The 160th Block: Two bad apples, one good one
AI uses, I mean. And an extra one I don't know where to bin.
This week…
Your reading time is about 8 minutes. Let’s start.
This week I joined the New Canadian Media collective. The collective’s mission is to showcase immigrant journalism and amplify the work of journalists from various immigrant and ethnic backgrounds whose views are not adequately reflected in public discourse, including through the media. Week One with the collective went smoothly; I was encouraged to apply for the mentorship programme, which I will. It is one of my favourite ways to learn.
I also attended a talk on journalism practices for covering indigenous issues, such as commemorative events for MMIWG2S, and land defence, after which I took some time for self-reflection. Since living in Canada for the last couple of years, I find the shift in identity from indigenous to immigrant a jarring one. Being an immigrant is, and I hope it is not an exaggeration, the polar opposite of being indigenous. Internally, I still identify as indigenous, but externally, in this community, in this county where I live, I obviously don’t. I still find it hard to express this… identity crisis(?), even when the migration of indigenous peoples is nothing new. If you have any resources for my consumption on this, whether or not it has a media angle, I would love to hear from you.
Another interesting thing I discovered this week was Splice Media, which I learned about because one of its founders was featured in a Reuters Institute event (see below). Specifically, the newsletters from the two co-founders: Splice Slugs, a weekly media intelligence report by Alan Soon, and Splice Frames, a weekly update on media products and design by Rishad Patel. Both took the time to write to me, and we had short but delightful exchanges where I conveyed my love for the newsletter medium and the joy of discovering newsletters that cover media outside the Western bubble.
There are certainly many, many, credible, high-profile individuals who are observing media practices and/or reporting on science, tech, and misinformation, but so few who do so without a Western-centric worldview until it’s too late. We know the outcome. Is it preventable? For example:
In 2017, Facebook’s negligence in hiring local content moderators culminated in the incitement of the Rohingya genocide (Steve Stecklow/Reuters)
In Nigeria, Berom people went after Fulani Muslims after inflammatory images were posted on Facebook in 2018 (Yemisi Adegoke/BBC)
Jair Bolsonaro coordinated disinformation campaigns on WhatsApp to the benefit of his 2018 Brazilian presidential campaign (Luca Belli/The Conversation)
Of course, now there are publications such as Rest of World (est. 2019) and The Continent (est. 2020) that offer diverse perspectives and in-depth coverage of media and tech developments (as they develop!) beyond the West (or the consequences of the “Hand of the West”), providing valuable insights into global trends and emerging markets. As an avid newsletter reader, though, I would like to read some of your favourite newsletters written from this counterbalanced angle. Send them my way. As always, I encourage you to diversify the sources of the publications you consume too.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
How con artists use AI, apps, social engineering to target parents, grandparents for theft
Sharyn Alfonsi for CBS News:
More Americans than ever rely on alarm systems, gates or doorbell cameras to help protect their families. But statistically, you are now more likely to be the victim of theft online than a physical break in at home.
A new report from the FBI reveals that Americans lost more than $10 billion last year to online scams and digital fraud.
People in their 30s — who are among the most connected online — filed the most complaints. But we were surprised to learn the group that loses the most money to scammers… is seniors.
I’m not surprised. My grandmother has three refrigerators, other kitchenware that she never uses that cost thousands of dollars, and her bungalow is probably in the name of someone the family has never even heard of.
ChatGPT and other generative AI could foster science denial and misunderstanding
Gala Sinatra and Barbara K. Hofer for The Conversation:
Until very recently, if you wanted to know more about a controversial scientific topic — stem cell research, the safety of nuclear energy, climate change — you probably did a Google search. Presented with multiple sources, you chose what to read, selecting which sites or authorities to trust.
Now you have another option: You can pose your question to ChatGPT or another generative artificial intelligence platform and quickly receive a succinct response in paragraph form.
ChatGPT does not search the internet the way Google does. Instead, it generates responses to queries by predicting likely word combinations from a massive amalgam of available online information.
Although it has the potential for enhancing productivity, generative AI has been shown to have some major faults. It can produce misinformation.
Change “science” in the heading to anything — economy, history, even Harry Potter (because surely Wattpad and Archive of Our Own have thousands of alternate universe HPs that has fed ChatGPT with some creative ideas, right?) — and it remains correct.
New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered with AI
James Gallagher for BBC:
To find a new antibiotic, the researchers first had to train the AI. They took thousands of drugs where the precise chemical structure was known, and manually tested them on Acinetobacter baumannii to see which could slow it down or kill it.
This information was fed into the AI so it could learn the chemical features of drugs that could attack the problematic bacterium.
The AI was then unleashed on a list of 6,680 compounds whose effectiveness was unknown. The results - published in Nature Chemical Biology - showed it took the AI an hour and a half to produce a shortlist.
The researchers tested 240 in the laboratory, and found nine potential antibiotics. One of them was the incredibly potent antibiotic abaucin.
Trying to provide one good (AI-related story) to two bad ones. Hope it helps.
Meta’s new AI models can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages
Rhiannon Williams for MIT TR:
However, the team warns the model is still at risk of mistranscribing certain words or phrases, which could result in inaccurate or potentially offensive labels. They also acknowledge that their speech recognition models yielded more biased words than other models, albeit only 0.7% more.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Well, this is neither good nor bad because there’s that caveat, per the snippet above.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone because of a tweet by that Trigun fan account Bigolas Nickolas Wofwood.
I’m listening to journalist Claudia Wallis on how to talk about science and the dangers of anti-science on WORT 89.9FM Madison with host Patrick Sajbel.
I’m watching Splice Media’s co-founder Rishad Patel’s presentation for Reuters Institute on how media businesses in Asia use AI.
Reviews, opinion pieces, and other stray links:
Just calm down about GPT-4 already, and stop confusing performance with competence, says Rodney Brooks by Glenn Zorpette for IEEE Spectrum.
How watching TV became a lonely pursuit – and podcasts are rushing to fill that void by Fiona Sturges for The Guardian.
With help from Succession, New York Magazine tops one million email subscribers by Mark Stenberg for Adweek.
La IA “no es fotografía” ni es “imaginante” por Guillermo Jiménez Carazo en elDiario.es.
Les réseaux sociaux, la nouvelle cour des revendeurs par Ariane Lacoursière dans La Presse.
Chart of the week
Data from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat shows Twitter’s shrinking role as a traffic source for news publishers. The impact was felt harder by small publishers, and Kyiv Independent saw the biggest traffic decline post-Musk (-61 per cent between September 2022 and April 2023, wrote Aisha Majid for Press Gazette.
Important to note that the data suggests that Twitter’s role as a referral source for news publishers had been “in decline long before Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform […] although the trend has continued under his ownership.” Read in full here.
And one more thing
Last week’s Extra Mile, ICYMI. You don’t need to like or comment, but share it if you know someone who might enjoy it!
The Extra Mile: Artificial intelligence, academic integrity, and AI literacy
In this master post, you will find: Background Definition Case study AI literacy
meow meow moew meow meow inddeed.