AI's copyright problem. Robots on the streets, spy pigeons, and wall-to-wall Swift.
And a stark milestone on journalists killed in their line of work.
Swift, the ‘tortured poet’ steeped in intrigue.
If students’ Taylor Swift T-shirts are any indication, the Swifty frenzy is at its peak. It spills into politics, football and other weirdness. She does milk the media which gives her new album (curiously titled ‘Tortured poets department’) free publicity; her marketing machine is at full throttle. Swift even mines the ‘easter egg’ department well. She once said that “the best messages are cryptic ones.” But there’s a price to pay.
Conspiracy theory.
The weirdest one I heard of was that Swift might be part of a government psyops. Part of the so-called Deep State that used her to ‘script’ the Super Bowl so that she could help Biden win. She does script things well. She’s a well managed brand trademarking words like ‘Swifties’ and ‘Blank Space,’ and filing lawsuits. All this while writing memorable lyrics. I have to admit I’ve been a Swift fan since she blasted into the country music scene back in the day. So yes, look what she made me do—write two paragraphs about her in an oversaturated media cycle.
Your Cheating AI heart
A student in my class asked me if he could use ChatGPT. I said, “sure—as long as you don’t submit the result as your work.” I then told him about how the algorithm scrapes content off copyrighted material, so while it is doing some plagiarizing, anyone using the result could be doing the same. There is no point in banning these apps. I keep saying that this AI brouhaha is our ‘Wikipedia moment.’ We can’t duck and hide, or barbwire ourselves out of it.
On a related note:
When Ried Southern and Gary Marcus put generative AI to the test (using Dall-E3 and Midjourney) they discovered outright theft going on under the guise of creativity. The problem, they say is the ‘nonconsensual use of copyrighted human work to train machines.’ To put it another way, its plagiarism and copyright violation wrapped in an enigma. Ours not to question the whys and the what’s. Read their Jan 6th Substack newsletter. There’s more detail in their paper.
‘Op-Ed’ About Kids Online Safety & Other Pants on Fire Zones.
I recently gave my students an Op-Ed assignment. I couldn’t have found a greater topic than the children’s privacy which popped up on the 31st of January when Mark Zuckerberg faced withering questioning by senators in yet another deposition. Not just Meta, but TikTok, Snap and Discord. This bill, Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has bi-prtisan support and may even pass in a few days.
There seems to be ‘pants on fire’ everywhere. There’s Boeing, George Santos, some mom influencer, and even Tesla. How could an Op Ed pierce the fog? Instead of dispatching a TikTok screed, how would you put that into words? I’m finding out, and will publish them in my February school newsletter, Charger Times.
Driverless…food delivery
A friend in Cambridge sent me a picture of a robot roaming the streets delivering food. Cambridgeshire County Council partnered with a company to pick up from local stores, and deliver groceries home. More about this here. Is this a picture of the future? I’m not comfortable—and often annoyed—at driverless cars. But then again, there’s a Roomba parked under a table in our home. So maybe we are just crossing that threshold to… giving in? What’s your experience with these bots?
The same company, Starship technologies, has been doing this since 2020 at Arizona State University.
Multimodal What?
Look, as much as I rant about the ethical slippery slopes of AI, I am not against it per se. All I say is we need more guardrails and skepticism. I use a website that transcribes audio into text, and it has added many new features I can barely wrap my head around. The site and the app is called Descript. I received an update that goes like this, promoting AI as your good old buddy:
“If you had a friend who'd read everything on the internet and could recall it in moments; and didn't get exasperated when you repeatedly asked for feedback; and whose feelings would never get hurt when you ignored their input; and who slightly terrified you, because they might subjugate you and turn your house into a data center.”
They go on to explain ‘multimodal systems’ that knits different strands of understanding, as it can ‘listen’ to you and ‘see’ your prompts etc. It’s a bit fuzzy. But my concern is the last line in that previous quote—about turning my house into a data center. Are they being snarky? Or giving us a heads-up that we’re all gonna be chomped up into bits of data to feed a hungry grid.
A Secret Agent Bird?
I was amused at news that a pigeon that flew into India was suspected as being a spy. Turned out the poor bird had lost its way from Taiwan. But it made me think—and I don’t want to propagate a conspiracy theory here—of a pigeon that visited our back yard for months. The handsome fella had a ring around its leg that could have been a transponder. The Mumbai cops thought so, when they noticed two metal rings around their pigeon’s legs, plus ‘what looked like Chinese’ writing on the underside of its wings.
Well, here’s where it gets tricky. The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology has been using dead birds with the help of taxidermy, to create drones. Drones! I am not making this up: China does have a dove drone project. Better do some closer bird watching, huh!
Google’s latest AI: like toothpaste, with more fluoride
In case you missed the news, Google’s AI chatbot, Bard, has been rebranded as Gemini. To Google’s claim that 100 AI experts were impressed by Gemini, Subbarao Kambhampati, a prof at ASU quipped that it’s like saying “eight out of 10 dentists” recommend its brand. He’s School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence and speaks on large language models. I wrote about these bots in a previous newsletter.
Speaking of which, you should watch this TED Talk about whether 9 out of 10 dentists did actually recommend the brand. It’s a quick take on the poor use of statistics to mislead us.
Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killer’ movie
If you get a chance, watch Killers of the Flower Moon. The cast (DiCaprio, De Niro, Lily Gladstone) is terrific. But it’s the story that’s perfect for our times. A corrupt, megalomaniac crime boss exploiting the land, murder, a love story, and an unexpected ending with… a radio drama. It’s Martin Scorsese’s twist in the tail. Next to a good book, movies make us privy to a world we would otherwise have never known.
‘The Elephant in the Room’ problem. Courtesy Chat GPT.
Should we laugh or weep? I saw this in a newsletter by author, Gary Marcus.
Enough said!
Journalists—An endangered species
This month marks a stark milestone. The number of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza has overtaken the number killed in the two-decade conflict in Afghanistan. (Washington Post reports.) CPJ, the Committee to Protect Journalists lists who they were and the work they were doing. Its web page scrolls down for several feet, which gives you an idea of the tragedy.
There is a correlation between the attacks on democracy and attacks on journalists. Isn’t that interesting? While we celebrate our access to information through an abundance of platforms, those who provide that solid core of information are being undervalued, and threatened.
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Thank you for reading this far. And for subscribing to this newsletter. If you found it interesting, please share it with someone. Also, a small plug for my new podcast, Wide Angle. The first episode will be on Media Bias.