Newsletter 39: Ignorance is a curse and a cult, Google and Meta rationalize AI ripoffs, the reality behind “birds aren’t real,” plus three people to follow and three books to read. Can we please stop idolizing ignorance? Twenty years ago, the Boston Red Sox did something that seemed impossible: after a supposedly cursed championship drought…
Great writers, thinkers, and researchers see patterns that others cannot. They then tell you about what they see and what you can do about it. Of course, of the things AI is best at is recognizing patterns. Does this mean writers, thinkers, and researchers are going to become obsolete? Not quite. First off, people see…
People have so much trouble with the flaws in AI tools because they are so different from everything else we do with our computing devices. Consider any productivity application you use: a spreadsheet, a programming language, an app, anything, doesn’t matter. All of these applications have two qualities: AI chatbots violate both of those rules….
There are now multiple lawsuits in which owners of copyrighted material — books and articles, fiction and nonfiction — claim that entities using large language models (LLMs) from Microsoft and OpenAI have violated their copyrights. But at what point in the process does the alleged copyright violation occur? Let’s examine the process of creating and…
Newsletter 20. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year; suing Microsoft and OpenAI; stop checking your grades; plus three people to follow, three books to read, and the perfect gift for the author in your life. Inauthentic I always thought the advice and books on how to be authentic were a little silly. Who wants to be…
The marketing thinker Scott Wilder recently posed this question on LinkedIn: “Would you write a business book today even though in a few years all information will be created and discoverable using AI?” What do you think? Will all information be discoverable using AI? You could have asked this question 15 years ago in the…
Where do you go to find the answer to a question? Who do you trust? Before the Web, you went to the network news or the local newspaper. If you needed a practical answer, you might take a book out of the library or ask somebody who you thought was likely to know the answer…
Week 9: George Colony nails it: reading stuff for us is AI’s job. Also: leveraged burnout at Simon & Schuster, KDP spies on your toolbox, plus 3 people to follow, 3 books to read, and pluggerating. Why A.I. upends everything, according to George Colony There are two common perspectives on the rise of generative A.I.,…
The Associated Press issued a set of guidelines for journalists regarding the use of AI. They should be a model for all news organizations as well as anyone else who publishes nonfiction content. The danger here is that AI text generation tools like ChatGPT are, basically, bullshitters. They make up plausible text that has no…