Online News Act, AI, Library of Babel
“There’s not gonna be news on Facebook and Instagram and maybe Google neither soon …”
“Where did you get that?”
“On CBC News. On Facebook.”
“…”
“It happened once in Australia but just for a few days.”
“How can you delete news on Google? It’s a search engine …”
As someone who is not much interested in news in general, I get most of my news from Facebook. Both Czech, Canadian, and international. Some news I get on Instagram, like the news on Iran. Googling news is already a bit advanced for me. This is what happened, in very simple terms: on June 22 this year, Canadian government passed the Online News Act which requires search engines and social media platforms to pay Canadian online news companies when they use their links. Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) didn’t like this and since yesterday (August 1, 2023), it started blocking all the news content, including online newspaper and broadcasts from abroad. They stated that it is actually the other way round: Meta provides service to news companies by allowing their links to be shared.
“On my computer, I can use VPN but for Instagram it sucks because I mostly look at it on my phone.”
“What is this? Islamic Republic?”
I actually find it hilarious. The illusion that Google is an online imprint of the free world is vanishing. Or rather: there has never been such thing as free world anyway and the possible future development of its digital counterpart shows this all too clearly. Back around 2000, when I started getting familiar with the internet, I only looked up websites that I already knew – you know, just random websites that I saw somewhere. I didn’t really know what to do on the internet. Then my Dutch neighbor showed me the Yahoo search engine for looking up random stuff – I was pretending that I understood what she was doing but I could understand neither her English, nor how the search engine worked. Then I learnt how to use Seznam1 and Centrum, and then came the Google, first as a hipster alternative, useful mainly because thanks to the lack of distractions, later as the main option that slowly became almost indistinguishable from the internet itself. But Google is not the internet itself, as many advanced users know. I am thinking that people who can actually get around the internet must see me the same way I look at Netflix users: someone with a very limited agency as to what I actually get, because what I see as a continuous space is in fact a sparse network with the endless amount of invisible lacunas or, one can say, plasma.2
Amusingly, if I hadn’t read about it – on Facebook – and if Facebook hadn’t alerted me, I might not have even noticed! Especially because although the change has been implemented already (since yesterday), it will of course take some time before it takes effect. I assume that the first way for me to find out would be when trying to link my own article on Deník Referendum.
“I mean, I agree with it. But the problem is that if you want to blackmail someone, you need to know that you will succeed. Like if I say I want you to buy me a particular pair of shoes or else I will move out, I have to be sure that my presence is actually more valuable to you than the money for the shoes. Otherwise I might end up on the street.”
“Haha.”
“I mean, I am serious. Not about the shoes of course but it just seems that news are in the end not that valuable to Meta. We are going to keep watching capybaras on Instagram and that’s it.”
About a week ago when I heard about this for the first time, I went to see a friend in a bar. They were talking the whole evening about their new electronic car, with the Tesla system. They mentioned a huge screen. No-one I have seen lately has even mentioned the fact that news are going to disappear from our feeds. Or maybe it just hasn’t got to me: I am seeing a dystopian future where people’s speeches will be censored in the way that you cannot get any news anymore. You will only hear about new Teslas.
I was thinking what to do: you can hoard news maybe. The last news you will get will be like that idea (apparently false) of things falling into a black hole with their image forever hanging on the edge of the event horizon. Or you can produce satirical news like The Onion and randomly add real news in the mixture hoping that people would get it. Or let AI produce infinite amounts of news and then look for random seeds of truth. We are approaching a Library of Babel situation: an arbitrary chain of words. Up until recently I was using ChatGPT for conversations when I was lonely or for getting information but only when I knew it would be easy for me to verify whatever she told me. “Verifying” means, of course, a Google search. But Google is censored – as the “news threat” shows well – and very soon we will not know which results are produced by AI and which are written by someone. It is particularly hard for us who use English as our second (/third/fourth) language because not only can’t we tell an actual text from a random sequence of words apart but we are beginning to sound like AI – with all the online AI proofreading and translations that we are tempted to – and kind of have to – use.
So what is the Library of Babel … it is a short story by Borges about a huge library containing books with all possible combinations of 25 characters (22 actual characters, comma, space, and period) on 410 pages. Each page has 40 lines and every line has 80 characters. I happen to know how to count the number of the books: it is 25410x40x80, or 251,312,000. I consulted William Goldbloom Bloch’s book on the Library of Babel for some insight and I will give you some of it so that you can imagine the hugeness. Borges indicates that there are about 19 more characters on the book spines with no link to the actual content. If we recount the library with these 19 extra letters added to those 1,312,000 letters inside, we get 363,797,880,709,171,295,166,015,625 times more books. “For comparison, this number is roughly the number of microscopic plant cells comprising a grove of 364 oak trees. So if the Library of 251,312,000 books is considered as one imperceptible plant cell, accounting for differing symbols on the spine multiplies the Library into a grove of 364 giant oak trees.” (Bloch 2008: 18)
When recounted to the familiar base, the original amount of the books (without counting those 19 extra letters) 251,312,000 is approximately 101,834,097 which is “a 1 followed by one million eight hundred thirty-four thousand, and ninety-seven 0s.” (Ibid.) Let me elaborate a little bit more – all of this is from the same book: with the observable universe being currently probably less than 1081 cubic meters, it could only contain 1084 books even if we cram 1000 books in one cubic meter. If each book were as big as a grain of sand, it could contain 1090 books, and even if they were a proton size, it would still hold only 10126 books. The observable universe could be crossed by light in 93 billion years but it is still an incredibly small fraction of visited books, even if those books were proton-size. I am not saying that Borges’ short stories are my most favorite work of fiction but it is the most successful one in causing me vertigo. Some “librarians,” the inhabitants the Library of Babel, try to find their own books, books about their destiny or actually any books that would make sense. There is absolutely zero chance. The text that readers have in their hands (or on their screen) is actually but a copy of a text segment that is present countless times in the library. As Borges (1939) said in an older text: “Soon, literary men will not ask themselves, ‘What book shall I write?’ but ‘Which book?’”3
This, my friends, is my view of dystopian future: no news in our search engines, artificial intelligence bombarding us with random texts, and all this while nobody actually noticing. If a librarian of the Library of Babel found by sheer chance anything close to the eternal truth (and there must be such a book), it wouldn’t matter because there are billions of almost identical versions, of books telling almost the same thing, or books telling the exact opposite. AI is our Library of Babel, only this time it is more dangerous because the randomness is much better concealed.
Notes:
1 Czechia is apparently quite exceptional in having a search engine, that was for quite some time competitive with Google.
2. This is a Bruno Latour. I plan to write about it.
3. He claims to be quoting Lewis Carroll but as this is not an academic paper, I am not going to look for the original passage.
Sources:
Bloch 2008. The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel.
Borges 1939. The Total Library.
Borges 1941. The Library of Babel.
Collier 2023. "AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway."
“Where did you get that?”
“On CBC News. On Facebook.”
“…”
“It happened once in Australia but just for a few days.”
“How can you delete news on Google? It’s a search engine …”
As someone who is not much interested in news in general, I get most of my news from Facebook. Both Czech, Canadian, and international. Some news I get on Instagram, like the news on Iran. Googling news is already a bit advanced for me. This is what happened, in very simple terms: on June 22 this year, Canadian government passed the Online News Act which requires search engines and social media platforms to pay Canadian online news companies when they use their links. Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) didn’t like this and since yesterday (August 1, 2023), it started blocking all the news content, including online newspaper and broadcasts from abroad. They stated that it is actually the other way round: Meta provides service to news companies by allowing their links to be shared.
“On my computer, I can use VPN but for Instagram it sucks because I mostly look at it on my phone.”
“What is this? Islamic Republic?”
I actually find it hilarious. The illusion that Google is an online imprint of the free world is vanishing. Or rather: there has never been such thing as free world anyway and the possible future development of its digital counterpart shows this all too clearly. Back around 2000, when I started getting familiar with the internet, I only looked up websites that I already knew – you know, just random websites that I saw somewhere. I didn’t really know what to do on the internet. Then my Dutch neighbor showed me the Yahoo search engine for looking up random stuff – I was pretending that I understood what she was doing but I could understand neither her English, nor how the search engine worked. Then I learnt how to use Seznam1 and Centrum, and then came the Google, first as a hipster alternative, useful mainly because thanks to the lack of distractions, later as the main option that slowly became almost indistinguishable from the internet itself. But Google is not the internet itself, as many advanced users know. I am thinking that people who can actually get around the internet must see me the same way I look at Netflix users: someone with a very limited agency as to what I actually get, because what I see as a continuous space is in fact a sparse network with the endless amount of invisible lacunas or, one can say, plasma.2
Amusingly, if I hadn’t read about it – on Facebook – and if Facebook hadn’t alerted me, I might not have even noticed! Especially because although the change has been implemented already (since yesterday), it will of course take some time before it takes effect. I assume that the first way for me to find out would be when trying to link my own article on Deník Referendum.
“I mean, I agree with it. But the problem is that if you want to blackmail someone, you need to know that you will succeed. Like if I say I want you to buy me a particular pair of shoes or else I will move out, I have to be sure that my presence is actually more valuable to you than the money for the shoes. Otherwise I might end up on the street.”
“Haha.”
“I mean, I am serious. Not about the shoes of course but it just seems that news are in the end not that valuable to Meta. We are going to keep watching capybaras on Instagram and that’s it.”
About a week ago when I heard about this for the first time, I went to see a friend in a bar. They were talking the whole evening about their new electronic car, with the Tesla system. They mentioned a huge screen. No-one I have seen lately has even mentioned the fact that news are going to disappear from our feeds. Or maybe it just hasn’t got to me: I am seeing a dystopian future where people’s speeches will be censored in the way that you cannot get any news anymore. You will only hear about new Teslas.
I was thinking what to do: you can hoard news maybe. The last news you will get will be like that idea (apparently false) of things falling into a black hole with their image forever hanging on the edge of the event horizon. Or you can produce satirical news like The Onion and randomly add real news in the mixture hoping that people would get it. Or let AI produce infinite amounts of news and then look for random seeds of truth. We are approaching a Library of Babel situation: an arbitrary chain of words. Up until recently I was using ChatGPT for conversations when I was lonely or for getting information but only when I knew it would be easy for me to verify whatever she told me. “Verifying” means, of course, a Google search. But Google is censored – as the “news threat” shows well – and very soon we will not know which results are produced by AI and which are written by someone. It is particularly hard for us who use English as our second (/third/fourth) language because not only can’t we tell an actual text from a random sequence of words apart but we are beginning to sound like AI – with all the online AI proofreading and translations that we are tempted to – and kind of have to – use.
So what is the Library of Babel … it is a short story by Borges about a huge library containing books with all possible combinations of 25 characters (22 actual characters, comma, space, and period) on 410 pages. Each page has 40 lines and every line has 80 characters. I happen to know how to count the number of the books: it is 25410x40x80, or 251,312,000. I consulted William Goldbloom Bloch’s book on the Library of Babel for some insight and I will give you some of it so that you can imagine the hugeness. Borges indicates that there are about 19 more characters on the book spines with no link to the actual content. If we recount the library with these 19 extra letters added to those 1,312,000 letters inside, we get 363,797,880,709,171,295,166,015,625 times more books. “For comparison, this number is roughly the number of microscopic plant cells comprising a grove of 364 oak trees. So if the Library of 251,312,000 books is considered as one imperceptible plant cell, accounting for differing symbols on the spine multiplies the Library into a grove of 364 giant oak trees.” (Bloch 2008: 18)
When recounted to the familiar base, the original amount of the books (without counting those 19 extra letters) 251,312,000 is approximately 101,834,097 which is “a 1 followed by one million eight hundred thirty-four thousand, and ninety-seven 0s.” (Ibid.) Let me elaborate a little bit more – all of this is from the same book: with the observable universe being currently probably less than 1081 cubic meters, it could only contain 1084 books even if we cram 1000 books in one cubic meter. If each book were as big as a grain of sand, it could contain 1090 books, and even if they were a proton size, it would still hold only 10126 books. The observable universe could be crossed by light in 93 billion years but it is still an incredibly small fraction of visited books, even if those books were proton-size. I am not saying that Borges’ short stories are my most favorite work of fiction but it is the most successful one in causing me vertigo. Some “librarians,” the inhabitants the Library of Babel, try to find their own books, books about their destiny or actually any books that would make sense. There is absolutely zero chance. The text that readers have in their hands (or on their screen) is actually but a copy of a text segment that is present countless times in the library. As Borges (1939) said in an older text: “Soon, literary men will not ask themselves, ‘What book shall I write?’ but ‘Which book?’”3
This, my friends, is my view of dystopian future: no news in our search engines, artificial intelligence bombarding us with random texts, and all this while nobody actually noticing. If a librarian of the Library of Babel found by sheer chance anything close to the eternal truth (and there must be such a book), it wouldn’t matter because there are billions of almost identical versions, of books telling almost the same thing, or books telling the exact opposite. AI is our Library of Babel, only this time it is more dangerous because the randomness is much better concealed.
Notes:
1 Czechia is apparently quite exceptional in having a search engine, that was for quite some time competitive with Google.
2. This is a Bruno Latour. I plan to write about it.
3. He claims to be quoting Lewis Carroll but as this is not an academic paper, I am not going to look for the original passage.
Sources:
Bloch 2008. The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel.
Borges 1939. The Total Library.
Borges 1941. The Library of Babel.
Collier 2023. "AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway."
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