AI
[Michael Atleson at the FTC Division of Advertising Practices] "Don’t misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods." The FTC
Business
[Michael Grothaus at FastCompany] "United Airlines announced that it is bringing personalized advertising to the seatback entertainment screens on its flights. The move is aimed at increasing the airline’s revenue by leveraging the data that it has on its passengers." Just another reason why friends don'
AI
[Robb Knight] Perplexity AI doesn't use its advertised browser string or IP range to load content from third-party websites: "So they're using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string. I can't even block their IP
Health
[Chris Bing and Joel Schechtman at Reuters] "The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and
AI
[Heather Bryant] "What generative AI creates is not any one person's creative expression. Generative AI is only possible because of the work that has been taken from others. It simply would not exist without the millions of data points that the models are based upon. Those data
Imagine a life where you dictate your own schedule, free from the confines of a traditional job. That’s a thought experiment I’ve been playing with lately: what would it look like if this was my last ever job? How might I optimize my lifestyle for freedom? By that
AI
[Janet Vertesi at Public Books] "Our lives are consumed with the consumption of content, but we no longer know the truth when we see it. And when we don’t know how to weigh different truths, or to coordinate among different real-world experiences to look behind the veil, there
A few weeks ago I wrote about how solving the challenges facing the news industry requires fundamentally changing newsroom culture. While newsrooms have depended on referrals from social media and search engines to find audiences and make an impact, both of those segments are in flux, and audiences are therefore
Technology
[Renee Dudley at ProPublica] "Former [Microsoft] employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others." This is a damning story about profit over principles: Microsoft
Business
[Calm Company Fund] "Inhale. Exhale. Find the space between… Calm Company Fund is going on sabbatical and taking a break from investing in new companies and raising new funds. Here’s why." Calm Company Fund's model seems interesting. It's a revenue-based investor that makes
AI
[The Markup] "Now all three men are speaking out against pending California legislation that would make it illegal for police to use face recognition technology as the sole reason for a search or arrest. Instead it would require corroborating indicators." Even with mitigations, it will lead to wrongful
I consider myself really lucky that people stop by and read my posts. Thank you! Every year I like to pause and ask folks a little bit more about themselves, what they’re worried about, and what they’re interested in. It’s a really short, anonymous survey that helps
