TechCrunch: “An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now, users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: June 2024
OpenAI Is Just Facebook Now
The Atlantic [unpaywalled] “Facing one controversy after the next, the artificial-intelligence company enters a new phase. OpenAI appears to be in the midst of a months-long revolt from within. The latest flash point came yesterday, when a group of 11 current and former employees—plus two from other firms—issued a public letter declaring that leading AI… Continue Reading
Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter
DeVerna MR, Aiyappa R, Pacheco D, Bryden J, Menczer F (2024) Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter. PLoS ONE 19(5): e0302201. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302201: “The world’s digital information ecosystem continues to struggle with the spread of misinformation. Prior work has suggested that users who consistently disseminate a disproportionate amount of low-credibility content—so-called superspreaders—are at… Continue Reading
DuckDuckGo Now Lets You Talk to AI Anonymously
Lifehacker: “Chatting with AI has proven to be a bit of a privacy risk as of late, with Meta admitting that it trains its AI by using your conversations with it (among other material posted to its services). Now, privacy-focused search engine and browser company DuckDuckGo is officially giving users a way to claw back… Continue Reading
Notable People
Notable people – “Using data from Morgane Laouenan et al., the map is showing birthplaces of the most “notable people” around the world. Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank. Click below to show people only from a specific category. Made by Topi… Continue Reading
This Hacker Tool Extracts All the Data Collected by Windows’ New Recall AI
Wired [unpaywalled]: “When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed the new Windows AI tool that can answer questions about your web browsing and laptop use, he said one of the “magical” things about it was that the data doesn’t leave your laptop; the Windows Recall system takes screenshots of your activity every five seconds and saves… Continue Reading
ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot
TechCrunch: “ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies for more wide-ranging needs. And that growth has propelled OpenAI itself into… Continue Reading
Close City
“Close.city – “Proximity governs how we live, work, and socialize. Close is an interactive travel time map for people who want to be near the amenities that matter most to them. Close builds on two core principles: Different people will prioritize being near different amenities A neighborhood is only as accessible as its most distant… Continue Reading
The New Generation of Online Culture Curators
The New Yorker [unpaywalled]: “In a digital landscape overrun by algorithms and A.I., we need human guides to help us decide what’s worth paying attention. The current Internet landscape sometimes feels like the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker”: directionless, inexplicable, bound to change in confusing ways. Our social-media feeds don’t offer much except the… Continue Reading
11th Circuit Judge Admits to Using ChatGPT to Help Decide a Case
e-discovery Team: Urges Other Judges and Lawyers to Follow Suit: “The Eleventh Circuit published a ground breaking Concurring Opinion on May 28, 2024 by Judge Kevin C. Newsom on the use of generative AI to help decide contract interpretation issues. Snell v. United Specialty Ins. Co., 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 12733 *; _ F.4th _… Continue Reading
The Liar’s Dividend: The Impact of Deepfakes and Fake News on Politician Support and Trust in Media
“This project, The Liar’s Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability? is joint work between the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. While previous work has addressed the direct effects of misinformation, we propose to study the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians “crying wolf” over fake news. We argue that strategic… Continue Reading
If Google Kills News Media, Who Will Feed the AI Beast?
Vanity Fair [unpaywalled] – “Summarization tools from OpenAI and Google offer a CliffsNotes version of journalism that may further dumb down public discourse and deliver a brutal blow to an already battered media business…we’re on the cusp of a similar phenomenon with the new wave of AI summarization tools being launched by OpenAI, Google, and… Continue Reading
