I check into Musk’s X every few days, but I no longer *use* it as I once did, as a way of learning from credible experts responding to breaking news, and as a way of connecting with colleagues in my field, mostly just listening quietly while they shared their wisdom with each other. I first…
There’s a history of case law protecting the rights of privately owned publishers and social networks to make their own editorial decisions — including algorithmically sorted content. The U.S. Court of Appeals (11th Circuit) ruling in May 2022, which blocked Florida’s law, stated “while the Constitution protects citizens from governmental efforts to restrict their access to social…
So, the sight of Elon Musk charging towards Wikipedia with his trademark guile and delicacy was so predictable that it was almost relaxing. He saw a collective resource that people prized and he wanted to hurt it. Why does Wales even need any money to run Wikipedia in the first place, he wondered on Sunday. You could…
A teenager in Indonesia may not see the same images on Instagram that I do, but the experience is roughly the same: we scroll through some photos from friends or family, maybe see some memes or celebrity posts; the feed turns into Reels; we watch a few videos, maybe reply to a friend’s Story or…
Google Search is already well-known for having gone dramatically downhill in terms of the quality of the results it provides over the past decade. In fact, Google’s deteriorating quality has resulted in techniques like adding “Reddit” to a query to reduce SEO-seeking spam sites and has also increased the popularity of AI chatbots, which apparently provide answers without…
About four years ago I bought an electric mower that was quiet enough that I could listen to audiobooks while doing my suburban adulting duties. The battery held enough charge that I could get about 1/2 of my lawn done at a time so that summer I bought another battery. A couple years later I…
As much as I love escapist science fiction, the way to get to the future for real is to avoid killing each other and ourselves in the present. We can’t count on capitalist techbros selling joyrides to billionaire tourists. People tend to liken space exploration to expansion on Earth—pushing the frontier. But on the edge…
I’ve enjoyed human-written A/V Club articles in the past. I see no reason to seek out articles written by bots that copy existing material word-for-word and add no value. The company G/O, mentioned in the clip below, owns the A.V. Club and is behind the shift to bot-authored articles: “A/V Club [sic] licenses content from…
A very fluffy article that does a good job diving into an everyday thing and sharing expert opinions. While some of these sources are simply random people, others have specialized skills and training that makes their opinions newsworthy enough to provide some substance to a not-exactly-hard-news story. Some of us just can’t get our thoughts…
Be careful of the parts of news stories that rely on ifs and coulds and maybes. Having said that, this is fascinating exploration of what’s at stake. It’s a fact that OpenAI’s business model involved training its large-language model on copyrighted material, without acquiring legal permission to do so, and without any mechanism to share…
I’m sad thinking of all the students whose academic careers and personal intellectual growth will suffer because they depend on generative text software — whether or not they get “caught” for plagiarism. In my mind, the fundamental error that almost everyone is making is in believing that Generative AI is tantamount to AGI (general purpose…
In a writing-intensive class, students need to write extensively to the point that the teacher cannot possibly grade all of it. — Edutopia via NCTE Good advice from an article by Kara Douma, reprinted by NCTE. I need to hear that. The referees don’t score every practice. The coaches don’t give you feedback after…
The results showed that out of the 512 questions, 259 (52%) of ChatGPT’s answers were incorrect and only 248 (48%) were correct. Moreover, a whopping 77% of the answers were verbose. […] According to the study, the well-articulated responses ChatGPT outputs caused the users to overlook incorrect information in the answers. “Users overlook incorrect information…
OpenAI has already taken a toll on human workers. It’s chilling to contemplate that students and creatives are comfortable with relying on this product in any meaningful way. The business model depends on devaluing human labor, and benefitting the powerful. The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts,…
I just removed from my syllabus template a digitally altered PR image of our school’s namesake St. Elizabeth Ann Seton holding an iPad, because iPads have not been part of the tuition package for a couple years now. I’ve been an Apple user for about 10 years, since Seton Hill instituted its MacBook plan, and…
Whereas Twitter was once a fountain of authoritative information, X is a platform where trolls can pay a small fee to have their ugly content boosted ahead of reputable sources. X is a platform where identity verification no longer exists and impersonation is only a paid subscription away. X is a platform where journalists are…
We ask students to cite encyclopedia articles, dictionaries, news interviews with experts, and in-person conversations. A generative text-generation tool that scrapes published work and uses a statistical model to emulate a response that mimics the way the humans in its database have responded to similar prompts is formally something like a conversation, and the MLA’s…
