Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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"Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the U.S." Come on. This is brazen. Whatever you think of TikTok, I'm not
Subsequent conversations have convinced me that I’m right about the assertions I made about the Fediverse for media organizations. There’s a huge need, a huge opportunity, and the underlying technology is there. The thing that’s a bit missing is a first-class Fediverse platform. Mastodon itself has
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"The House bill, then, is an acknowledgment that algorithmic curation of feeds is a powerful feature that can have a major influence on individuals and society. It at least makes the point that allowing a foreign company, under its own government’s influence, to have some level of control
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Europe once again leads the way by passing meaningful AI regulation. Banned unacceptable-risk uses of AI include facial recognition, social scoring, and emotion recognition at schools and workplaces. "The use of real-time facial recognition systems by law enforcement is permitted “in exhaustively listed and narrowly defined situations,
I’ve been thinking about the risks and ethical issues around AI in the following buckets: * Source impacts: the ecosystem impact of generative models on the people who created the information they were trained on. * Truth and bias: the tendency of generative models to give the appearance of objectivity and
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"The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into our vast network of privately run deportation flights, a system that has generated troubling reports of passenger mistreatment and in-flight emergencies." Important work from some pretty brave activists that sheds
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"What I thought would be helpful, instead, is to survey the current state of AI-powered journalism, from the very bad to really good, and try to draw some lessons from those examples. I'm only speaking for myself today, but this certainly reflects how I'm
Someone I follow posted this weekend about how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was stupid because it consistently pushed for projects that would require higher taxes. I don’t like the framing, and as a self-identified progressive I’m not particularly excited about being called stupid. But
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"Weeknotes are well suited to teams that want to communicate about their work to colleagues or management. But they’re useful in other circumstances, too, such as individuals communicating to the teams they’re part of, or leaders communicating to the people they lead." This is a pretty
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I can't share a quote from this one without ruining it. But you should go read it. #AI [Link]
I used to have a night-time routine. I would help my mother up the six stairs from the living room to her bedroom, give her a hug, and set her up in bed. Sometimes, if she was feeling particularly weak, I would bring her toothbrush to her with a
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"We almost never never actually teach people how to use the ordinary tools of business communication in more effective ways. So, I'm gathering some advice that I regularly share with people, in hopes that this helps you get your messages across more effectively." This is brilliant: