John Borthwick on the Intimacy of AI & Social Media Data

For those of us that like to bookend history, it’s tempting to compartmentalize 2023 as the year that marked the end of the social media age and the beginning of the AI one. But as Betaworks CEO John Borthwick warns, that’s an overly neat analysis. Borthwick suggests that there would have been no OpenAI revolution this year without all the social media data we’ve spewed onto the internet over the last quarter century. The age of surveillance capitalism, then, is also the age of ChatGPT. So rather than a watershed year, 2023 marks a synthesis of the two dominant forces in digital technology. Gulp.