What Just Happened?
The Aussie social media ban, Sri Lanka's landslide election. Google's AI goes rogue.
Have you run into the annoying new AI result on Google? This feature is called ‘AI Overviews.’ Or more specifically (to give you the AI overview response) it’s this:
AI Overviews are summaries of a topic that appear at the top of Google Search results. They're generated by generative AI, which is experimental.
Do we really need synthetic response? Worse, some AI is going off the rails, as we discovered on Friday. Google’s swanky AI called Gemini told an inquiring student to basically end his life.
As I have said before the Big Tech bros are experimenting with us, using us as specimens, and when the sushi hits the fan, they come up with pathetic explanations. This time, here’s what Google said:
"Large language models can sometimes respond with nonsensical responses, and… (yada, yada etc.)… and we've taken action to prevent similar outputs from occurring."
Right! Not: beware, “our AI language model is acting like Elon Musk so please stay at least 1000 feet away.” But, in other words, “stuff happens. Suck it up.”
WHAT JUST HAPPENED IN THE US?
Shaking your head about US elections? Some of you readers outside the country have messaged us in spades on WhatsApp about it. (I’m having a meme overdose right now!) Pundits, journalists, and people like us around the dinner table all have theories about what just happened.
The New Yorker has a piece called ‘ambient messaging’ — the idea that specifics don’t resonate anymore, because “big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide” is what wins the day. To my mind, this suggests that ‘noise’ works. Noise, made-up ‘facts’ and conspiracy theories. Big sloppy, laughable ‘stuff’ that’s parodied on Saturday Night Live. Or sound-bytes and screenshots primed for Instagram, Telegram and whatever-grams people sink their eyes into.
Here’s my take on it, called MINISTRY OF TRUTH
Bring up the signals, cue the noise,
Patch in the proxies, talking-head decoys;
Waterproof tropes learned from monarchs before us,
Sound bytes so sexy—wait! their wrapping is porous;
That's all now folks, pay up your dues,
Oh please, genuflect to the nine o'clock news.
You gave him the throne and the airtime, forsooth,
So listen and learn from the ministry of truth.
THEY DO READ AND WRITE AFTER ALL
Please don’t keep saying ‘Johnny can’t read.’ Some do, and many of them write quite well. While I rail against the death of reading, by and large my students always, always surprise me around this time of the year. Next week 130 of them will be completing their eBooks, which I will upload to a public website.
Here are some titles they are working on.
“The Purge,” “Flavorful Journeys,” ‘Watch Your back,” “Secretly Switched,” “Web of Lies,”, ‘First Date," “A Tale of Pollack Acres,” “Sherlock Holmes And The Living Dead,” “Havoc,” “Elemental Weapons,” “Ink Stains,” “How To Code,” “A Visit to the Stanley Hotel,” “Spiderman,” and “World War 2.”
AUSSIES TAKE THE LEAD
This was the news I was waiting for. Not just a school district or a state, but a country taking the bold step to declare that social media is harmful to young people. “Just as alcohol is an age-restricted product these are age-restricted services” said the Australian communications minister, Michelle Rowland
A Supercomputer Controversy
The massive data center in south Memphis (hyped, as usual as a “gigafactory for super-computing’) has raised an alarm among residents. This AI project, called xAI is backed by Elon Musk. Residents are concerned about its massive impact on their electric grid and water. One report on NPR states that this will require “a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 100,000 homes per year.”
SRILANKANS GIVE PRESIDENT A HUGE THUMBS UP
This week, the party of the new president won parliamentary seats by a landslide. The snap elections had been called by the new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, (AKD). He is a relative outsider with a refreshing vision, compared to those of his predecessors whose administrations were rife with nepotism and corruption on an enormous scale.
The best media coverage of his economic policies, and for context of his populist party, I recommend watching the stories by Minelle Fernandez who has been reporting for Al Jazeera for more than a decade.
Yes, I am biased. Minelle is the daughter of my cousin, Jean Fernandez whom some of you may remember from her career in advertising in the nineties.
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