“Today, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) released Generating Harms II: Generative AI’s New & Continued Impacts, a follow-up report that expands on the harms detailed in last year’s Generating Harms report. The new report includes a deep dive into four new issue areas and explores the different remedies and enforcement actions that are being… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: May 2024
Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good
Pluralistic: “The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to “AI search” – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you’ll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web: https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/ – Google bills this as… Continue Reading
The Secret to Talking to an AI Chatbot
WSJ via MSN: “Want to get the best answers out of an AI? It’s all in how you talk to it. Tell it, for instance, to pretend it is Albert Einstein. Or that somebody’s life depends on the response. Or that it needs to stay focused on its goals. Prodding an artificial-intelligence chatbot is nothing… Continue Reading
The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment
PNAS – The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment. Crossref DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2321584121, Published Online: 2024-05-13. Published Print: 2024-05-21 Significance – We provide the largest-scale evidence available to date on the effect of Facebook and Instagram access on political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior in a presidential election season. This… Continue Reading
Webinar – Environmental Law and the Things We Need to Build
Join the Witkin State Law Library and Professor Dave Owen for a free live webinar on “Environmental Law and the Things We Need to Build” on Tuesday, June 11, 2024 at 6PM. Is environmental law keeping us from building important things—and from building things that would be good for the environment? Recently, that question has… Continue Reading
Greenhouse gas giants
Data is Plural: “Carbon Majors, run by the UK-based InfluenceMap, “is a database of historical production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers.” It attributes to these producers 1,421 metric gigatons of CO2-equivalent emissions from 1854 through 2022. Launched last month, the database provides downloads at several levels of… Continue Reading
1 million ChatGPT conversations
Via Data Machina via Data is Plural – 1 million ChatGPT conversations. “The WildChat Dataset, constructed by Wenting Zhao et al., “is a corpus of 1 million real-world user-ChatGPT interactions, characterized by a wide range of languages and a diversity of user prompts.” The researchers, primarily affiliated with Cornell and the Allen Institute for AI,… Continue Reading
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
500 songs – “For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we take a short look at the song’s writers,… Continue Reading
How the Pandemic Reshaped American Gun Violence
The New York Times: “Taking a stroll around the neighborhood is a routine activity for many Americans. Yet for 47 million people — about one in seven — such a walk would pass near the location of a recent gun homicide. The number of people living this close to fatal violence grew drastically during the… Continue Reading
How to prepare for another season of wildfire smoke
Vox: “Several US states are again experiencing an influx of wildfire smoke as Canada’s summer fire season gets underway. Due to the scale of the wildfires and natural weather patterns, enormous amounts of smoke are drifting southward — much like last year. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota are among the earliest states to… Continue Reading
PolitiFact launches Spanish-language website to serve more than 40 million U.S. Spanish-speakers
“Poynter’s PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning fact-checking newsroom, is pleased to announce the launch of a new Spanish-language experience, PolitiFact en Español, to help more than 40 million Spanish-speakers in the U.S. sort out the truth in politics. A new Spanish-language website and a related social media presence are the culmination of an effort that began… Continue Reading
Are home prices still rising? See how prices have changed in your area
Washington Post: “Many first time home buyers are struggling to break into the U.S. housing market as prices continue to rise. Since 2019, home prices have surged 54 percent. In the last year, prices increased 5.8 percent — a more steady rise after the volatile years of the early pandemic, according to a Washington Post… Continue Reading
