This week…
Your reading time is about 6 minutes. Let’s start.
An armed gang stormed an Ecuador TV studio during a live broadcast. There has been a series of attacks in the country after the apparent escapes from prison of drug gang leaders (Gonzalo Solano and Allen Panchana / AFP).
The following day, at my workplace, management organised a voluntary safety briefing with the Toronto Police Service, unrelated to the event. It was planned a couple of weeks earlier, due to escalated violence downtown. I didn’t sign up for the session during the call for registration but after reading the news, I did.
It’s clear the speaker knows the area very well; he provided extremely practical safety advice for all the key buildings, outdoor spaces, and along the main public transit routes. Not that I am any less anxious about being downtown, because among the things people hate the most, besides the cops and politicians, are journalists, and the company’s logo is practically everywhere and leads you straight to the front doors when you’re in the area, so it’s hard to hide the fact that that’s where I’m heading to and from when I’m downtown.
Anyway, can you believe Toronto is consistently reported to be one of the safest cities in the world / North America / Canada even as recently as this month? I don’t have access to the actual methodologies for these rankings so I won’t share any links to any of these reports because who knows how rigorous they are. Obviously, I have a personal bias because I get heckled and yelled at (I get accused of stalking by this one person all the time but it’s not my fault we have to be at the same place every day?), and have to dodge street fighting every week on my commute to work. I just cannot imagine it being worse for people in other cities!
Anyway, here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
ICYMI: The Previous Block previewed The Year of Elections and reflected on doing what we do in the dark. CORRECTION NOTICE: None notified.
Mahindra kills off AI influencer after social media backlash
Ben Vinel for Motorsport.com:
On Instagram, the account @avabeyondreality described itself as a “Sustainable Tech Queen & Racing Rebel Robot”, with its goal “fueling inclusion through AI innovation”. It had been documenting the virtual influencer’s life through 11 posts, the first of which dated back to 8 December.
The idea was met with backlash from fans and media alike on social media, with many reckoning the team should have hired a human ambassador rather than generated one via artificial intelligence.
“Mahindra creating an AI team ambassador that is a woman instead of simply hiring one real, actual woman to fill that role is so incredibly messed up”, Devin Altieri, a PR consultant in motorsport, wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Automotive journalist Alanis King added on the same platform: “I’m not an AI expert, but everything I see is about enormous energy use. Isn’t it weird to call this a ‘Sustainable Tech Champ’?”
So inclusive of women that they’d rather use AI than hire a human woman.
Climate and vaccine misinformation seemed worlds apart – but it turned out the Cranky Uncle was a universal figure
Graham Readfearn for The Guardian:
Chelsey Lepage, at Irimi, ran workshops developing the game in east Africa. She says there are many people who are reluctant to be vaccinated because they think vaccines are part of a conspiracy.
“A lot of people feel vaccines are a way to reduce African populations, so you can understand why these things take root,” she says.
[John Cook, an academic at the University of Melbourne who researches climate change misinformation] had to redraw the Cranky Uncle character several times to reflect local populations. One version with the character in a suit for the Ugandan game had to be redrawn “because in Uganda a blazer confers authority”, Lepage says.
Lepage says they also added the character of a health worker, whose job in the game is to deliver factual information.
“This is in part behaviour change messaging. We want people to change their behaviours and we also need trusted messengers.”
Hope it’s not a stretch to say that this also demonstrates the importance of local journalism.
How Google perfected the web
Mia Sato for The Verge, with animations by Richard Parry:
The relentless optimizing of pages, words, paragraphs, photos, and hundreds of other variables has led to a wasteland of capital-C Content that is competing for increasingly dwindling Google Search real estate as generative AI rears its head. You’ve seen it before: the awkward subheadings and text that repeats the same phrases a dozen times, the articles that say nothing but which are sprayed with links that in turn direct you to other meaningless pages. Much of the information we find on the web — and much of what’s produced for the web in the first place — is designed to get Google’s attention.
We often hear about the latest engagement hacks on other platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or X, formerly known as Twitter. But Google is consequential above all of these, acting essentially as the referee of the web. Yet deep knowledge of how its systems work is largely limited to industry publications and marketing firms — as users, we don’t get an explanation of why sites suddenly look different or how Google ranks one website above another. It just happens.
Bit by bit, the internet has been remade in Google’s image. And it’s humans — not machines — who have to deal with the consequences.
An impressive demonstration of how a website is tweaked until it is Google-optimised, instead of people-optimised... and looks exactly like every other site.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing (2021), a collection of essays by the enigmatic Elena Ferrante.
I’m listening to Decoder with Nilay Patel on how Adobe manages the AI copyright dilemma with the company’s general counsel Dana Rao.
I’m watching Last Year in Marienbad (1961) directed by Alain Resnais. I’ve been meaning to get hold of a copy of this for years. I recently found out that with my library card, I get to borrow digital films for free. The premise of this film, without giving too much away, is maybe pretentious, but in an earnest kind of way. Kind of like trying to explain our most private thoughts to others, sometimes.
Other curious links, including en español et français:
“At the CIA’s creative writing group” by Johannes Lichtman for The Paris Review.
“How Russian officials and their collaborators spirit away Ukraine’s children” by Mari Saito, Maria Tsvetkova, Polina Nikolskaya, and Anton Zverev for Reuters. Photography by Alina Smutko.
“Piracy is surging again because streaming execs ignored the lessons of the past” by Karl Bode for TechDirt.
“Ministers prioritised driving in England partly due to conspiracy theories” by Peter Walker for The Guardian.
“How fact-checking journalism is evolving – and having a real impact on the world” by Peter Cunliffe-Jones (University of Westminster) and Lucas Graves (University of Wisconsin-Madison) for The Conversation.
“Did the battle against misinformation go too far?” by Sara Talpos for Undark.
“2024, el año de la inteligencia artificial: ¿una carrera fuera de control?” por José María Lasalle en Clarín.
“Periodistas desplazadas: abandonadas y victimizadas por el Mecanismo de Protección” por Sandra Segura y José Martín Arriaga en Proceso.
« Gabriel Attal, gay mais pas queer » par Barbara Krief dans Rue89.
« À quand le devoir de rendre des comptes pour les chroniqueurs politiques ? » ($) par Rafael Jacob dans L'actualité.
Chart of the week
Reuters Institute carried out an industry survey sampling more than 300 digital leaders from more than 50 countries and territories to find out journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions for 2024.
One of the major trends reported not just in this piece but others (see Alex Kantrowitz’s piece in his newsletter Big Technology below) is a shift in user preference away from social apps and towards messaging apps.
Publishers are likewise going to focus more on WhatsApp and TikTok while moving away from the ugly place, XTwitter, and the place that doesn’t want news, Facebook.
Nic Newman has the report here.