The 148th Block: AI publishing dilemmas in news, literature
And the social warming of a comic strip author
This week…
The highly anticipated inaugural Women’s Premier League begins, already life-changing for many young cricketers in India, and beyond. Can’t wait for another cricket franchise league to consume my life.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Guy launches news site that’s completely generated by AI
Maggie Harrison for Futurism:
The “world's first” entirely AI-generated news site is here. It’s called NewsGPT, and it seems like an absolutely horrible idea.
The site, according to a press release, is a reporter-less — and thus, it claims, bias-free — alternative to conventional, human-created news, created with the goal of “[providing] unbiased and fact-based news to readers around the world.”
“For too long,” Alan Levy, NewsGPT’s CEO, said in the release, “news channels have been plagued by bias and subjective reporting. With NewsGPT, we are able to provide viewers with the facts and the truth, without any hidden agendas or biases.”
Okay. While we understand that a lot of folks out there are frustrated with the modern news cycle, there are about a million problems with what this guy is doing, the least of which being that there are some glaring transparency problems here — which is pretty incredible, given everything that he claims to be railing against.
Read on.
Can publishing survive the oncoming AI storm?
Suw Charman-Anderson on Word Count: Mews, News and Reviews:
Grifters will crowd out genuine writers on Kindle. LLM content will swamp submissions to literary magazines and agents. Any system based on human review will collapse, but algorithmic systems won’t do much better. It doesn’t matter how good or bad this LLM content is, what matters is how quick it is to create and thus how much of it gets produced.
This disruption is already affecting short stories and, in concert with some other self-publishing and wider macroeconomic trends, it is very rapidly going to take over Amazon’s book marketplace. Traditional publishing, especially agents, are not going to be able to escape either, though they might believe that they are safe for now. They aren’t. And authors who are focusing now on the ethical use of LLM assistance in their writing are going to find themselves in competition with people who don’t care about ethics or even readable prose. We’re at only the beginning of a massive shitshow.
Scott Adams v the internet, social warming edition
Charles Arthur on Social Warming:
The way to decide whether this is really social warming, though, is to ask the counterpoint. What if [Scott] Adams hadn’t joined Twitter, or YouTube? He would still have been the same resentful person, certain that he had been racially discriminated against not once, not twice, but three times in his professional life; certain about Trump’s potential, making hyperbolic jokes to his friends. But he wouldn’t have had the same opportunity to torpedo his own career. The latter is a classic outcome of social warming: getting so wound up that you crash through all the social boundaries until eventually you hit that one that everyone agrees is Too Far. Adams found it.
Absolutely well-elaborated hypothesis on the gradual social warming of the Dilbert cartoonist.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading about delusional ideation, paranoia, and the need for uniqueness as mediators between two forms of narcissism and conspiracy beliefs by Cameron S. Kay, published in 2021 in the Journal of Research in Personality.
I’m listening to Nature’s Take on how Twitter’s changes could affect science.
I’m watching Pretend It’s A City featuring raconteur Fran Lebowitz, who I find both insufferable and riveting.
Reviews, opinion pieces, and other stray links:
How shock sites shaped the Internet by Blake Hester for Vice.
Document reveals first known Canadian UFO study in nearly 30 years now underway by Daniel Otis for CTV News.
‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by energy weapon or foreign adversary, intelligence review finds by Shane Harris and John Hudson for WaPo.
Un nid-de-poule sur l’autoroute de l’information? by Alain McKenna for Le Devoir.
Chart of the week
On Statista, Katharina Buchholz shows how politically divided social media networks are according to US adults who use them:
And one more thing
David Emery fact-checks for Snopes.