Author: Ian Kennedy
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New York City hacks
At what point to do you start calling yourself a New Yorker?
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Institutional memory in a box
Every publisher should be thinking about publishing their archives into a GPT-style database to be used as an internal research tool.
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Succession Riffs on Media
Cringy dialog around media from HBO’s Succession
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The Challenge Ahead
Generative AI presents a challenge for media companies that can no longer rely on Google for “discovery.” The chat UI commoditizes everything it indexes so every source in its index is reduced to a mere footnote. The article (or media artifact) construct will exist tangentially to chat, but with less importance to the reader experience…
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Art is by humans, for humans
I thoroughly enjoyed the final cut of Everything is a Remix which, if you’ve seen earlier cuts, has been updated to include a chapter about AI and its impact on Art. The conclusion is uplifting, affirming the triumph of human creativity over the robots. Kirby Ferguson completed this multi-year project, manually curating an impressive number…
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Search finds, chat extracts
Publishers should not wait to experiment with conversational AI platforms so they can emerge from this Precambrian period with a reputation for quality that prevents them from disintermediation by the platforms.
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The learned grammar of humanity
Thank you Noam Chomsky for pointing out the key difference between generative AI and human “intelligence.” The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.…
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David Lindley, the Prince of Polyester
David Lindley celebrated the richness of the universe. He was a musician’s musician who reveled in discovering new sounds to reinterpret old songs.
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Manhattan Tower of Terror
A new hotel going up near Times Square is proposing putting one of those vertical-drop rides on the top of the building. In the request, Extell suggests that vertical-drop rides will pull in tourists as well as “a few jaded New Yorkers,” and pitches it as the next level for hoteliers who “must think flexibly…