The 140th Block: ChatGPT and beyond
Scroll to the end for some essential media to check out
This week…
I thought this newsletter would reach you before the US House of Representatives elects a speaker. Good to be wrong.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Can elections survive the digital age?
On CIGI, Panthea Pourmalek, Yves Tiberghien, and Heidi Tworek argue that to understand the role of social media in elections, we must move beyond analyses focused on Europe and North America:
On October 18, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions and the Konwakai Chair in Japanese Research at the University of British Columbia organized a panel of experts from three continents to assess electoral disruption caused by social media in different contexts. The event aimed to extract general patterns and identify factors that explained different types of disruptions. Speakers explored the cases of the 2022 elections in South Korea (Ju Oak Kim, professor, Texas A&M International University), Kenya (Angela Oduor Lungati, executive director, Ushahidi), the Philippines (Aim Sinpeng, researcher, University of Sydney), and Brazil (Ivar Hartmann, professor, Insper [São Paulo]). These contests represent a good sample of recent elections in middle-income countries with varied demographics, with respect to geographic and ethnic backgrounds.
Among the panellists’ findings, four stand out.
Read on to find out.
ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. But it can still be amazingly useful
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor for AI Snake Oil:
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce plausible text, not true statements. ChatGPT is shockingly good at sounding convincing on any conceivable topic. But OpenAI is clear that there is no source of truth during training. That means that using ChatGPT in its current form would be a bad idea for applications like education or answering health questions. Even though the bot often gives excellent answers, sometimes it fails badly. And it’s always convincing, so it’s hard to tell the difference.
Yet, there are three kinds of tasks for which ChatGPT and other LLMs can be extremely useful, despite their inability to discern truth in general.
No spoilers, but there are good news and bad news.
The third magic
Noah Smith’s meditation on history, science and AI:
Humanity’s living standards are vastly greater than those of the other animals. Many people attribute this difference to our greater intelligence or our greater linguistic communication ability. But without minimizing the importance of those underlying advantages, I’d like to offer the idea that our material success is due, in large part, to two great innovations. Usually we think of innovations as specific technologies — agriculture, writing, the wheel, the steam engine, the computer. The most important of these are the things we call “general purpose technologies”. But I think that at a deeper level, there are more profound and fundamental meta-innovations that underlie even those things, and these are ways of learning about the world.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading about the politics of pain by Rob Boddice on Aeon.
I’m listening to a conversation with University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist on CBC’s Front Burner about why he believes Bill C-18—which would require Big Tech to pay Canadian media outlets for posting or linking to their news content—could harm the Internet and the media for Canadians.
I’m watching The Father (2020), directed by Florian Zeller, a poignant portrayal of what it is like living with dementia.
Reviews, opinion pieces, and other stray links:
Try these AI writing tools in 2023 by Jeremy Caplan on Wonder Tools.
Algorithms, lies, and social media by Stephan Lewandowsky and Anastasia Kozyreva for Open Mind.
Chart of the week
Volodymyr Agafonkin lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. He visualised when the power went out over the past two months:
And one more thing
There was a comment last month on the “Essential Media” post I made, which hasn’t been updated since November 2021, asking if it would be updated soon. I think the post is due for an update, but I haven’t gotten around to it. However, here are some things not on the list yet, that you might want to check out:
The Peak: A daily newsletter on Canadian business, tech, and finance. While not directly about misinformation and media literacy, it’s often that the top business and tech headlines intertwine with matters about tech governance and ethics. This newsletter is one of the best at keeping you updated with that from a Canadian perspective. Lately, each edition has a lie-detecting quiz where you pick out the phoney story from a list of somewhat bizarre but could be actual headlines.
The Continent: An pan-African newspaper optimised for reading and sharing on social media platforms and messaging apps. Its FAQ stated that “by using the same viral networks exploited by disseminators of disinformation, the publication aims to counter the fake news on people’s phones with real news.”
The Cleaners (Delete or Ignore Quiz): Based on the Independent Lens film, this 2018 quiz is based on real scenarios of Facebook’s censorship guidelines (which may be outdated). Imagine that you are a Facebook content moderator; decide if you would delete or ignore the posts you come across.
