Artificial intelligence has been deployed to handle facial recognition, recommend movies, and auto-complete your typing. The news that CNET had been using it to generate entire stories, however, sent a ripple of anxiety through the news media for its seeming threat to journalists. The robot-brained yet conversational ChatGPT can produce copy without lunch or bathroom breaks and…
The story goes like this: A man goes to a morgue in Galilee, RI to look at a body that had been identified as him. “Nope,” he said, “that ain’t me.” Then he left. 84 years after premature reports of his death, the late Charles Keville is going viral. Background on this story from The…
“To begin our hoax scenario, we intended to build participants’ trust in the machine by pretending that it could decode their preferences and attitudes,” the study authors wrote. “The system included a sham MRI scanner and an EEG system, that supposedly used neural decoding driven by artificial intelligence (AI).” […] In other words, participants were…
Ad Fontes Media Similar:Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia School of Journalism ReportSloppy journalism can ruin lives. Check …AcademiaDescent, Part 1 (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 26) Data experiences disturbing…Rewatching ST:TNG Data plays poker wi…CultureTime article with clickbaity headline: Web users annoyed by marketing tricksThis Time magazine article is a good one…CybercultureAnd Now for…
Similar:My 4Cs StoryI chaired a session on Friday, and gave …AcademiaCanada's Globe and Mail Uses Expandable Inline Meta-articles to Explain Its CoverageJournalism matters. Educated citizens wh…CybercultureGood example of ‘do NOT remove things from photos.’Hat tip to my former student Kiley Fisch…BusinessPopulating my simulation with a crowd. Tweaking and experimenting. #unity3d #medievalyork …PersonalPerchance to Dream: LARPing…
Get a load of the upholstery on that chair! This is a 3D visualization of the bridge of the fantasy interplanetary cruiser I created for an epic, interactive, episodic bedtime story I told my kids from about 2007-2012. Elsewhere the ship has more steampunk elements, but this part of the ship is more neo-Victorian. Something…
YouTube commenter Bob Hepple writes, “Two minds about this. On the one hand – wow! OTOH – my mental imagery (of the original 1977 Crowther and Woods Adventure game, I never played Zork as such) is so strong and precious that I kinda hate watching someone else’s version. Much like how I hate the LotR…
Similar:The Loss (#ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 10) Troi's Empathic Sense FlatlinesRewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….EmpathyNotes on watching "Aliens" for the first time again, with a bunch of kids”This movie has so many cliches in it,” …CultureJJ Abrams announces fourth rebooted Star Trek movie“We are thrilled to say that we are hard…Current_EventsChildren of Time…
Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour. —Guardian Similar:I sometimes…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir is less than thrilled with Garak’s gift of a holographic adaptation of a Cardassian “enigma tale,” and explains he’s testy about his impending 30th birthday. Quark seems relieved when Bashir shoots down a shady client’s hopes of buying “biomemetic gel.” Bashir later finds that same customer (a bumpy-faced reptilian named Altovar) ransacking…
I was born in 1968 and grew up with reruns of TOS. I can only remember seeing a handful of episodes for the first time (and those are some of my earliest memories). Some of the episodes are awful, and the third season is overall very weak. You can be a Trek fan without loving…
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The episode starts with O’Brien on the floor, as Bashir exposits that he was exposed to plot contrivance particles. On his way to meet a Romulan delegation, Sisko passes rowdy, drunken Klingons whose ship is in for repairs. O’Brien, trying to relax, talks Quark into setting up a dart board. He’s about to…
Similar:Identity Crisis (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 4 Episode 18) The Case of LaForge’s Disapp… Rewatching ST:TNG An enjoyable …MediaWanted in College Graduates: Tolerance for Ambiguity”What answer do you want?” “Just tell…AcademiaJimmy Kimmel Reveals "Worst Twerk Fail EVER – Girl Catches Fire" PrankBrilliant. The combination of a looks-to…AmusingPeople we have a hole in the floorCurrent_EventsIn journalism,…
Not only is this a fantastic story about language and culture and colonialism, it’s also a great example of how a talented PR writer used journalistic storytelling strategies to turn a scholarly study into an appealing narrative. We start with a very specific, very personal story about a man returning home for his father’s funeral.…
Similar:The Miller of the Dee; by James Baldwin; read by Dennis JerzI showed up at the recording studio for …AestheticsOn the way to closing night of "Orphans."PersonalThe barbican at Mickelgate was pulled down in the 1800s but I made a rough approximation f…AestheticsReaders Are Liars: The 1928 Study That Predicted the Future of NewsThe invention…
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first talkie The Jazz Singer, the songs “Ol Man River” from Showboat and “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and the novels To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder) and the first Hardy Boys novel will (finally) enter the common domain in 2023. I chose my…
Similar:GIFs, memes and liveblogs: The controversial new language of book reviewingSalon has an interesting essay on multim…AestheticsA Thursday throwback to end 2015.PersonalNerd Break! Listening To: Wilhelm Scream / Castle Thunder / Amen Break (While Watching Lig…In order to provide some context for a b…AestheticsLook what mysteriously appeared outside my office door!PersonalSuch pictures fill my weekday…
I’m consciously fighting confirmation bias by sharing some claims that I intuitively (irrationally?) doubt. Contrary to widespread beliefs, the share of misinformation in most people’s information diet is minimal, conspiracy theorising does not seem to have increased in recent years, and those who consume high rates of misinformation are largely hyper-partisans or dogmatists anyway. Moreover, even when people’s…
Similar:Reliving memories and saying goodbye to my late colleague Sr. Ann Infanger.Reliving memories and saying goodbye to …PersonalAs I was preparing to take this screenshot, two more papers came in.I still have odd jobs to tie up, but I’m…AcademiaHamlet. #tobePersonalA Pox On Your Listicle ClickbaitYup, seeing “1 of 21” at the top of your…BusinessFather David…