One reflection I've had in the whole "AI use in the encyclical" affair is to slightly increase my trust in traditional media, especially non-American traditional media, and slightly decrease my trust in social media and new media epistemics.

I tried my best to promote my analysis as legibly and reasonably as I could and focused on logos rather than ethos: I didn't frame my article with institutional affiliations and intentionally chose not to include obvious, flashy, but irrelevant signaling. Stuff I could've done but explicitly chose not to: get an ML professor to cosign my analysis, publish on Arxiv instead of Substack and LessWrong, highlight my past ML experience at Google, etc. 

The traditional media response were somewhere between neutral and positive. There were some disappointments (eg a famous media org won't run the article without confirmation from a "primary source" -- aka the Vatican which is of course a non-starter). But mostly the traditional media just looked at the analysis and said "yeah looked reasonable." and either ran it as "Unconfirmed but seems right" or just "unconfirmed, period." Which seems fine.

On the other hand, the social media attacks were very aggro. People just didn't seem to entertain it at all, many without reading it. And I got personally attacked a ton^[1].

Also it wasn't picked up at all^[2] by new media afaict (unless you count Russia Today as new media).

This is exactly the type of story you might expect new media to be good for: story of institutional decay in the Old Guard, investigation by someone without credentials carefully laying out an epistemically rigorous and systematic case. And yet traditional media was happy to report it^[3], social media kept yelling at me, and new media just got crickets.

1. ^{^}

   Don't worry, I didn't take it personally at all. Very much a "yapping of chihuahua in a tiny purse" moment.

2. ^{^}

   This is a slight exaggeration. Other than Russia Today a bunch of small AI news aggregators (AI news in both senses of the term) covered it briefly. Eg Zvi, Let's Data Science, and some AI slop publications. But no big/general "Alt Media" coverage comparable to The Economist, Perfil, etc).

3. ^{^}

   Quite possibly against their explicit economic interests, if I'm reading the popular reaction correctly.