Having a blast from the past this morning. I’m having a quick coffee at the Bridge Café. I used to be a regular here in the pre-pandemic days, when Journalism.co.uk held its training courses here.
I’m off round to corner to run an in-house training course, but it’s nice to revisit the past.
Mike Masnick on who goes MAGA:
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.
The same could be said to be true of rise of Reform in the UK.
Is the AI bubble about to burst?:
The neuroscientist Eric Hoel calls this the “supply paradox of AI”: “the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.”
Man follows ChatGPT’s advice – and so poisons himself:
As described in a new paper published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, a 60-year-old man ended up coming down with an all-but-defunct condition known as “bromism” after ChatGPT suggested he replace sodium chloride, which is better known as table salt, with sodium bromide, a substance used in pesticides, pool and hot tub cleaners, and as a canine anticonvulsant.
We need to keep teaching people that LLMs are guessing machines, not answer engines.
I see that the Generative Engine Optimisation grift is building up speed.
This morning’s links on the dominance of YouTube, the state of university education and Ghostly publishers…
Ignoring the fact that AI produces hallucinations does not make those errors go away: Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part.
Any long term use of GenAI needs a strategy for identifying and eliminating hallucinatory results. And that’s going to have a major impact on the claimed cost/efficiency savings.
Great, deep dive into the financial precariousness of the AI revolution: AI Is A Money Trap
Instagram finally gets the repost:
Oh, every time I have to use Google Analytics, I’m reminded of how throughly GA4 ruined it for editorial people.
Meta is an empty husk of a company with no values, no beliefs, other than growth and dominance for the sake of growth and dominance.
No lies detected.
Having lots of interesting conversations about the overlaps of journalism and the so-called creator economy. This is more fodder for those discussions.
I dawned on me yesterday that I’ve been training journalists for 20 years now.
But I’ve also feel that something needs to change. What is training going to look like as the journalism world shifts fundamentally, away from large publishers, and towards many, many more independent creators?
Ghost gets social and analytical: Ghost 6.0 is here