will face the same fate as former president Donald Trump’s push to force a ban or sale of TikTok in 2020, when federal courts ruled the government had not adequately proved that the app presented a national security threat.

A hold by Paul could deal the bill a significant blow, delaying a vote in the Senate by a week or more. The Senate is only in session three of the next six weeks, and faces a calendar of pressing measures related to government funding, taxes and judicial appointments.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) made no commitments about the measure’s advancement. “Let’s see what the House does,” he said. I “intend to consult with my relevant committee chairmen to see what their views would be.”

Congress has previously approved legislation to block TikTok from being used on government-owned computers and phones, and many states have followed suit. Restrictions for apps used by the general public, however, have faced a steeper challenge: In November, Montana had its first-in-the-nation statewide ban of the app blocked by a federal judge, who said the law had a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment” and “violates the Constitution in more ways than one.”

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew landed in Washington on Tuesday night to meet with senators in hopes of shoring up opposition to the measure, said a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

The company offered to pay for some content creators and small-business owners to travel this week to Washington to drive home the app’s social and economic value. The creators, who rallied outside the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon, were not paid to advocate on the company’s behalf, a TikTok spokesperson said.

Phone lines on Capitol Hill were again blitzed with calls Tuesday from TikTok users who received a phone pop-up urging them to “help stop the shutdown.” The notification prompted users to enter their Zip code, then presented a “call now” button to connect them to their local representative.

TikTok’s opponents said the notification was an unfair push for mass political promotion that backfired; during a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence briefing Tuesday, Krishnamoorthi said it had “ended up convincing a number of members from being 'lean yeses’ to ‘hard yeses.’”

Beckerman, the TikTok executive, said in his letter to the members of Congress that hearing from constituents was part of the job: “One would hope, as public servants, that you would be well acquainted with the constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances.”

In its annual threat assessment report , released Monday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said TikTok accounts run by a Chinese propaganda arm had “reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”

China, the report added, “may attempt to influence the U.S. elections in 2024 at some level because of its desire to sideline critics of China and magnify U.S. societal divisions.” Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in a threat briefing Tuesday that the country “cannot rule out” similar interference in 2024.

The report did not offer details of the midterm influence campaign, but Forbes reported in 2022 that TikTok accounts run by a Chinese government propaganda arm had accumulated millions of views on videos criticizing some U.S. midterm candidates.

TikTok said in a statement that the company regularly took action against “covert influence networks throughout the world,” including two Chinese networks operating more than 700 accounts.

The ODNI report did not name other social media platforms, though Meta , which runs Facebook and Instagram, and X , then called Twitter, also reported in 2022 that China-based influence campaigns had used their platforms to try to influence the midterm vote.

The bill has revealed unconventional alliances in Washington. Trump and libertarian Republicans like Paul have joined with the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups in calling the bill a government overstep.

Though they are probably too few to stop the House bill’s passage, some representatives on the party’s edges have signaled they will oppose the bill. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said in an X post on Tuesday that the bill was a “Trojan horse” for government dominance of the web. X’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, reposted Massie’s opinion and said the “law is not just about TikTok, it is about censorship and government control!”

Trump has criticized the bill by saying it would mostly serve to make TikTok rival Meta more powerful, raising suspicions among some Republicans that he was surrendering the effort he kick-started in 2020 due to his own self-interest. A former Trump aide told The Washington Post in 2022 that Trump had dropped the issue when he learned it could hurt him in the polls.

Of the criticism of TikTok, Trump said Monday on CNBC, “You have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies, too: I mean, they get the information … and they’ll do whatever China wants.” He added, “Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it.”

His former vice president, Mike Pence , called the app “a 21st century technological weapon … poisoning the minds of American children” in a Fox News essay Tuesday and said Trump had been turned by lobbyists “against his own political legacy.” “Too many politicians talk a big game but crack under the pressure of wealthy donors or personal grudges — including my former running mate,” Pence wrote.

TikTok has been in negotiations for years with the federal government over a proposal, known as Project Texas, designed to help ease U.S. national security concerns. The program would store Americans’ data on servers in the United States and give the federal government veto power over decision by a board that would run TikTok’s U.S. subsidiary. Federal officials have yet to agree to the deal.

Amid the impasse, a bipartisan group of senators last March unveiled legislation known as the Restrict Act that would give the Commerce Department more authority to assess and potentially block technology deals involving companies from countries deemed to be foreign adversaries. The National Security Council endorsed the measure and called on Congress “to act quickly to send it to the President’s desk.”

The push lost steam, however, amid bipartisan blowback , including from conservative Republicans who said it’d give too much power to the executive branch and liberal Democrats who assailed it as an affront to free expression online.

Lawmakers have floated numerous other approaches, including a yet-to-be-unveiled bill from Senate Commerce Chairwoman Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). But none of them appeared to gain broad enough support to clear either chamber of Congress until the House proposal was unveiled last week.

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the lead sponsor of the Restrict Act, said he still had “concerns about the constitutionality of an approach that names specific companies.” Cantwell, whose panel would probably need to sign off on the new bill, has not indicated whether her committee will consider the measure.

Some of the legislation’s supporters voiced enthusiasm for moving quickly. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said Tuesday, “Once you sort of peel back the layers of the onion on the layers of the ownership and access to information and what they can do with it, I think it concerns a lot of people. It should.”

But others, like Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), worried Congress’s rapid embrace of the legislation was a mistake. “There are a lot of things that haven’t been thought through here,” he said. “The first thing that was said was, ‘Ban TikTok. Let’s ban it.’ That was last year. Now we’ve done this jujitsu, and it’s a forced sale. It’s a forced sale set up to fail.”

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

An earlier version of this report incorrectly reported that Sen. Cantwell said her committee would consider the bill if it cleared the House. She in fact has not indicated how her committee would treat the bill. This version has been corrected.

Tech 2U Tuesdays - Episode 23 - March 19th 2024 Tech 2U Tuesdays

We discuss the impending Tik Tok ban and why it’s happening. The EU has yet another consumer protection pact and this time it’s protecting people from AI: things like scanning your face in public without your knowledge.  The FTC is cracking down on fake antivirus programs, we’ll go over what they are and how to avoid them.  And of course we can’t go more than one week without another massive data breach: Roku, as popular TV maker has had over 15,000 accounts breached, likely as a result of the “Mother of all breaches” we just saw last month. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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