Fake News Is Here to Stay
August 22, 2017
Morphed pictures and videos were the realms of experts. New tools, however, are making it easier for people with average computer skills to create hyper-realistic content.
As reported by Mashable in an article titled This Scary Video Tool Makes Fake News Look Legit, which says:
Researchers at the University of Washington recently announced a new video-editing tool that they used to superimpose audio — with realistic lip movements — onto a video of former U.S. president Barack Obama, making it appear as though he’s saying whatever they want him to.
The intention of making this tool was to help special effects artists in the entertainment industry. However, as is the case with any other tool, the tool as a test run was to create a fake news content. Couple this tool with other available tools like Google DeepMind AI and Lyrebird, a single person could be producing a number of fake videos sitting in the dungeon.
Social media platforms are already fighting the menace of fake news. However such tools make their tasks tougher. Facebook, for instance, employs an army of analysts to weed out fake news. Seems like until the problem of fake news or information is going to get worse.
Vishal Ingole, August 22, 2017
Chinese Sogou to Invade American Search
August 16, 2017
Having more than its fair share of the world’s population, China doesn’t do anything in small numbers. Search is no exception. It was recently announced that one of China’s most popular search engines has set its scope on the US.
According to TechNode,
Sogou, established in 2004, is the developer of China’s most popular Chinese input method service Sogou Pinin which takes more than 60% share in the mobile market. It’s also the operator of China’s top search engine, behind market leader Baidu, providing search service for Tencent’s WeChat social media platform as well as Microsoft’ Bing for English search in China. Company CEO Wang Xiaochuan disclosed in a recent speech that the firm is pivoting its focus to AI-driven search and navigation in the future.
The company has filed for a US IPO and is now just waiting for the all clear. What will this mean for current US search engines? With their increased focus on AI, Sogou is certainly poised to go head to head with the best the US has to offer, but will it be enough to win the hearts of Americans?
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 16, 2017
Social Intelligence a Nice Addition to Analytics, but Not Necessary
August 9, 2017
Social media is an ever-evolving tricky beast to tame when it comes to analytics which is why most companies do the best they can with the resources appointed to the job. Social intelligence gurus, however, are constantly pushing more ways to make sense of the mounting social data.
A recent CIO article exploring the growing field of social intelligence highlighted the role of Sally-Anne Kaminski, Global Social Media Strategy Manager, at Zebra Technologies. Her job was explained as:
When the sales enablement team approaches her about prospective clients, Kaminski taps Oracle’s Social Cloud, a social relationship management tool, to build a comprehensive dashboard to help the sales representative nail the sale. Kaminski loads Social Cloud’s Boolean search with keywords, phrases and topics to discover in conversations across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as message boards and blogs.
Is it effective though? Even Kaminski admits there is no data showing her role analyzing social media data (beyond what analytics alone can do) is benefiting anyone. At the end of the day, social intelligence is reliant on the human touch (think more money) and we must question the operational value it provides.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 9, 2017
Free Content Destroying Print Media
August 8, 2017
Today’s generation has no concept of having to wait for the day’s top stories till the newspaper is delivered. If they want to know something (or even they don’t) they simply turn on their Smart phone, tablet or even watch! With news stories available 24/7 with automatic alerts, most people under thirty can’t possibly fathom paying for it.
It almost wasn’t that way. According to Poynter,
In the 1990s, a cantankerous, bottom-line-obsessed and visionary Tribune Company executive named Charles Brumback pushed something that was called The New Century News Network. The top print news organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Times-Mirror would form a network in which they’d house their content online and charge for it. Members would get paid based on usage. They even started a newswire that was similar to what we know as Google News.
Unfortunately, the heads of print media couldn’t see the future and how their pockets would be deflated due to the giving away of their content to online giants such as Facebook and Yahoo and Google.
Now, these same short-sighted network bigwigs are wanting Congress to intervene on their behalf. As the article points out, “running to Congress seems belated and impotent.”
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 8, 2017
Google: A Me Too from Mountain View
August 7, 2017
It is a tough world out there for a seller of online ads. From my point of view, the concentration of online advertising in the hands of Facebook and Google is a natural consequence of digital disintermediation. He who is most like the old Bell Telephone wins.
What does one do when an upstart comes up with a better idea? If one is a giant company’s chief innovator, the answer is obvious: Imitate, then use the power of scale to take lots of money.
I thought about this characteristic of online when I read “Google Reportedly Building Its Own Snapchat Competitor.” I would have used the word “killer,” not competitor, but that’s why I am a 74 year old retired person in rural Kentucky.
The write up (which may be a recycled variant of another real journalism effort) said:
Google is working on its answer to Snapchat. It’s called Stamp — a portmanteau of “stories” and “AMP,” the acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages …The new platform would be similar to Snapchat’s Discover feature, where publishers create and share made-for-Snapchat (or repurposed-for-Snapchat) content.
Didn’t Google try to buy Snap when it was just Snapchat?
Moral of the story:
The model and wife of Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has historically not been too thrilled about other tech companies ripping off her husband’s product. “Do they have to steal all of my partner’s ideas? I’m so appalled by that … When you directly copy someone, that’s not innovation.”
Steal?
Nah, that’s innovation the online way.
Stephen E Arnold, August 7, 2017
Big Data as Savior of Newspapers? Tell That to NYT Editors
August 7, 2017
This would be ironic. The SmartDataCollective posits, “Is Big Data the Salvation of the Newspaper Industry?” The write-up tells us that several prominent publications are turning to data analysis to boost their bottom lines and, they hope, save themselves from extinction. Writer Rehan Ijaz cites this post from the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation as he describes ways the New York Times and the Financial Times are leveraging data. He quotes publishing pro, David Soloff:
The Financial Times, one of our global publisher customers, uses big data analytics to optimize pricing on ads by section, audience, targeting parameters, geography, and time of day. Our friends at the FT sell more inventory because the team knows what they have, where it is and how it should be priced to capture the opportunity at hand. To boot, analytics reveal previously undersold areas of the publication, enabling premium pricing and resulting in found margin falling straight to the bottom line.
What about the venerable New York Times? That paper hired a data scientist in 2014, yet now is slashing staff, we learn from Reuters’ piece, “New York Times Offers Buyouts, Scraps Public Editor Position.” It is, in fact, most editors facing unemployment (because clear prose and verified facts are so last century, I suppose.) Reporters Jessica Toonkel and Narottam Medhora reveal:
The newspaper said it would eliminate the in-house watchdog position of public editor as it shifts focus to reader comments. ‘Today, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be,’ publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr said in a memo, which was reviewed by Reuters.
“Vigilant and forceful?” Is “correct” not a consideration? Professional editors exist for a reason; crowdsourcing will not always suffice. Also, call me old-fashioned, but I think facts should be confirmed before publication. This is an interesting choice for the Times to be making particularly now, amid the “fake news” commotion.
Cynthia Murrell, August 7, 2017
Facebook Grapples with Moderation
August 1, 2017
Mashable’s Alex Hazlett seems quite vexed about the ways Facebook is mishandling the great responsibility that comes with its great power in, “Facebook’s Been Making It Up All Along and We’re Left Holding the Bag.” Reporting on a recent leak from the Guardian of Facebook moderator documents, Hazlett writes:
It confirmed what a lot of people had long suspected: Facebook is making it up as they go along and we’re the collateral damage. The leaked moderator documents cover how to deal with depictions of things like self-harm and animal cruelty in exceedingly detailed ways. A first read through suggests that the company attempted to create a rule for every conceivable situation, and if they missed one, well they’d write that guideline when it came up. It suggests they think that this is just a question of perfecting the rules, when they’ve been off-base from the outset.
The article notes that communities historically craft and disseminate the rules, ethics, and principles that guide their discourse; in this case, the community is the billions of Facebook users across the globe, and those crucial factors are known only to the folks in control (except what was leaked, of course.) Hazlett criticizes the company for its “generic platitudes” and lack of transparency around an issue that now helps shape the very culture of the entire world. He observes:
Sure, if Facebook had decided to take an actual stand, they’d have had detractors. But if they’d been transparent about why, their users would have gotten over it. If you have principles, and you stick to them, people will adjust. Instead, Facebook seems to change their policies based on the level of outrage that is generated. It contributes to a perception of them as craven and exploitative. This is why Facebook lurches from stupid controversy to stupid controversy, learning the hard way every. single. time.
These days, decisions by one giant social media company can affect millions of people, often in ways, those affected don’t even perceive, much less understand. A strategy of lurching from one controversy to another does seem unwise.
Cynthia Murrell, August 1, 2017
Optimizing the Noisy Internet
July 28, 2017
Humans love to complain, especially the older generations about how their youth was superior to the current day. Alan Franzoni rants about how the Internet has gotten too noisy in “Stopping The Internet Noise-A Useful Internet Back Again.” Franzoni complains that the modern Internet is not as useful as the Internet of the 56K modem days. He lists the ways the old Internet was more productive. He starts with old Usenet discussion groups and mailing lists. What he liked about this old discussion boards were that he could subscribe to one application service instead of having to do it multiple times. He then turns to IRC chatting, citing its superiority because it was a single application with a consistent interface.
He bemoans the loss of Google Reader, which is an actual loss. The ability to read all of your daily Web sites in one consistent feed was nice. What Franzoni hates is that he cannot mark things as reading, there is zero to little API, and there is not any focus. This is what he wants and suggests how the Internet can be improved:
•Topics. Google Plus created somethings similar to that with Collections (without RSS, of course); or we could just create a blog or username for each of our topics – I think most of us won’t discuss about so many totally unrelated different fields. It’s a change of mentality – we shouldn’t write something just because we can. Unless we are celebrities, people, especially strangers, won’t follow us just for the sake of it – we need actual, quality content. Smallchat is fine on FB or Twitter.
APIs. I’m not saying we should get back to IRC or to NNTP. But we need a common API for Instant Messaging and forum-like software so that people can use their favorite tools to organize their data sources. Installing tons of apps or visiting tens of websites every day is not an option.
His rant is about the lack of a good app that digests the Internet into a single, serves reading list. Franzoni really needs to try out the Feedly app.
Whitney Grace, July 28, 2017
AI Feeling a Little Sentimental
July 24, 2017
Big data was one of the popular buzzwords a couple years ago, but one conundrum was how organizations were going to use all that mined data? One answer has presented itself: sentiment analysis. Science shares the article, “AI In Action: How Algorithms Can Analyze The Mood Of The Masses” about how artificial intelligence is being used to gauge people’s emotions.
Social media presents a constant stream of emotional information about products, services, and places that could be useful to organizations. The problem in the past is that no one knew how to fish all of that useful information out of the social media Web sites and make it a usable. By using artificial intelligence algorithms and natural language processing, data scientists are finding associations between words, the language used, posting frequency, and more to determine everything from a person’s mood to their personality, income level, and political associations.
‘There’s a revolution going on in the analysis of language and its links to psychology,’ says James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas in Austin. He focuses not on content but style, and has found, for example, that the use of function words in a college admissions essay can predict grades. Articles and prepositions indicate analytical thinking and predict higher grades; pronouns and adverbs indicate narrative thinking and predict lower grades…’Now, we can analyze everything that you’ve ever posted, ever written, and increasingly how you and Alexa talk,’ Pennebaker says. The result: ‘richer and richer pictures of who people are.’
AI algorithms are able to turn a person’s online social media accounts and construct more than a digital fingerprint of a person. The algorithms act like digital mind readers and recreate a person based on the data they publish.
Whitney Grace, July 24, 2017
Instagram Reins in Trolls
July 21, 2017
Photo-sharing app Instagram has successfully implemented DeeText, a program that can successfully weed out nasty and spammy comments from people’s feeds.
Wired in an article titled Instagram Unleashes an AI System to Blast Away Nasty Comments says:
DeepText is based on recent advances in artificial intelligence, and a concept called word embeddings, which means it is designed to mimic the way language works in our brains.
DeepText initially was built by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company for preventing abusers, trolls, and spammers at bay. Buoyed by the success, it soon implemented on Instagram.
The development process was arduous wherein a large number of employees and contractors for months were teaching the DeepText engine how to identify abusers. This was achieved by telling the algorithm which word can be abusive based on its context.
At the moment, the tools are being tested and rolled out for a limited number of users in the US and are available only in English. It will be subsequently rolled out to other markets and languages.
Vishal Ingole, July 21, 2017
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