I’m the cup of sunshine you didn’t order, but are too shy to send back.
Eventually all the computing storage and power used to keep our archives will be transferred to an LLM that summarizes recipe SEO for people too busy to scroll.
“Bad job, Internet: The web gets a little smaller as two decades of culture reporting and criticism disappear in a flash”
“News Corp’s new five-year deal with OpenAI is reportedly valued at as much as $250 million in cash and OpenAI credits.”
News Corp partnering with OpenAI is a no-brainer if you have an ideological desire to be the hegemonic political philosophy threading through the most easily accessible and digestible content. OpenAI is the high-processed food of information and only those without the means to pay for or time to look for better options (which is increasingly more and more of us) will be able to access nuanced and researched discourse.
The “fatal error” is News Corp forgetting that it makes it largest profits as the Adversary.
There was a time, back in the 00s or so, when I kept up to date on a lot of tech news. I spent the time trying to follow trends in web development and mobile technology and apps. It was important to my work, but part of my overall interest in how the Internet was being integrated into our daily lives.
Once I moved away from tech focused work and into education, I let those news feeds go. I purged myself of latest developments and relied on larger, mainstream news outlets to inform me about the technology that would impact my daily life. Yet, as I started teaching first-year composition, I realized (we all realized) that being up-to-date on the technology our students were using (not always by choice either) would make our discussions surrounding critical thinking that much more relevant. Trust me, when ChatGPT burst on to the scene, I suggested we lean into it, teaching it as a new tool that students can use in their ever increasing arsenal of technological apps that can help them… wait. Help them what exactly? What was I supposed to be teaching them? More on that in a moment.
As I’ve reinstated my tech RSS feeds, I find myself getting more and more suspicious about the proliferation of AI. While I’ve not been totally receptive to the computerization of our automobiles, nor the subscription model of everything, I still want to be able to glean the direction personal technology is headed, and, if Microsoft’s recent announcements are any indication, the future is AI.
If you follow my links of interest at all, you can see where this is going?
Who wants this? Why are we being told that we want this? Every time I read about another AI-enhanced laptop or an app that’s I’ve been using suddenly wants me to incorporate their AI model into my workflow, I get frustrated.
If I’m not building up the critical skills to summarize an article (and most public-facing articles are woefully short and simplistic already), what am I doing with the time AI is saving?
What’s the point of learning discernment and curation if I never skip over Google’s AI-created search summaries at the top of its results page? (Shouldn’t have made Google suck, yeah?)
How am I supposed to teach critical thinking skills if all the little ways in which we think every day are being eaten up by language learning models that have dubious bias built in and don’t have an understanding of a ham sandwich outside the fact that sometimes it’s mentioned next to mustard?
More and more I feel like we’re heading into a direction where we will teach two ways of existing cognitively in our technological future: 1) a way to prompt AI to yield results that save us from doing labor or gaining mastery; and 2) a way to avoid the AI altogether and create bare bones text and art in a way that hides it from the upcoming singular cloud. Both feel exhausting.
Meanwhile, a bunch of narcissistic shitheads are at the controls of the future.
Who wants this? With the consolidation of media companies over the last three decades perhaps there’s no distance between journalism and tech any more. Companies that produce software that people have to be sold that they want are intertwined with the media companies that will hype up the usefulness and turn a novelty into a necessity.
I assure you a good copy editor could write this summary (and fast, too) but news outlets have pretty much abandoned good editing of most of their content because 1) it will be replaced immediately, and 2) they don’t want the labor costs. If only someone figured out how news media could monetize without being beholden to social media or browser-breaking ads.
You’re not implying that these two people are ‘rogue animals,’ are you? What a terrible fucking headline! I think every news organization needs to show its headlines and blurbs to a select group of diverse people before letting any of its copy editors’ (or interns’) ClevErnEss out into the world. Cripes!
Ridley Scott Regrets Not Directing Blade Runner Sequel
I love the Blade Runner 2049 we have and realize I’ve not watched Alien: Covenant yet. Also, AV Club saying 2049 is better than the original is just plain stupid. Different eras, subgenres, everything. Comparing apples and batteries.
The Prosecraft Controversy
Dunno, fren. If you want to know how many words are in a memoir, then look at memoirs, not 25,000 different books. I happened to be on “Twitter the X” when this started and it’s down to directly benefiting (lo its tilt or not) off of someone else’s work without their consent and compensation. Also, I don’t know why you would want to sound like another author outside of marketing purposes, I guess.
Conspiracy theories: how social media can help them spread and even spark violence introduces us to the author’s research in how conspiracy theories are spread. What I’m interested in is how I can work this idea into my class discussion of discourse communities. I think this is a good way to connect it to our later technology conversation.
America Already Has An AI Underclass
“In the coming era of AI, can the people doing the tech industry’s grunt work ever be seen and treated not as tireless machines but simply as what they are—human?”
“The program might write multiple recipes for chocolate cake, which a rater ranks and edits.” Does anyone make the cake?
“the machine-learning company Hugging Face” the fuck?
“there’s nothing flexible about precarity”
There’s nothing more I can say that these quotes don’t already convey.
I did not know they made a film based on this chapter from Dracula, but I’m going to try to get to see The Last Voyage of the Demeter before my exams start.
Zoom Returns to the Office
I think there’s a way to make an adjustment without requiring people to be in the office and that’s Zoom Communal spaces- like Zoom sessions with four to five people online working together occasionally chatting and helping each other stay on task. I don’t know why employees don’t do this or maybe they do co-working all the time and companies just need to justify the high rental rates they’re paying for office space.
Seven Books That Will Make You Put Down Your Phone
I will check some of these out now that I took social media off my phone.
The Loneliness Epidemic
A generation of kids who stayed home alone because their parents didn’t make enough money for child care is part of this. Also, Reagan, it’s always Reagan.
I’ve stepped back from consuming social media lately and am starting to feel the effects. My attention is slightly better and I find I have more time during the day to do other things. Important things. I’ve always been a fan of social media, but I think if your main use of platforms is consumption and not creation, it alters the way you think. Not in what you think, but how you think.
So I’ve been trying an experiment. I removed all social media platforms from my phone and kept only my RSS feeds from a few sources and blogs and that’s it. While I can check Facebook or Instagram on my laptop, I make sure to keep it short: a quick drive-by for Happy Birthdays and “care” emojis, and then I’m out. Twitter had been my go-to app and now it’s gone, figuratively and literally.
Now every time I read an article or have an idea I want to share, I put it into my Obsidian daily note. Not only does this give me an archive of the media I’m consuming (and that’s good for when I suddenly find myself saying “I read something just recently…”) it makes me think a little bit more about what I’m reading. No more saving articles to read later, I take the time and if it inspires or enrages me, I write it down in a separate note and log it in my daily media_log.
It’s still new and fresh, so I’m in the ADHD honeymoon phase, but I also wanted to start sharing this on my site, because, I’m not doing anything else with it right now. Let me know if this is helpful.
Listening to NPR’s Up First today and in the case of Trump speaking after his arrest and Alexei Navalny speaking from a Russian jail, both men said that “this isn’t happening to me, this is happening to you” in their public statements.
I’m certainly not comparing the two men, but I just found the timing of the similar statements interesting.
An open letter to NPR:
Why purposefully use “teenager” in this headline to describe the adult male pleading guilty? His attack was racially motivated and since we have a long history of “aging up “ Black people in our media to make them seem more threatening, this is a bad editorial choice.
“Man pleads guilty to killing ten Black workers and shopper in Buffalo.”
There. You don’t even have to put “white” before his name if it makes you uncomfortable, because we know. Of course, we know.
Why we should stop wringing our hands about The New York Times and instead, learn to love pointing out its many, many flaws.
https://oliverwillis.substack.com/p/the-new-york-times-is-the-problem
