Nieman Lab: “Given the amount of attention TikTok has swallowed up from anyone under the age of 30, we might expect it to be a more obsessive focus of news organizations in their efforts to attract younger and more engaged audiences. But TikTok has shown itself to be rather inhospitable to news: It removes links that publishers could use… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Education
Lessig on why AI and social media are causing a free speech crisis for the internet
The Verge: Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig – After 30 years teaching law, the internet policy legend is as worried as you’d think about AI and TikTok — and he has surprising thoughts about balancing free speech with protecting democracy. Nilay Patel: “…Larry and I talked about the current and recurring controversy around react videos on… Continue Reading
The yearly issue of Air Street Capital’s Nathan Benaich slide deck
State of AI Report – Produced by Nathan Benaich and Air Street Capital team: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is a multidisciplinary field of science and engineering whose goal is to create intelligent machines. We believe that AI will be a force multiplier on technological progress in our increasingly digital, data-driven world. This is because everything around… Continue Reading
What Went Wrong with a Highly Publicized COVID Mask Analysis?
Scientific America [read free]: “The COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing, but in May officials ended its designation as a public health emergency. So it’s now fair to ask if all our efforts to slow the spread of the disease—from masking, to hand washing, to working from home—were worth it. One group of scientists has seriously muddied… Continue Reading
Public Case Access
“This new Public Case Access site was created as a result of a collaboration between the Harvard Law School Library and Ravel Law. The company supported the library in its work to digitize 40,000 printed volumes of cases, comprised of over forty million pages of court decisions, including original materials from cases that predate the… Continue Reading
Skimming, scanning, scrolling – the age of deep reading is over
Financial Times (read free): “…Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Stunning numbers of people with years of schooling are effectively illiterate. Admittedly, nostalgics have been whining about new media since 1492, but today’s whines have an evidential basis. To quote this month’s Ljubljana Reading Manifesto, signed by publishers’ and library associations,… Continue Reading
How to fix the internet
MIT Technology Review – If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms. Erik Carter. “We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For… Continue Reading
Introducing The Foundation Model Transparency Index
A new index rates the transparency of 10 foundation model companies and finds them lacking. Katharine Miller – Companies in the foundation model space are becoming less transparent, says Rishi Bommasani, Society Lead at the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), within Stanford HAI. For example, OpenAI, which has the word “open” right in… Continue Reading
OpenAI Finally Allows ChatGPT Complete Internet Access
Gizmodo: “OpenAI’s world-famous chatbot is free to rummage through the internet’s darkest corners. The company declared Tuesday that the “Browse with Bing” feature is ready for prime time for those ChatGPT users paying for Plus or Enterprise editions. This lets ChatGPT access up-to-date information, rather than being limited to the training data that was cut… Continue Reading
Your Personal Information Is Probably Being Used to Train Generative AI Models
Scientific American: “Artists and writers are up in arms about generative artificial intelligence systems—understandably so. These machine learning models are only capable of pumping out images and text because they’ve been trained on mountains of real people’s creative work, much of it copyrighted. Major AI developers including OpenAI, Meta and Stability AI now face multiple… Continue Reading
Climate-exacerbated wildfires cost the U.S. between $394 to $893 billion each year in economic costs, damages
Joint Economic Committee, Democrats – Report [PDF]: “Wildfires represent a growing threat to the health and well-being of communities across the country. The United States has already seen a devastating string of catastrophic wildfires this year in places like Maui, the western United States, and Louisiana as these disasters become more and more damaging due… Continue Reading
How standards editors are sorting through graphic images from Israel and Gaza
Via Poynter: How to avoid misinformation about the war in Gaza When journalists find demonstrators’ views personally offensive Amid images and news of actual war, false and misleading claims about Israel-Hamas thrive How standards editors are sorting through graphic images from Israel and Gaza The basics on Israel, Gaza, Palestine and Hamas for local journalists… Continue Reading
