ABrockwell @aebrockwell@qoto.org

It's endlessly amazing -- or maybe not, since it keeps happening -- that Big Journalism treats Trump like their assignment editor and even copy editor.

The NY Times, for example, headlines its story today about the Trump criminal trial in NY "a case related to hush money paid to a porn star."

No, it's about (among other things) falsifying financial records to keep the public in the dark before the 2016 election.

@jenniferplusplus
Tangential thought:

The current LLM craze reminds me a •lot• of late-19C-early-20C spiritualism (attempts to communicate with the dead, seances and all that). There’s a deep hunger for it to be real. And it almost seems possible! And smart, famous people keep buying in (Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr. Logic)! And there’s obvious reason to doubt, but…tantalizing pieces of evidence keep surfacing! And yes, one thing after another keeps turning out to be smoke and mirrors, but…but but….

You won't be surprised that one of the Trump era's most ardent and prolific liars, and key election denier, has been hired by NBC "News" -- because that's how Big Journalism rolls these days. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/22/media/ronna-mcdaniel-nbc/index.html

Dear New York Times et al,

He was never a successful businessman.

1. He inherited 400 million dollars and turned that into zero dollars.
2. He went bankrupt 7 times.
3. Some of those bankruptcies were casinos, literally a licence to print money which he couldn't manage.
4. He conned kids with cancer out of money once. That's why he can't run a charity anymore.
5. The following business ventures no longer exist or are insolvent:
a. Trump Steaks
b. Trump University
c. Trump Mortgage
d. Trump Vodka
e. Trump: The Game
f. Trump Ice
g. GoTrump.com
h. Trump Magazine
i. The New Jersey Generals
j. Trump Airlines
k. Trump Entertainment Resorts (filed for bankruptcy FOUR TIMES)
l. Trump Tower Tampa
m. Trump Taj Mahal
n. The Trump Plaza
o. Trump Castle
p. Plaza Hotel
q. Trump Media and Technology Group
r. Truth Social
s. Trump Shuttle, Inc
t. Trump Fire
u. Trump Power
v. Trump's American Pale Ale
w. Trump Marina
x. Trump Casino, Indiana
y. Trump Style
z. Trump World Magazine
aa. Trumpnet, LLC
ab. Trump Entrepreneur Initiative
ac. Trump Fragrances
ad. Empire by Trump
ae. Trump Mattress
af. Tour de Trump
ag. Trump Network
ah. Trumped!
ai. Trump Menswear
aj. Trump Home
ak. Success by Trump
al. Trump Hotel Bedding Line
am. Donald J. Trump Eyeglasses
an. Donald Trump Regency Lighting
ao. Select by Trump Coffee
6. Of the 16 companies that were manufacturing Trump-branded products in 2015, only 2 remain in business less than 10 years later. Neither of those companies are American. One is located in Panama and the other is located in Turkey.

Stop saying "successful businessman". My little company founded in 2014 has been in business longer, employs more people, and makes more income than 99% of his ventures. The difference between him and me is access to capital, which means he gets unlimited bites at the apple, and I get just this one if I'm lucky.

Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”

VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”

Tik-Tok's privacy invading data collection practices and their algorithmic manipulation of users are both terrible, and completely emblematic of every major US-based social media company, all of which do the same thing.

Bringing Tik-Tok under American control does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

#tiktok

One of the main points I got from Barb McQuade's book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, is that with social media our metaphors of speech & debate are out of date & they're being used against us.
I still hear, “I don’t like what they have to say, but I’ll fight to the death their right to say it!”
Does that mean you’ll defend to the death the “right” of 5,000 bots out of Russia to amplify intentional lies about our election?
https://digbysblog.net/2024/03/15/our-old-metaphors-on-speech-debate-are-broken-by-new-tech-says-barb-mcquade/
#Disinformation

Elsevier, everyone's favorite copyright maximalist closed-access publisher, argues that their high costs are necessary because they're the arbiter of quality.

The arbiter of quality keeps publishing LLM-written papers. Thanks for making my argument for me, Elsevier! They didn't even read it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043324001298

"In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I'm very sorry, but I don't have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model."

Based on my experiences in academic medicine, this is painfully true

#academia #research

#AI #GenerativeAI #Education #Humanities: "We do not pretend that the work of reining in tech monopolies, setting up robust guardrails, and “building the worlds that we need” is a project for academics alone. It is, rather, the work of a generation (beginning with our students) and will involve diverse communities, experts of many kinds, and collaborators across the globe.

As the problems with “AI”-driven search already suggest, the polarized landscape that social media helped to usher in about a decade ago cannot be repaired in a world in which tech behemoths flood the internet with unreliable bots that generate ostensibly magical “knowledge.” According to Chirag Shah and Emily M. Bender, the idea that “AI” can navigate contested terrain by flagging “disagreement” and synthesizing links to “both sides” is hardly sufficient. Such illusions of balance obscure the need to situate information and differentiate among sources: precisely the critical skills that college writing was designed to cultivate and empower.

The point is not for educators to kill ChatGPT on the mistaken assumption that it obviates the need for humanistic labor, knowledge, and experience. Rather, precisely because it does no such thing, the time has come to cut through the hype, and claim a seat at the table where tech entrepreneurs are already making their pitch for the future." https://www.publicbooks.org/now-the-humanities-can-disrupt-ai/

@lolgop

The GOP response to Obama brought out their open racism, the GOP response to Hillary brought out their blatant misogyny. The GOP is a party of hate, and their hatred is not confined to just the other party.

Recently I've given a number of public talks on how information tech, including social media, is impacting our ability to make collective societal decisions.

But it was this Q&A session with Rob Brooks at UNSW's Centre for Ideas that I think best captured the story I'm trying to tell. You can here the whole thing in podcast form here:

https://unswcentreforideas.com/article/art-scepticism-data-driven-world

Oh man, I am really excited for the inevitable cryptocurrency hype cycle overlaid on the on-going AI hype cycle.

That's going to be great.

Are the AI people at google ok

It really is hard to overstate how sleazy and inexcusable it is to churn out a constant stream of non-news stories (vaguely disguised op-eds, really) about Biden being too old to lead, based on nebulous feelings and speech foibles that aren’t new.

His age isn’t going to change and barring death or calamity, neither is the reality that he’s going to be the nominee up against a rapist fascist who promises to burn everything down. Pretending this is a real choice is journalistic malpractice.

well that's interesting, https://notbyai.fyi/

Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to hand a victory to Russia, and to weaken American power and credibility. Why?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/one-global-issue-trump-cares-about/677592/

To speak of an LLM system "hallucinating" is both an act of anthropomorphism and an act of marketing.

*All* of the output from an LLM is hallucination, a statistical fever-dream.

Some outputs seem to align with our consensus reality, and the others, we've excused, with a pithy, humanizing name. The term "hallucinating" is disingenuous; it tacitly normalizes unjustifiable assumptions about what "AI" systems can do.

We can stop accepting this term any time we want to.

#AI #LLM #marketing

Modern consumer-facing #AI products perfectly described in 1981 by Shel Silverstein.
♲ piaille.fr/@japonmeneatout/111…

I can find only one major journalism organization -- the Guardian US -- that a) understands the accelerating threats to our democracy; b) relentlessly explains what is happening; and c) has proudly assumed the role of an advocate for saving democracy.

I'm fairly sure that other Big Journalism orgs understand. A (scant) few have even begun to give this the ongoing coverage it requires.

But apart from the Guardian, they can't be bothered to become the advocates we desperately need.