Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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"We’re taking a phased approach to Threads’ fediverse integration to ensure we can continue to build responsibly and get valuable feedback from our users and the fediverse community." It's really great to see Meta do this and communicate well about it. However you see the
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"One way you know that it’s business as usual for journalists is that so many have remained on Twitter, a platform whose owner has taken right-wing trollery to extremes lately. He loudly supports people who want to install a fascist government in the United States, and it’s
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A detail I hadn't noticed: while the New York Times OpenAI lawsuit rested on copyright infringement, the Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet are claiming a DMCA violation. "A study released this month by Patronus AI, a startup launched by former Meta researchers, found that GPT-4 reproduced copyrighted
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"Sure, our articles maintain a rigid SEO template that creatively resembles the kitchen at a poorly run Quiznos, and granted, all our story ideas are gleaned from better-written magazine articles from seven months ago (that we’re totally not plagiarizing), but imagine if AI wrote those articles? So much
One thing that becomes clear when you move outside of open web groups and a certain kind of tech company is the difference between trying to build the web as a platform and trying to use the web as a platform. In the former mental model, you’re experimenting to
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"Researchers have discovered a new way to hack AI assistants that uses a surprisingly old-school method: ASCII art." So many LLM exploits come down to finding ways to convince an engine to disregard its own programming. It's straight out of 1980s science fiction, like teaching an
If AI makes it easier to create generic, middle-of-the-road content, the way forward for human beings is to create content that is out there on the edges, blazing ground that probabilistic algorithms could never possibly reach. Which, honestly, I wish more people would do anyway. The middle of the road
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A lovely interview with the creator of Karateka and Prince of Persia. (Karateka in particular was a formative game for me.) "If you'd asked me at age 12, I’d probably have said that my dream job would be comics artist or animator." Me too. So
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This is such an interesting trend: "It seems like a pretty well-worn path at this point. Start a YouTube channel with some compelling videos, and when you amass enough views/revenue, use that money to entice strangers into helping you make more videos that get more revenue." Mr
My posts are syndicated to Microsoft Start as part of the Creator Program. It’s been interesting to see which ones find an audience there and which ones don’t: politics seems to be more interesting to the community there than tech commentary, which stands to reason, as it’s
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"We're selling ourselves out by letting Facebook own a new social network and not putting that energy into building something that preserves our choice." I am worried that this might turn out to be correct. #Technology [Link]
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"Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016." This seems obvious: there are informants in any major protest movement, and have been