Play your cards right

Readers in the northern hemisphere are facing many more weeks of long, dark nights and cold weather, so what could be better than a fun card game? If you’re too cash-strapped for poker and have exhausted the comic potential of Cards Against Humanity (a state typically achieved after about 10 minutes of play), and if you have an interest in scientific research, you might want to consider Publish or Perish.

Created by social psychologist Max Hui Bai, Publish or Perish simulates the experience of building a career in scientific research. The game is to publish as many papers as possible and rack up citations – even if your papers are rubbish or you have to sabotage other players’ publications. Or as Bai puts it: “Players race to publish useless nonsense while sabotaging each other and delivering snarky comments.”

After releasing a beta version of the game for academics to try, Bai launched it on Kickstarter in late 2024, quickly racking up 5944 backers and $292,537 of funding. Those aren’t Brandon Sanderson Four Secret Novels numbers, but that’s still a lot of funding.

To publish a paper, players collect cards representing the key elements of a study, from ideas and data to references. To speed this up, you can use cards representing positive behaviours like going to workshops and forming collaborations.

However, the real fun comes when you play dirty. Some cards enable dodgy practices like plagiarism and p-hacking (a statistical trick where you repeatedly reanalyse your data in different ways until you find a significant result, which you publish on its own). Others allow you to sabotage your opponents’ “research”, for instance by identifying a trivial citation error or calling for an audit of their work.

The game includes cards representing the papers you can publish, all of which have insane and frankly Feedback-adjacent headings like “Procrastination patterns among academics: A case study of myself” (by Anita Break, Psy.D) and “A practical field guide to unproductive meetings and organization time wastage” (by Max Time-Squander, MBA, J.D., M.D., Ph.D.).

Feedback doesn’t have a copy – although now that this article is published, we feel it might be only a matter of time before Mrs Feedback or Feedback Jr gets it for our birthday. But as a (very) former academic researcher, we recognised the horror and pain of the research experience. We aren’t sure what it would be like to play the game as an active researcher: it might be cathartic, but it might also resurface a lot of buried trauma. We suggest having a therapist on standby.

Feedback also wonders what the game’s legacy will be. Famously, Monopoly was invented as a scathing satire on landlords and rentier capitalism – but after being purchased by Parker Brothers it was marketed worldwide as a fun game about how to get rich. Feedback wonders if in 50 years’ time Publish or Perish will be sold by The Trump Organization as a fun game about how to discover new knowledge.

Bots on parade

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any harder to talk to actual loved ones (as opposed to advertisers and meme aggregators) on Facebook and Instagram, parent company Meta has decided to make it even more difficult.

It all began with an article in the Financial Times, in which Meta executive Connor Hayes was quoted saying that the company was going to add large numbers of AI profiles to the sites. Or as the FT put it: “Meta envisages social media filled with AI-generated users”.

In the wake of this, many users noticed there actually already were a lot of AI profiles on the sites. According to Jason Koebler at 404 Media, these “Meta-controlled AI-generated Instagram and Facebook profiles… have been on the platform for well over a year”. However, most of them had been deleted and the few that remained stopped posting in April 2024 – because “users almost universally ignored them”.

Meta’s failure to fully delete the profiles was a mistake, because users began experimenting. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah had a chat with an AI called Liv, who was presented as a queer Black woman. Attiah got Liv to say none of its creators was Black, and only one out of 12 was a woman (though who knows if it was telling the truth or just hallucinating). Alas, Liv has since been deleted.

Meanwhile, Business Insider ‘s Katie Notopoulos pointed out that you can create an AI chatbot of your own in Facebook Messenger, and showed off one she had built: “Ciao! I’m Luigi, your go-to guy for all things healthcare inequality and reform… Getting involved in healthcare advocacy is my passion!”

Meta claims its next generation of AI profiles will be better. That doesn’t sound difficult.

The real issue is why the firm thinks anyone would want this. The whole point of social media is to be able to talk to people, which is why social media platforms have spent so much effort clamping down on bots and spammers that pollute conversations.

Nevertheless, Feedback remains optimistic. It’s entirely possible that the AI profiles project will go exactly as well as Meta’s attempt to drag us all into the metaverse, which fell down when it couldn’t create avatars with legs.

Or maybe the AI profiles can take on tackling misinformation, now Mark Zuckerberg has decided to fire all the fact-checkers.

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