Tag: ai
-
AI’s Dark Secret
Behind every freakishly algorithm is a group of often underpaid and overworked “digital serfs” busy labeling and reviewing the data streams that make the technology work. Expensify SmartScan for receipts? In 2017, someone discovered some of these receipts turned up on Mechanical Turk. Amazon announced last week that it’s shutting down its “Just Walk Out”…
-
The Three Laws of AI
When my previous company started using technologies such as machine learning to automate tasks such as curation, Rich Jaroslovsky, an experienced newsman who pioneered using web technology to build the online version of The Wall Street Journal, circulated a memo with three simple guidelines that are applicable to anyone thinking of using AI to automate…
-
Video: Simon Willison on AI
Simon Willison has been hacking on technology for years and blogging about it in his excellent blog where he posts on how to recreate his innovations and follow along on his adventures. He was a speaker at this year’s WordPress WordCamp US 2023 conference and gave a talk that I would highly recommend to anyone…
-
Notes from the (media) party
A couple of weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend the Media Party conference in Chicago. As with previous, early-stage “what is this technology?” conferences, I found the three days in Chicago a great way to connect with others who are also stumbling around and learning about Generative AI (genAI), Large Language Models…
-
White-label AI Bots
I’ve been playing around with a hosted Chat AI offered by Chat Thing that was recently announced on Product Hunt. Seth Godin has indexed 5M words from his blog [Seth’s Blog bot] and Dave Winer uploaded his 30+ years of daily posts from scripting.com [Scripting News bot]. Both bots are instructive and give you a…
-
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.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.