2023: AI gatecrashed our party. (Try getting the confetti out of your hair.) Plus, Print lives!
The year my 'digital media' students began publishing an analog newspaper!
Not to alarm you, but this year the ‘Doomsday Clock’ was forwarded to… 90 seconds from midnight. Ten seconds up since last year. It appears that we’re happily ticking along….
Speaking of timing, in the next eight minutes of your time I will focus on just four topics as we close the year: Newspapers and AI.
Writers and page editors of our student newspaper.
Focus# 1: News
If a newspaper falls in the forest, will anyone read the 12 point Times New Roman fine print before it turns to compost?
Why newspapers? Think of news as the blood corpuscles that keep all other functions of society running. From my rudimentary knowledge of biology, like these red and white cells that transport oxygen, information that surges through our systems keeps us ticking. We who scrape our news off apps tend to forget that news is (still) produced by journalists who don’t work for free. Just because their stories show up in our feeds for free, doesn't make it free to produce. Someone's got to pay a salary to the fellow who walks the street, sits in at the courthouse with a notepad, presses the politician for comment, talks to a whistleblower in a dark parking garage, fact-checks the press release that is 80% BS, writes up the story or script, works with the sub-editor, and produces the story that hits Google News a few hours before it even lands on the newspaper rack in dawn's early light.
And still, we insult 'The media' as if it is some sweatshop. We tend to give Amazon a pass for listing crappy foreign-made products with fake reviews, but we attack the Press as if it were one gargantuan cabal run by Warren Buffet.
I say this because I try to teach students 'media' and journalism in its many amorphous forms. I teach them how to write stories, interview subjects, fact check, and do their homework on an interviewee before they get five minutes of her time. Then, they must take their notes and craft the story in a way that someone may read and be enlightened. If we don't preserve storytelling and story craft at a young age, we may end up with the journalism we fear we have. We may be overrun by the meme makers, the conspiracy theory factories that quote fake doctors and researchers, the angry consumers of TikTok headlines who don't care who wrote the story, nor care to read beyond paragraph one because an influencer had a sexier take on it.
Without news we may end up with…deoxygenated blood that shuts down our vitals. (News, like leukocytes, also gives us immunity but that’s another topic.)
Despite this it’s the toxic stuff that rules. The phrase, "I saw it somewhere on the Internet" turns more heads than "I read the full report." (If you're over 50 you know that "I saw it on Facebook" carries even more gravitas —and gets more shares.) While Facebook ‘news’ wanes, TikTok new spreads like wildfire. Some think it’s not the enemy of journalism.
Fun Fact: Journalists back in the day referred to a tiktok as a short, snippet of a story.
Focus# 2: A.I.
It’s barely a year since AI showed up at our door with a funny hat, uninvited. But what it slipped into the punch bowl has had many side effects. We have learned very quickly that AI is prone to ‘hallucinations.’ Yeah! What they mean by hallucinations is, when data fed into the machines is biased, too complex, and the machines cannot recognize patterns in ‘unseen data’ it gulps down. For instance, Google’s chatbot, Bard (The also-ran in the ChatGPT arms race) incorrectly claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took the world’s first images of a planet outside our solar system. I’ve conducted my own quiet experiments with ChatGPT, and Bard, and have been spectacularly disappointed. I’m still open to seeing how we could someday use it as a tool, just as we do use Wikipedia, despite the bad mojo it had when it first appeared in 2001.
Are you OK with the fact that machines were trained on language patterns stolen from the Internet - blog sites, Wikipedia, Amazon reviews, books etc? Singers and songwriters (any Ed Sheeran fans?) get sued when a line from a song seems like there’s copyright infringement,1 but we give a pass to machines. Why? What we once called crowdsourcing and plagiarism is considered ‘Generative AI.’ Interestingly, the intelligence gleaned from a “human crowd” is sometimes considered better because it increases the range of ideas compared to LLMs.2 But few seem to care, punch drunk, genuflecting at the altar of OpenAI going, “oooh, aaah!!” Even if they care, there’s no way to break up the party.
And then there was the recent mutiny in the OpenAI organization, over a purported discovery of something that was internally called Q* that employees feared could threaten humanity (so the report goes). Enough to make the folks who control the doomsday clock jittery!
Focus# 3: Social Media Reforms With Teeth
The optimistic story I’ve come across about social media. Remember the movie Social Dilemma on Netflix? Some of the folks involved in revealing how algorithms mess with our brains, came up with a ‘reform’ document with tangible, workable fixes for the platforms. There is a large body of evidence from several countries that it is harming teens. So they came up with something called Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) for online platforms to design their services with the best interests of children in mind. The UK’s Information Commission’s Office offers a good model. 3
The code focuses on many factors such as changing the default settings, data sharing restrictions, prohibition of ‘nudging’ techniques, parental controls and much more. Many states have introduced bills 4
Focus# 4: A ‘Bookshelf’ for my Student Authors.
It’s that time of year when my students write, design, format, edit, and publish their eBooks. It’s a ‘summative’ proof of all they’ve mastered. They love it (after a week of panicking)! Topics range from history and scary YA fiction (lots of these!), to nature, sports, family values, and fantasy. I always have surprising topics. Like this book, a guide for first-time ‘Aquarists.’
This semester, I switched to FLIPHTML5, one heck of a portal that lets me set up bookshelves for each class. The one above is my 1st Period class.
Why do they still love books in the age of gamification, social media distraction and AI? I have my own reasons. Which is why I love teaching this in a class that used to be a ‘keyboarding’ class.
In the spirit of wishing you a happy new year, let me leave you with something on a lighter note.
Forget the Chinese balloon that drifted into our airspace this year. Something else was shot down. Words!
Earlier this year publishers of Roald Dahl’s books (Charlie and the chocolate factory, James and the giant peach etc) in a fit of political correctness said it would publish a some of his books with ‘offensive language’ — words like fat, and ugly - replaced.
Vivek Ramaswamy, in a rush to get to the Oval Office, called TikTok “digital fentanyl” even though he has a presence on the platform.
Merriam Webster’s pick for ‘word of the year’ was the letter X, after it became a replacement for Twitter that was laid to rest. Runners up were ‘meta,’ and 'chat.’
But wait! One of these stories is not true. Your challenge is to guess which one. Or go ask your favorite AI app, and see if it could do better than you.
Thank you for reading this far, and subscribing. Have a wonderful Christmas, and here’s looking forward to 2024. Please check out for my new podcast, Wide Angle.
Footnotes - just in case you want to be sure I did not get AI to write this newsletter:
Ed Sheeran’s case in which he, Warner Music and Sony Music were sued in 2017. The claim was about "Thinking Out Loud" He won the case. https://www.reuters.com/legal/lets-get-it-on-songwriters-estate-drops-ed-sheeran-copyright-verdict-appeal-2023-09-21/
“The Crowdless Future? How Generative AI Is Shaping the Future of Human Crowdsourcing.” Léonard Boussioux, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic, and Karim R. Lakhani. Harvard Business School, 2023
Oregon, SB 196 - a bill to get platform owners to act like adults, is just one of them. https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023r1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/SB196/Introduced