The 136th Block: Useless AI bot, failure is the plan, and TikTok as news
Just another week in techland.
This week…
I took the flu shot, and I got really ill. I don’t know what kind of influenza super strain Canada has, but if this is the side effect of the vaccine, then I don’t want the real thing at all.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
What if failure is the plan?
From danah boyd’s Medium:
I’ve been thinking a lot about failure lately. Failure comes in many forms, but I’m especially interested in situations in which people *perceive* something as failing (or about to fail) and the contestations over failure that often arise in such situations. Given this, it’s hard not to be fascinated by all that’s unfolding around Twitter. At this point in the story of [Elon] Musk’s takeover, there’s a spectrum of perspectives about Twitter’s pending doom (or lack thereof). But there’s more to failure than the binary question of “will Twitter fail or won’t it?” Here’s some thoughts on how I’m thinking about the failure question…
Read on.
How come GPT can seem so brilliant one minute and so breathtakingly dumb the next?
Gary Marcus on The Road to AI We Can Trust:
Monkeys and typewriters would be no more likely to create Rtomb’s fluent churro-surgery invention than they would be to write Hamlet. Either could happen, but if you relied on chance alone, you would likely be waiting billions of year, even with a lot of monkeys and a lot of human readers sorting wheat from chaff. The impressive thing about GPT is that it spits out hundreds of perfectly fluent, often plausible prose at a regular clip, with no human filtering required.
GPT is not (ever) giving us random characters (JK@#L JKLJFH SDI VHKS) like monkeys and typewriters might. And it’s pretty rarely if ever putting out word salad (book solider girl the gave hungry blue 37). Blaming it all on chance just doesn’t capture what’s going. Almost everything it says is fluent and at least vaguely plausible.
What’s really happening is more subtle than Bender lets on.
The real answer comes in two parts.
You’ll want to find out.
Singapore’s free AI therapy-bot is as problematic as you’d think
Meerie Jesuthasan for Rest of World:
In conversations with Rest of World, however, users described Mindline at Work as a one-size-fits-all program that struggled to meet teachers’ specific needs. More generally, psychology experts caution that partnering with digital wellness or therapy apps can backfire when the root causes of mental health problems in the workplace remain unaddressed. A growing critique of “workplace wellness” points out that through such partnerships, employers can outsource the responsibility to address mental health in the workplace, leaving other problems — work pressure, toxic environments, or unsafe conditions — to fester.
Who would’ve thought, huh?
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading “How Publishers are Learning to Create and Distribute News on TikTok,” a report by Nic Newman for Reuters Institute.
I’m watching Wednesday. Everyone is, right?
Reviews, opinion pieces and other stray links:
The world cup of Microsoft Excel ($) by Jacob Stern for The Atlantic.
Malaysia’s new struggle over state power by Teck Chi Wong and Garry Rodan for New Mandala.
I was sexually assaulted when I was 16. Penguin Random House Canada published a memoir by one of my assailants claiming it was consensual by Zoe Charlotte Greenberg on Medium.
Chart of the week
From the Reuters Institute report above, here’s the proportion of top news publishers on TikTok by country.
And one more thing
Have you met Pat Kauffman yet?