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Daily Archives: December 12, 2023

How Twitter Broke the News

The Verge: “Here is a very dumb truth: for a decade, the default answer to nearly every problem in mass media communication involved Twitter. Breaking news? Twitter. Live sports commentary? Twitter. Politics? Twitter. A celebrity has behaved badly? Twitter. A celebrity has issued a Notes app apology for bad behavior? Twitter. For a good while, the most reliable way to find out what a loud noise in New York City was involved asking Twitter. Was there an earthquake in San Francisco? Twitter. Is some website down? Twitter. The sense that Twitter was a real-time news feed worked in both directions: people went on Twitter to find out what was going on, and reporters, seeing a real-time audience of people paying attention to news, started talking directly to those people. Twitter knew this and played right into it. In 2009, co-founder Biz Stone wrote that the platform had become a “new kind of information network” and that the prompt in the tweet box would now be, “What’s happening?”  “Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about,” he wrote. In short, Twitter was for the news…

reporters around the world provided Twitter with real-time news and commentary for free, increasingly learning to shape stories for the algorithm instead of their actual readers. Meanwhile, the media companies they worked for faced an exodus of their biggest advertising clients to social platforms with better, more integrated ad products, a direct connection to audiences, and no pesky editorial ethics policies. The news became ever smaller, even as the stories got bigger — there are would-be reporters in every part of the country and world posting for free, even as the local news business itself dries up. Twitter was founded in 2006. Since that year, newspaper employment has fallen 70 percent, and people in more than half of the counties in America have little to no local news at all…”

Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Choi, Jonathan H. and Monahan, Amy and Schwarcz, Daniel, Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (November 7, 2023). Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-31, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4626276 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4626276 : “We conduct the first randomized controlled trial of AI assistance’s effect on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned sixty students at the… Continue Reading

Your Browser Has a Hidden Setting That Will Speed Up the Web

Gizmodo: “A lot of us now spend much of our work and leisure time peering at the web through a browser—and for that time to be spent as productively as possible, the browser in question needs to run swiftly and smoothly. There’s actually an integrated browser setting to help with this, too: Hardware acceleration. While… Continue Reading

Judges Given the OK to Use ChatGPT in Legal Rulings

Gizmodo: “Robots may help determine your legal fate if you end up in a British court. The UK Judicial Office issued guidance Tuesday permitting judges to use ChatGPT and other AI tools to write legal rulings and perform several other tasks. “The use of Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) throughout society continues to increase, and so does… Continue Reading

Google’s Antitrust Loss to Epic Could Preview Its Legal Fate in 2024

The New York Times: “Google’s loss was swift after a monthlong antitrust trial in a San Francisco federal court. A little more than three hours after a jury had begun deliberating on Monday, they returned with their verdict. There were 11 antitrust claims that Epic Games, the maker of the hit videogame Fortnite, had brought… Continue Reading

AI – Agencies Have Begun Implementation but Need to Complete Key Requirements

Artificial Intelligence: Agencies Have Begun Implementation but Need to Complete Key Requirements, GAO-24-105980 Published: Dec 12, 2023. Publicly Released: Dec 12, 2023. “Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the world and could improve government operations. For example, federal agencies can use AI to analyze drone photos and large datasets. But safeguards are needed to manage AI… Continue Reading