Overview: Media

My mid November 2024 newsletter summarises how a deep dive into Bluesky has changed how I view #AI4Communities, and summarises some of the most influential things I've read recently.

An interesting take: governments should ensure "that news outlets, digital platforms, and political leaders provide the best available knowledge" and enshrine a new to not "be lied to by the powerful" in a world optimised for enragement: "one study showing that each additional negative word in a headline increased the clic…

Profile of New_Public, founded by Eli Pariser of Filter Bubble and Upworthy fame, and Deepti Doshi "from from Meta, where she’d spent much of her tenure leading the company’s Community Partnerships... supporting, Facebook group admins... as well as UT Austin professor Talia Stroud, who remains on the board, and their drive to stimulate "…

"it’s surprisingly unclear what the AI search startup actually is"- according to its CEO it is, depending on when he's asked:"an answer engine...almost like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid,,,a mere “aggregator of information”"All three cannot be true. The chatobot itself "is more specific... “Perplexity AI is an AI-po…

After so many years of spam, splog, slop, phishing and above all trolling, "Our guard is up. Our filters are activated. Our default mode is suspicion", something that's only going to get worse with AI: are those photos too good to be true? Can that video actually be real? Is that a spambot, or just "someone who isn’t neurotypic…

The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure's manifesto sets out the three legs upon which an open public sphere must rest.

Michael Foster's "top ten unfinished building blocks" are:trust & safety: "heart of an ethical social web... [currently] delegated to a small group of volunteers... [but] green shoots emerging"spam filters: "there are some amazing tools now... Pixelfed has shown what can be done"safe spaces / bridging & f…

"A deep dive into Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone", over 20 years later, by "former New_ Public Research Fellow Serena Chao".Social capital, according to Putnam, "is the “connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”... [making] a strong case for a…

Doctorow, pointing out that Google's move to AI search "is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage". Instead, "you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it…

"When Sundar Pichai took the stage at Google I/O ... said that the rise of generative artificial intelligence would provide new opportunities... for everyone". While many products unveiled will be doubtless useful, the picture's unclear for search itself: by end 2024 "Search Generative Experience... will appear at the top of re…

I've been kicking the tyres of Sublime, a new personal and social curation app, and pondering its approach to integrating AI.

"a deep-dive on the concrete ways Sublime makes my life better", by Sublime.app founder Sari Azout.

"LinkStowr is a free, open source and privacy-friendly ... store valuable online resources in a structured and meaningful way". Uses a Chrome extension to save link + note to LinkStowr, and an Obsidian plugin to sync the card to a vault. LinkStowr then deletes its unneeded copy.

Cory Doctorow on the demise of Vice, "a Canadian media success story... founded by a motley clique of hipsters... transitioned to a string of progressively worsening corporate owners... one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's infamous "pivot to video"... spending hundreds of millions to finance Zuckerberg's doome…

In this edition: join the ChatGPT integration free trial, check out the results of my latest experiments, and enjoy the Alliteration of the Month: Bullshit, Botshit and Bubbles.

"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".Why? Human curators :"…

Another word for the lexicon: when bullshit meets AI you get "botshit". "we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job... there’s a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence…

According to:MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks, ChatGPT "“just makes up stuff that sounds good"... where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts",Geoff Hinton: "the greatest risks is not that chatbots w…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

One of my favourite writers/thinkers on all things digital future is "finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media..."

Jon Stokes thinks "people are talking about this chatbot in unhelpful ways... anthropomorphizing ... [and] not working with a practical, productive understanding of what the bot’s main parts are and how they fit together."So he wrote this explainer."At the heart of ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that belongs to the family o…

"You Are Not a Parrot and a chatbot is not a human" - an interview/profile of Emily M. Bender, the "computational linguist at the University of Washington ... [who] co-wrote the octopus paper... to illustrate what ... LLMs ... can and cannot do"The paper: "Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Ag…

Wired's rules for using generative AI: "Not for images, yes for research, no for copyediting, maybe for idea generation". Meanwhile interactive book PromptCraft shows how to "get the most out of the creative man/machine communications... AI is like querying our collective intelligence".So how best to design an AI prompt?…

"the distributed/federated digital garden approach is the way to go for knowledge commoning... cribbing from ActivityPub's local, global, and 'those-you-follow' timelines... you could have local, 'those-you-follow', and global gardens... [with] some kind of liquid democracy", and interest-based groups, perhaps s…

"a modern version of del.icio.us meets Roam... a searchable, interconnected repository of the most insightful content on the Internet" - and a pretty interesting example of convergent evolution vis a vis myhub.ai

When James West "joined a small wave of users granted early access" to the new Bing (I'll call and tag it "BingGPT"), powered by the same LLM behind ChatGPT, which is "a great party trick ... powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks", he soon "noticed strange inconsist…

Proof that one of the myhub revenue streams exists: "pay once, and you get lifetime access to my growing list of notes from the books I’m reading. If you went out and bought all of these books, you’d pay around $3,000. If you then spent the 3-6 hours reading each book, and 1-2 hours taking notes on them, it’d take you anywhere from 800 – 1,60…

"I spent a few minutes in conversation with ChatGPT."This was both me kicking ChatGPT's conversational tyres and exploring its limits, both those it admits to and those it does not.Key takeaways from a first reading:Many, but not all, content creators are screwedFor "writers, journalists, copywriters, consultants, and even publ…

ChatGPT... is going to change our world much sooner than we expect, and much more drastically

A research project which aims "to find data structures and interfaces that support synthesis and innovation in a decentralized discourse graph".Appropriately enough, it's presented as a hypertext notebook, built using Quartz, so "click on what is interesting... hypertext notebooks are designed for exploratory browsing. In a lin…