AI Tools That Make Cheating…Err… Research Easier
June 22, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Homework has been the bane of students since the inception of school. Students have dreamt about ways to make homework easier, either with the intervention of divine beings or a homework-finishing robot. While the gods of various religions have never concerned themselves with homework, ingenious minds have tackled the robot idea with artificial intelligence. While AI cannot succinctly write a decent essay, Euro News shares the next generation of tools that will make homework easier: “The Best AI Tools To Power Your Academic Research.”
This young lady is not cheating. She is using her mobile phone to look up facts using Bard and ChatGPT. With the information in hand, she will interact with each system to obtain the required 500 words for her US history essay about ethics and Spiro Agnew. She is not cheating. She is researching. The image emerged from the highly original MidJourney system, which never cheats it users. But what does it do with those inputs?
OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool, a generative AI that creates and writes text, has thrown academic for a loop. ChatGPT is the first AI that can “write” a cohesive essay and can answer simple questions better than a search engine. Academics are worried it ruin the integrity of education, but others believe ChatGPT and other AI tools will democratize information.
Postdoctoral researcher Mushtaq Bilal, based at the University of Southern Denmark, believes ChatGPT is a wonderful invention. He explains that ChatGPT cannot produce a full journal article that contains truthful information, peer-reviewed, and well-cited. With incremental prompting, Bilal says the AI tool can generate ideas that resemble a conversation with an ivy league professor. Bilal proposes to use ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool. For example, he used it to create an article outline and he fact checked the information.
Bilal recommends scholars use other AI tools, such as Consensus. Consensus is an AI-driven search engine that answers questions and provides citations. Elicit.org is similar, except it is an AI research assistant and its database s based purely on research. Scite.ai provides fact based citations based on search queries. Research Rabbit fast tracks research similar to how Spotify recommends music. It learns researchers interests and recommends new information based on them. ChatPDF allows users to upload papers, then they can ask the AI questions or summarize the information.
Homework has not seen a revolution this huge since the implementation of the Internet.
“ ‘The development of AI will be as fundamental “as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone,’ wrote Bill Gates in the latest post on his personal blog, titled ‘The Age of AI Has Begun’. ‘Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped,’ he wrote. ‘But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn’.
In other words, homework be much easier to complete and these new tools will make learning better. Students will also cleverly discover new ways to manipulate the tools to cheat just as they have been for centuries.
Whitney Grace, June 22, 2023
Two Creatures from the Future Confront a Difficult Puzzle
June 15, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I was interested in a suggestion a colleague made to me at lunch. “Check out the new printed World Book encyclopedia.”
I replied, “A new one. Printed? Doesn’t information change quickly today.”
My lunch colleague said, “That’s what I have heard.”
I offered, “Who wants a printed, hard-to-change content objects? Where’s the fun in sneaky or sockpuppet edits? Do you really want to go back to non-fluid information?”
My hungry debate opponent said, “What? Do you mean misinformation is good?”
I said, “It’s a digital world. Get with the program.”
Navigate to World Book.com and check out the 10 page sample about dinosaurs. When I scanned the entry, there was no information about dinobabies. I was disappointed because the dinosaur segment is bittersweet for these reasons:
- The printed encyclopedia is a dinosaur of sorts, an expensive one to produce and print at that
- As a dinobaby, I was expecting an IBM logo or maybe an illustration of a just-RIF’ed IBM worker talking with her attorney about age discrimination
- Those who want to fill a bookshelf can buy books at a second hand bookstore or connect with a zippy home designer to make the shelf tasteful. I think there is wallpaper of books on a shelf as an alternative.
Two aliens are trying to figure out what a single volume of a World Book encyclopedia contains? I assume the creatures will be holding the volume 6 “I”, the one with information about the Internet. The image comes from the creative bits at MidJourney.
Let me dip into my past. Ah, you are not interested? Tough. Here we go down memory lane:
In 1953 or 1954, my father had an opportunity to work in Brazil. Off our family went. One of the must-haves was a set of World Book encyclopedias. The covers were brown; the pictures were most black and white; and the information was, according to my parents, accurate.
The schools in Campinas, Brazil, at that time used one language. Portuguese. No teacher spoke English. Therefore, after failing every class except mathematics, my parents decided to get me a tutor. The course work was provided by something called Calvert in Baltimore, Maryland. My teacher would explain the lesson, watch me read, ask me a couple of questions, and bail out after an hour or two. That lasted about as long as my stint in the Campinas school near our house. My tutor found himself on the business end of a snake. The snake lived; the tutor died.
My father — a practical accountant — concluded that I should read the World Book encyclopedia. Every volume. I think there were about 20 plus a couple of annual supplements. My mother monitored my progress and made me write summaries of the “interesting” articles. I recall that interesting or not, I did one summary a day and kept my parents happy.
I hate World Books. I was in the fourth or fifth grade. Campinas had great weather. There were many things to do. Watch the tarantulas congregate in our garage. Monitor the vultures circling my mother when she sunbathed on our deck. Kick a soccer ball when the students got out of school. (I always played. I sucked, but I had a leather, size five ball. Prior to our moving to the neighborhood, the kids my age played soccer with a rock wrapped in rags. The ball was my passport to an abuse free stint in rural Brazil.)
But a big chunk of my time was gobbled by the yawing white maw of a World Book.
When we returned to the US, I entered the seventh grade. No one at the public school in Illinois asked about my classes in Brazil. I just showed up in Miss Soape’s classroom and did the assignments. I do know one thing for sure: I was the only student in my class who did not have to read the assigned work. Reading the World Book granted me a free ride through grade school, high school, and the first couple of years at college.
Do I recommend that grade school kids read the World Book cover to cover?
No, I don’t. I had no choice. I had no teacher. I had no radio because the electricity was on several hours a day. There was no TV because there were no broadcasts in Campinas. There were no English language anything. Thus, the World Book, which I hate, was the only game in town.
Will I buy the print edition of the 2023 World Book? Not a chance.
Will other people? My hunch is that sales will be a slog outside of library acquisitions and a few interior decorators trying to add color to a client’s book shelf.
I may be a dinobaby, but I have figured out how to look up information online.
The book thing: I think many young people will be as baffled about an encyclopedia as the two aliens in the illustration.
By the way, the full set is about $1,200. A cheap smartphone can be had for about $250. What will kids use to look up information? If you said, the printed encyclopedia, you are a rare bird. If you move to a remote spot on earth, you will definitely want to lug a set with you. Starlink can be expensive.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2023
Moral Decline? Nah, Just Your Perception at Work
June 12, 2023
Here’s a graph from the academic paper “The Illusion of Moral Decline.”
Is it even necessary to read the complete paper after studying the illustration? Of course not. Nevertheless, let’s look at a couple of statements in the write up to get ready for that in-class, blank bluebook semester examination, shall we?
Statement 1 from the write up:
… objective indicators of immorality have decreased significantly over the last few centuries.
Well, there you go. That’s clear. Imagine what life was like before modern day morality kicked in.
Statement 2 from the write up:
… we suggest that one of them has to do with the fact that when two well-established psychological phenomena work in tandem, they can produce an illusion of moral decline.
Okay. Illusion. This morning I drove past people sleeping under an overpass. A police vehicle with lights and siren blaring raced past me as I drove to the gym (a gym which is no longer open 24×7 due to safety concerns). I listened to a report about people struggling amidst the flood water in Ukraine. In short, a typical morning in rural Kentucky. Oh, I forgot to mention the gunfire, I could hear as I walked my dog at a local park. I hope it was squirrel hunters but in this area who knows?
MidJourney created this illustration of the paper’s authors celebrating the publication of their study about the illusion of immorality. The behavior is a manifestation of morality itself, and it is a testament to the importance of crystal clear graphs.
Statement 3 from the write up:
Participants in the foregoing studies believed that morality has declined, and they believed this in every decade and in every nation we studied….About all these things, they were almost certainly mistaken.
My take on the study includes these perceptions (yours hopefully will be more informed than mine):
- The influence of social media gets slight attention
- Large-scale immoral actions get little attention. I am tempted to list examples, but I am afraid of legal eagles and aggrieved academics with time on their hands.
- The impact of intentionally weaponized information on behavior in the US and other nation states which provide an infrastructure suitable to permit wide use of digitally-enabled content.
In order to avoid problems, I will list some common and proper nouns or phrases and invite you think about these in terms of the glory word “morality”. Have fun with your mental gymnastics:
- Catholic priests and children
- Covid information and pharmaceutical companies
- Epstein, Andrew, and MIT
- Special operation and elementary school children
- Sudan and minerals
- US politicians’ campaign promises.
Wasn’t that fun? I did not have to mention social media, self harm, people between the ages of 10 and 16, and statements like “Senator, thank you for that question…”
I would not do well with a written test watched by attentive journal authors. By the way, isn’t perception reality?
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2023
Thinking about AI: Is It That Hard?
May 17, 2023
I read “Why I’m Having Trouble Covering AI: If You Believe That the Most Serious Risks from AI Are Real, Should You Write about Anything Else?” The version I saw was a screenshot, presumably to cause me to go to Platformer in order to interact with it. I use smart software to convert screenshots into text, so the risk reduced by the screenshot was in the mind of the creator.
Here’s a statement I underlined:
The reason I’m having trouble covering AI lately is because there is such a high variance in the way that the people who have considered the question most deeply think about risk.
My recollection is that Daniel Kahneman allegedly cooked up the idea of “prospect theory.” As I understand the idea, humans are not very good when thinking about risk. In fact, some people take risks because they think that a problem can be averted. Other avoid risk to because omission is okay; for example, reporting a financial problem. Why not just leave it out and cook up a footnote? Omissions are often okay with some government authorities.
I view the AI landscape from a different angle.
First, smart software has been chugging along for many years. May I suggest you fire up a copy of Microsoft Word, use it with its default settings, and watch how words are identified, phrases underlined, and letters automatically capitalized? How about using Amazon to buy lotion. Click on the buy now button and navigate to the order page. It’s magic. Amazon has used software to perform tasks which once required a room with clerks. There are other examples. My point is that the current baloney roll is swelling from its own gaseous emissions.
Second, the magic of ChatGPT outputting summaries was available 30 years ago from Island Software. Stick in the text of an article, and the desktop system spit out an abstract. Was it good? If one were a high school student, it was. If you were building a commercial database product fraught with jargon, technical terms, and abstruse content, it was not so good. Flash forward to now. Bing, You.com, and presumably the new and improved Bard are better. Is this surprising? Nope. Thirty years of effort have gone into this task of making a summary. Am I to believe that the world will end because smart software is causing a singularity? I am not reluctant to think quantum supremacy type thoughts. I just don’t get too overwrought.
Third, using smart software and methods which have been around for centuries — yep, centuries — is a result of easy-to-use tools being available at low cost or free. I find You.com helpful; I don’t pay for it. I tried Kagi and Teva; not so useful and I won’t pay for it. Swisscows.com work reasonably well for me. Cash conserving and time saving are important. Smart software can deliver this easily and economically. When the math does not work, then I am okay with manual methods. Will the smart software take over the world and destroy me as an Econ Talk guest suggested? Sure. Maybe? Soon. What’s soon mean?
Fourth, the interest in AI, in my opinion, is a result of several factors: [a] Interesting demonstrations and applications at a time when innovation becomes buying or trying to buy a game company, [b] avoiding legal interactions due to behavioral or monopoly allegations, [c] a deteriorating economy due to the Covid and free money events, [d] frustration among users with software and systems focused on annoying, not delighting, their users; [e] the inability of certain large companies to make management decisions which do not illustrate that high school science club thinking is not appropriate for today’s business world; [f] data are available; [g] computing power is comparatively cheap; [h] software libraries, code snippets, off-the-shelf models, and related lubricants are findable and either free to use or cheap; [i] obvious inefficiencies exist so a new tool is worth a try; and [j] the lure of a bright shiny thing which could make a few people lots of money adds a bit of zest to the stew.
Therefore, I am not confused, nor am I overly concerned with those who predict home runs or end-of-world outcomes.
What about big AI brains getting fired or quitting?
Three observations:
First, outfits like Facebook and Google type companies are pretty weird and crazy places. Individuals who want to take a measured approach or who are not interested in having 20-somethings play with their mobile when contributing to a discussion should get out or get thrown out. Scared or addled or arrogant big company managers want the folks to speak the same language, to be on the same page even it the messages are written in invisible ink, encrypted, and circulated to the high school science club officers.
Second, like most technologies chock full of jargon, excitement, and the odor of crisp greenbacks, expectations are high. Reality is often able to deliver friction the cheerleaders, believers, and venture capitalists don’t want to acknowledge. That friction exists and will make its presence felt. How quickly? Maybe Bud Light quickly? Maybe Google ad practice awareness speed? Who knows? Friction just is and like gravity difficult to ignore.
Third, the confusion about AI depends upon the lenses through which one observes what’s going on. What are these lenses? My team has identified five smart software lenses. Depending on what lens is in your pair of glasses and how strong the curvatures are, you will be affected by the societal lens, the technical lens, the individual lens (that’s the certain blindness each of us has), the political lens, and the financial lens. With lots to look at, the choice of lens is important. The inability to discern what is important depends on the context existing when the AI glasses are perched on one’s nose. It is okay to be confused; unknowing adds the splash of Slap Ya Mama to my digital burrito.
Net net: Meta-reflections are a glimpse into the inner mind of a pundit, podcast star, and high-energy writer. The reality of AI is a replay of a video I saw when the Internet made online visible to many people, not just a few individuals. What’s happened to that revolution? Ads and criminal behavior. What about the mobile revolution? How has that worked out? From my point of view it creates an audience for technology which could, might, may, will, or whatever other forward forward word one wants to use. AI is going to glue together the lowest common denominator of greed with the deconstructive power of digital information. No Terminator is needed. I am used to being confused, and I am perfectly okay with the surrealistic world in which I live.
PS. We lectured two weeks ago to a distinguished group and mentioned smart software four times in two and one half hours. Why? It’s software. It has utility. It is nothing new. My prospect theory pegs artificial intelligence in the same category as online (think NASA Recon), browsing (think remote content to a local device), and portable phones (talking and doing other stuff without wires). Also, my Zepp watch stress reading is in the low 30s. No enlarged or cancerous prospect theory for me at this time.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2023
The APA Zips Along Like … Like a Turtle, a Really Snappy Turtle Too
May 10, 2023
I read “American Psychology Group Issues Recommendations for Kids’ Social Media Use”. The article reports that social media is possibly, just maybe, perhaps, sort of an issue for some, a few, a handful, a teenie tiny percentage of young people. I am not sure when “social media” began. Maybe it was something called Six Degrees or Live Journal. I definitely recall the wonky weirdness of flashing MySpace pages. I do know about Orkut which if one cares to check was a big hit among a certain segment of Brazilians. The exact year is irrelevant; social media has been kicking around for about a quarter century.
Now, I learn:
The report doesn’t denounce social media, instead asserting that online social networks are “not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people,” but should be used thoughtfully. The health advisory also does not address specific social platforms, instead tackling a broad set of concerns around kids’ online lives with commonsense advice and insights compiled from broader research.
What are the data about teen suicides? What about teen depression? What about falling test scores? What about trend oddities among impressionable young people? Those data are available and easy to spot. In June 2023, another Federal agency will provide information about yet another clever way to exploit young people on social media.
Now the APA is taking a stand? Well, not really a stand, more of a general statement about what I think is one of the most destructive online application spaces available to young and old today.
How about this statement?
The APA recommends a reasonable, age-appropriate degree of “adult monitoring” through parental controls at the device and app level and urges parents to model their own healthy relationships with social media.
How many young people grow up with one parent and minimal adult monitoring? Yeah, how many? Do parents or a parent know what to monitor? Does a parent know about social media apps? Does a parent know the names of social media apps?
Impressive, APA. Now I remember why I thought Psych 101 was a total, absolute, waste of my time when I was a 17 year old fresh person at a third rate college for losers like me. My classmates — also losers — struggle to suppress laughter during the professor’s lectures. Now I am giggling at this APA position.
Sorry. Your paper and recommendations are late. You get an F.
Stephen E Arnold, May 10, 2023
AI Shocker? Automatic Indexing Does Not Work
May 8, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I am tempted to dig into my more than 50 years of work in online and pull out a chestnut or two. l will not. Just navigate to “ChatGPT Is Powered by These Contractors Making $15 an Hour” and check out the allegedly accurate statements about the knowledge work a couple of people do.
The write up states:
… contractors have spent countless hours in the past few years teaching OpenAI’s systems to give better responses in ChatGPT.
The write up includes an interesting quote; to wit:
“We are grunt workers, but there would be no AI language systems without it,” said Savreux [an indexer tagging content for OpenAI].
I want to point out a few items germane to human indexers based on my experience with content about nuclear information, business information, health information, pharmaceutical information, and “information” information which thumbtypers call metadata:
- Human indexers, even when trained in the use of a carefully constructed controlled vocabulary, make errors, become fatigued and fall back on some favorite terms, and misunderstand the content and assign terms which will mislead when used in a query
- Source content — regardless of type — varies widely. New subjects or different spins on what seem to be known concepts mean that important nuances may be lost due to what is included in the available dataset
- New content often uses words and phrases which are difficult to understand. I try to note a few of the more colorful “new” words and bound phrases like softkill, resenteeism, charity porn, toilet track, and purity spirals, among others. In order to index a document in a way that allows one to locate it, knowing the term is helpful if there is a full text instance. If not, one needs a handle on the concept which is an index terms a system or a searcher knows to use. Relaxing the meaning (a trick of some clever outfits with snappy names) is not helpful
- Creating a training set, keeping it updated, and assembling the content artifacts is slow, expensive, and difficult. (That’s why some folks have been seeking short cuts for decades. So far, humans still become necessary.)
- Reindexing, refreshing, or updating the digital construct used to “make sense” of content objects is slow, expensive, and difficult. (Ask an Autonomy user from 1998 about retraining in order to deal with “drift.” Let me know what you find out. Hint: The same issues arise from popular mathematical procedures no matter how many buzzwords are used to explain away what happens when words, concepts, and information change.
Are there other interesting factoids about dealing with multi-type content. Sure there are. Wouldn’t it be helpful if those creating the content applied structure tags, abstracts, lists of entities and their definitions within the field or subject area of the content, and pointers to sources cited in the content object.
Let me know when blog creators, PR professionals, and TikTok artists embrace this extra work.
Pop quiz: When was the last time you used a controlled vocabulary classification code to disambiguate airplane terminal, computer terminal, and terminal disease? How does smart software do this, pray tell? If the write up and my experience are on the same wave length (not surfing wave but frequency wave), a subject matter expert, trained index professional, or software smarter than today’s smart software are needed.
Stephen E Arnold, May 8, 2023
Digital Tech Journalism Killed by a Digital Elephant
May 4, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read a labored explanation, analysis, and rhetorical howl from Slate.com. The article is “Digital Media’s Original Sin: The Big Tech Bubble Burst and the News Industry Got Splattered with Shrapnel.” The article states:
For years, the tech industry has propped up digital journalism with advertising revenue, venture capital injections, and far-reaching social platforms.
My view is that the reason for the problem in digital tech journalism is the elephant. When electronic information flows, it acts in a way similar to water eroding soil. In short, flows of electronic information have what I call a “deconstructive element.” The “information business” once consisted of discrete platforms, essentially isolated by choice and by accident. Who in your immediate locale pays attention to the information published in the American Journal of Mathematics? Who reads Craigslist for listings of low-ball vacation rentals near Alex Murdaugh’s “estate”?
Convert this content to digital form and dump the physical form of the data. Then live in a dream world in which those who want the information will flock to a specific digital destination and pay big money for the one story or the privilege of browsing information which may or may not be accurate. Slate points out that it did not work out.
But what’s the elephant? Digital information to people today is like water to the goldfish in a bowl. It is just there.
The elephant was spawned by a few outfits which figured out that paying money to put content in front of eyeballs. The elephant grew and developed new capabilities; for example, the “pay to play” model of GoTo.com morphed into Overture.com and became something Yahoo.com thought would be super duper. However, the Google was inspired by “pay to play” and had the technical ability to create a system for creating a market from traffic, charging people to put content in front of the eyeballs, and charge anyone in the enabling chain money to use the Google system.
The combination of digital flows’ deconstructive operation plus the quasi-monopolization of online advertising death lethal blows to the crowd Slate addresses. Now the elephant has morphed again, and it is stomping around in the space defined by TikTok. A visual medium with advertising poses a threat to the remaining information producers as well as to Google itself.
The elephant is not immortal. But right now no group is armed with Mossberg Patriot Laminate Marinecotes and the skill to kill the elephant. Electronic information gulping advertising revenue may prove to be harder to kill than a cockroach. Maybe that’s why most people ask, “What elephant?”
Stephen E Arnold, May 4, 2023
Libraries: Who Needs Them? Perhaps Everyone
May 3, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
How dare libraries try to make the works they purchase more easily accessible to their patrons! The Nation ponders, “When You Buy a Book, You Can Loan It to Anyone. This Judge Says Libraries Can’t. Why Not?” The case was brought before the U.S. District Court in Manhattan by four publishers unhappy with the Internet Archive’s (IA) controlled digital lending (CDL) program. We learn the IA does plan to appeal the decision. Writer Michelle M. Wu explains:
“At issue was whether a library could legally digitize the books it already owned and lend the digital copies in place of the print. The IA maintained that it could, as long as it lent only the same number of copies it owned and locked down the digital copies so that a borrower could not copy or redistribute them. It would be doing what libraries had always done, lend books—just in a different format. The publishers, on the other hand, asserted that CDL infringed on authors’ copyrights, making unauthorized copies and sharing these with libraries and borrowers, thereby depriving the authors and publishers of rightful e-book sales. They viewed CDL as piracy. While Judge John G. Koeltl’s opinion addressed many issues, all his reasoning was based on one assumption: that copyright primarily is about authors’ and publishers’ right to profit. Despite the pervasiveness of this belief, the history of copyright tells us something different.”
Wu recounts copyright’s evolution from a means to promote the sharing of knowledge to a way for publishers to rake in every possible dime. The shift was driven by a series of developments in technology. In the 1980s, the new ability to record content to video tape upset Hollywood studios. Apparently, being able to (re)watch a show after its initial broadcast was so beyond the pale a lawsuit was required. Later, Internet-based innovations prompted more legal proceedings. On the other hand, tools evolved that enabled publishers to enforce their interpretation of copyright, no judicial review required. Wu asserts:
“Increasing the impact on the end user, publishers—not booksellers or authors—now control prices and access. They can charge libraries multiple times what they charge an individual and bill them repeatedly for the same content. They can limit the number of copies a library buys, or even refuse to sell e-books to libraries at all. Such actions ultimately reduce the amount of content that libraries can provide to their readers.”
So that is how the original intention of copyright law has been turned on its head. And how publishers are undermining the whole purpose of libraries, which are valiantly trying to keep pace with technology. Perhaps the IA will win it’s appeal and the valuable CDL program will be allowed to continue. Either way, their litigious history suggests publishers will keep fighting for control over content.
Cynthia Murrell, May 3, 2023
TikTok: An App for Mind Control?
March 29, 2023
I read “TikTok Is Part of China’s Cognitive Warfare Campaign.” The write up is an opinion. Before I suggest that the write is missing the big picture, let me highlight what I think sums up the argument:
While a TikTok ban may take out the first and fattest mole, it fails to contend with the wider shift to cognitive warfare as the sixth domain of military operations under way, which includes China’s influence campaigns on TikTok, a mass collection of personal and biometric data from American citizens and their race to develop weapons that could one day directly assault or disable human minds.
The problem for me is that I think the “mind control” angle is just one weapon in a specific application environment. The Middle Kingdom is working like Type A citizen farmers in these strike zones:
- Financial. The objective is to get on the renminbi bus and off the donkey cart dollar.
- Physical. The efficacy of certain pathogens is familiar to anyone who had an opportunity to wear a mask and stay home for a year or two.
- Political. The “deal” between two outstanding nation states in the Middle East is a signal I noted.
- Technological. The Huawei superwatch, the steady progress in microprocessor engineering, and those phone-home electric vehicles are significant developments.
- Social. Western democracies may not be embracing China-style methods, but some countries like India are definitely feeling the vibe for total control of the Internet.
The Guardian — may the digital overlords smile on the “real” news organization’s JavaScript which reminds how many Guardian articles I read since the “bug” was placed on my computer — gets part of the story correct. Hopefully the editors will cover the other aspects of the Chinese initiative.
TikTok, not the main event. Plus, it does connect to WiFi, Congressperson.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2023
Negative News Gets Attention: Who Knew? Err. Everyone in TV News
March 21, 2023
I love academic studies. I have a friend who worked in television news in New York before he was lured to the Courier Journal’s video operation. I asked him how news was prioritized. His answer: “If it bleeds, it leads.” I think he told me this in 1980. I called him and asked when TV news producers knew about the “lead, bleed” angle. His answer, “Since the first ratings study.”
Now I know the decades old truism is — well — true. No film at 11 for this insight.
If you want a more professional analysis of my friend who grew up in Brooklyn, navigate to “Negativity Drives Online News Consumption.” Feel free to substitute any media type for “online.”
Here’s a statement I found interesting:
Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption.
Ah, who knew?
My takeaway from the write up is basic: If smart software ingests that which is online or in other media, that smart software will “discover” or “recurse” to the “lead, bleed” idea. Do I hear a stochastic parrot squawking? OSINT issue? Yep.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2023
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