Planes with loose bolts, Cars with ChatGPT, Deep Fakes. 2024 is off to the races!

We recently played Monopoly, but this time we allowed ourselves ‘protectionism’ deals with property swaps. In case you don’t know what this means, it’s when you agree to under-the-table deals. Let’s say you exchange ‘Park Avenue’ for cash, plus an agreement that you don’t have to pay rent in case you land on any of the other blue properties. The game was contentious but fun! It was after all a game. (There are no ‘regulators’ to prevent bad behavior.) In real life, though, that’s not that funny. Someone pays.

Like that ‘plug’ that blew out of a Boeing Max aircraft early January. An apt metaphor for games airlines play with regulators looking the other way. After the media ruckus, the apologies came on cue. (It’s easy to cry on camera and apologize.)

But beyond loose bolts, we get scammed. I saw this story how Delta airlines and others have become ‘banks with wings.’ This triumvirate between banks, credit cards and airlines is a game of Monopoly in which they make the rules as they go. It might make you want to cancel your airline miles program, and credit card. (I did.)

Air AI wants to talk—Nonsense.

I received a text message from an AI app that was so annoying, it has become a case study in my class. The app is called Live Human AI. I had just got my students to understand what AI is, and how these apps are ‘trained.’ The subject line of the email was this: “I Have a FREE GIFT Just For You, Johnny” So salesy. So lame to call me Johnny. This was a follow-up to a phone call I had received a week prior, in which I ended up pranking the call, and got ‘it’ off my back. What I felt was this was AI that wasn’t ready for prime time; they were just using us as bait. Jasper is doing similar things, calling it ‘AI chat that feels surprisingly human.’

I’m still trying to figure out why we need a bot to sound human. Is there some short supply of humans to chat with? Are we so bankrupt with ideas that we need help with prompts? There’s even a cottage industry of prompt marketplaces. Below are just a few from Etsy.

AI + DNA + Facial Recognition = What?

I asked my class to discuss the ethical dilemma of using DNA and facial recognition to solve crimes. (Check the story by Dhruv Mehrota in Wired. ) Is it in our best interests when AI could be used to generate a 3D image of a person, and then check if there is a match against a database of faces? What happens when we let the algorithms decide on the match. Algorithms are great in some spaces. But even Tesla is having numerous recalls, because its software is, still, janky.

Still on the AI newsbeat, you probably heard of X’s problem involving Taylor Swift. Enough said! Or how about your next car with ChatGPT as a voice assistant? This was featured at CES in Vegas this month. Volkswagen is onto it for “Enriching conversations, clearing up questions, interacting in intuitive language.” When everyone’s asleep, or listening to their own music during that long drive, it must be nice to talk to your car.

All The News That Fit To Print. Inhouse

I like to end with some news about news. Despite the death knell of newspapers, we printed our third edition of the student newspaper, Charger Times this week. My Media students wrote a bulk of the articles. It’s also available as a neat digital read, with a page curl effect as you flip pages. Click on the image below for a peek.

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