Werd I/O

[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation]

"Four years ago, Boston lawyer and journalist James Barron wrote that the Watergate break-in may well have been an attempt to steal documents from Democratic Party headquarters showing that Nixon had taken $549,000 from the Greek government in order to help finance his 1968 campaign."

Dan Kennedy argues that there are parallels here with the story, reported a year ago, that Donald Trump might have partially funded his 2016 election campaign with an illegal contribution from the Egyptian government.

It does seem strange that the story hasn't been followed up on by either the press or the Democratic Party. What sticks out to me about Dan's commentary, though, is this:

"What makes a story stick is repetition — and without prominent Democrats coming out every day and giving journalists something to report on, it quickly withers away."

Should that be true? I'd hope that the press could find their own leads. Otherwise it, in effect, becomes a press release driven industry. I'm not disputing that it probably is true in reality, but I'd hope for a better dynamic.

#Democracy

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[Bill Grueskin in Columbia Journalism Review]

"What’s most important is that a disruptive start-up not be placed at the mercy of the old organization—which might see the upstart as a competitive threat and attempt to have it shut down or cause it to fail."

"[...] Newsroom managers must figure out if their current staff is equipped—intellectually, emotionally, technologically—to handle the pace of change in the business."

Interesting reflections here on newsrooms that split in order to incubate future-facing innovation alongside their legacy businesses. It seems like a good idea to me, if you can afford it: a pro-innovation culture is likely to shed the bureaucracy and processes that may be present in an older business. (This isn't just true for newspapers vs "digital", whatever digital is: it's also true for businesses that are set in an older version of the web.)

The trouble is, as this article notes, that these innovative newsrooms are likely to be so successful that they end up re-merging with the main newsroom and falling under its control. At that point the culture of innovation tends to die, which is something anyone in the tech industry who watched Yahoo acquire startups in the mid-2000s will recognize clearly.

So what's the solution? I think there isn't one. It may be more effective for the innovative newsrooms to be spun off completely, so that they aren't so much parallel sides of the same organization as new organizations entirely, with a more complete ability to reinvent how they work. My guess is that this would extend far beyond new modes of content and audience engagement and extend to the experience of working itself. After all, that's exactly what happened in tech - an exploration that, depending on the organization, was often positive for tech workers. Some people in news describe tech workers as "coddled"; I'd describe it more as "free to invent".

#Media

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[Sean Tilley at We Distribute]

"Following President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 election, Democratic supporters have gained a massive influx of energy and support all over the Web. Hours after the president made his announcement, Heidi Li Feldman, a law professor emeritus at Georgetown University, launched an ActBlue fundraiser comprising of Mastodon users."

It's been pretty successful: almost half a million dollars at the time this article was written. It's another example of how Mastodon users are politically engaged, more active per capita than any other social network, and ready to contribute.

It's also a facet of Mastodon's wider userbase that there were some criticisms this money was being raised for the Presidential election than, say, local mutual aid. From my perspective, both are important: perhaps there's a way to learn from this in order to fund a wider mutual aid campaign, but contributing to an election campaign to stop an authoritarian, nationalistic second Trump administration feels incredibly important.

Political purity tests and fractions unfortunately are a feature of Mastodon's communities, and will likely continue to be - but one positive way of looking at it is that it means they care, a lot, and are interested in ways to improve the lives of vulnerable people. That's an incredibly good thing that should give us all hope for the future.

#Fediverse

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[Matt Levine at Bloomberg]

"Here’s a thing. It costs $1. If you buy one, the next one will cost $2. If someone buys it, the next one will cost $4. Et cetera. The price of the thing always goes up, leaving every buyer (except the most recent one) with a large guaranteed profit. Of course they can’t sell the thing to realize the profit, but that too is a benefit: If they can’t sell, the price can’t go down.

"Man, 2019 was just amazing. That was an economic model that you could advertise."

It genuinely is incredible. Matt Levine is incredulous that anyone could think that they could avoid SEC regulation because something was "decentralized" - but even then, BitCloud wasn't really decentralized.

In a way, I'm a little envious: it seems like one could have raised millions and millions of dollars for some crypto venture and actually, with complete impunity, openly spent it on something else that really had nothing to do with a token scheme. Imagine what could have been funded that way!

As Matt points out:

"And then you could just take the money! And be like “what, I told you I wouldn’t spend it on developing the protocol, and I didn’t.”"

What a time. Anyway, I'm sure nothing like it is happening in the tech industry right now.

#Crypto

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[Lauren Feiner at The Verge]

"A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story, reads. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”"

This is seismic, both for Google and for the web. As The Verge points out, this is so far about liabilities, not about any prescriptive remedy. But as one of the major factors in the decision was the payments that Google makes to browser manufacturers, it seems likely that any remedy will change how this works. In turn, the impact across tech could be significant.

Apple received $20 billion from Google in 2022 to be the default search engine (it shares 36% of ad revenue from Safari users with the company). That's a big number, but nothing compared to its $394bn in total revenue. But for Mozilla, the impact might be more profound: in 2021, these payments represented 83% of its revenue. What happens to it without this underwriting?

It's too early to say exactly what will change, but this is also potentially a gift for the new batch of AI startups that are trying to seize search engine ground. The era of the internet flux that we've found ourselves in - wherein everything is once again up for grabs and seemingly-entrenched incumbents change dramatically at a moment's notice - shows no sign of slowing.

#Technology

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[Joel Gascoigne]

"The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term."

Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne talks about how the rise of the new, decentralized / federated social networks allow publishers to retain control.

"They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to."

I'm a Buffer customer. I love that it works with both Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as every other major social network. More than that, I've long admired Joel's approach while running Buffer: it's a transparent company that works in the open and genuinely values independence. Alongside excellent ventures like micro.blog, I wish there were more like it.

#Fediverse

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[Reid Hoffman in the New York Times]

"As Vice President Harris defines her vision for how best to lead the United States in this moment in time, she has an opportunity to take the torch passed to her by President Biden in an explicitly pro-innovation direction. Instead of governing by tweet, Mr. Biden passed bipartisan legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that authorized hundreds of billions of dollars for new manufacturing construction and investment."

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman explains why Silicon Valley should get behind Harris, counter to the example set by Musk, Andreessen, and a few others. Hoffman is a co-signatory of VCs for Kamala, which makes clear that most Silicon Valley funders are in favor of the Democratic candidate and current Vice President.

Hoffman make the case clearly:

"Under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. stock market indexes hit all-time highs, with the S&P 500 increasing by 48 percent. Unemployment dropped below 4 percent. The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs hit its highest level since 2008. While Mr. Trump’s great ambition was to build a big beautiful border wall, Mr. Biden actually secured the necessary funding to build large-scale factories for manufacturing semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, solar cells and more. And we’re now constructing them at stunning rates."

I'm more pro-regulation than Hoffman is. Harris should maintain a strong antitrust stance, too, I believe, as well as providing new protections against the worst excesses of AI and other technologies that might harm vulnerable groups. But it's certainly true that her administration will be better for innovation than her opponent, even if the latter might be better for lining the pockets of a few select billionaires.

This is also true:

"In a speech Ms. Harris gave on the future of A.I. in 2023, she noted that we must “reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation.”"

It is a false choice. Regulation, principles, and a duty of care to the public are not anti-innovation: in fact, they promote it. And that's the direction we should all be heading in.

#Democracy

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[Dmitry Antonov and Andrew Osborn at Reuters]

"A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their children found out they were Russians only after the flight took off, the Kremlin said on Friday."

What a bonkers story. It's crazy to me that these kinds of sleeper agents are still real - or that they ever were at all. Imagine what it takes to fit in with a culture completely, from language to mannerisms to cultural understanding.

Also, many of these voices appear to adhere to their pulp fiction archetypes:

"Andrei Lugovoi, a former spy wanted by Britain for murdering dissident Alexander Litvinenko with atomic poison and now serving as head of an ultranationalist party's faction in the Russian Duma, said on Telegram: "Our people are at home with their families. And for each of them it is no pity to hand over a bunch of foreign agent scum.""

I wonder how many sleeper agents are still out there, acting on behalf of Russia and every other nation.

#Democracy

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[Jason Snell at Six Colors]

"In the most recent financial quarter, Apple generated $24.4 billion in revenue from Services. The Mac, iPad, and wearables categories together generated just $22.3 billion. Only the iPhone is more important to Apple’s top line than Services."

This is an interesting piece about how Apple's services revenue is set to overtake its hardware business.

Over on his blog Pixel Envy, Nick Heer worries:

"It would be disappointing if Apple sees its hardware products increasingly as vehicles for recurring revenue."

I'd go further. The beauty of Apple's product line is that they're comparatively well-made products that push the boundaries of user experience, bringing technology breakthroughs to a creative audience: as Jobs put it, "bicycles for the mind". Customers (including me) accept higher prices because the products are exceptional, but that depends on a product line that is complete.

If the product offering is a higher-priced hardware device and premium monthly services on top of it, the investment starts to have diminishing returns. It's a loss of focus on what made Apple great, and why people keep coming back to it. It's greed, essentially: continuing to push the Apple user base further and further, assuming the breaking point is very far out.

That puts them at risk from being disrupted by someone else. Windows ain't it, but at some point someone is going to come in with a really great set of hardware on an alternative stack. The question won't be whether it beats Apple as-is, but simply whether it's good enough at a lower price point. And then that company will grow their offerings, until before you know it, Apple has serious competition. It's disruption 101, and the further Apple pushes out its expense and friction, the more susceptible it becomes.

#Technology

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[Nieman Journalism Lab]

"The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps digital-native news startups globally, cited economic challenges, slow growth, and political conflicts as potential reasons for the drop."

This report is in-depth and fascinating. It seems obvious to me that having more news sources with specific focuses is a really good thing, but also that ensuring that they are sustainable is crucial. Many journalistic outlets were created by journalists with business models as almost an afterthought, so as certain kinds of funding dried up they became less viable.

One thing that I really wish was present in this report: platform. What was Substack's influence here? Or Ghost's? Are these WordPress shops? How many of them were aided by Automattic's Newspack, for example? These details could also be revealing.

We need journalism that keeps us more informed, and it's not a secret that many of our incumbent outlets are not doing the job. A healthy news startup ecosystem is one way we can get to a more informed voting population and stronger democracies in our local communities, nationally, and globally.

#Media

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[Molly White]

"With $45.5 million in corporate contributions, American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is the largest donor to Fairshake: a newly-minted super PAC focused solely on installing political candidates who will be friendly to the cryptocurrency industry, and ousting those with a history of pushing for stronger regulations and consumer protections when it comes to an industry that has long been a regulatory “Wild West”."

"[Coinbase's] $25 million contribution, however, appears to be in violation of federal campaign finance laws that prohibit contributions from current or prospective federal government contractors. This would be by far the largest known illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor."

Molly points out that there's a possibility here that Coinbase is using a loophole that had previously been exploited by Chevron. But it's certainly not clear that this is the case.

It's also worth calling out what "candidates who will be friendly to the cryptocurrency industry" means in practice this election cycle. It's far more likely that Trump-aligned candidates will fall into this camp.

#Democracy

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[Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica]

The majority of Donald Trump's net worth is wrapped up in Truth Social's parent company Trump Media & Technology Group. If he's elected, its deals and ownership structure will present conflicts of interests - illustrated by this ProPublica investigation into its streaming TV deal:

"The deal announced by Trump Media involves a series of largely unknown small players. Trump Media’s disclosures about the deal describe a nesting doll of companies that leave many questions unanswered about its new business partners."

"The sellers include a pair of Louisiana companies: [major Republican donor James E.] Davison’s JedTec LLC along with another called WorldConnect IPTV Solutions."

JedTec's issues are relatively straightforward. For me, the bigger mystery surrounds WorldConnect IPTV, which seems to be acting as a wrapper around a UK streaming company called Perception Group. In turn, Perception's servers seem to be colocated with Hurricane Electric, a backbone provider based in Fremont.

Perception seems like a bit of a mystery operation in itself: there's very little information on its website that really illuminates if there's any new technology here at all. WorldConnect, meanwhile, seems to have spent many of its early years helping right-wing Christian TV stations reach audiences across the UK's Freeview over-the-air digital TV service and the internet at large.

It's all super-strange. There's definitely more to discover.

#Democracy

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[Kylie Robison at The Verge]

"Perplexity’s “Publishers’ Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including prominent names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this program, when Perplexity features content from these publishers in response to user queries, the publishers will receive a share of the ad revenue."

Now we're talking. This was inevitable.

It also opens the floodgates: there's a world where any publisher gets a direct revenue share for being a source, if they sign up and license their content. This seems like a solid improvement.

Which brings me to Automattic's involvement. As Matt Mullenweg says in the piece:

"It’s a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero."

Automattic will actually be sharing the revenue with customers of its hosted WordPress product. I'm not sure if that includes WordPress VIP, its premium product for publishers. Whether free hosted WordPress publishers who are used as sources by Perpexity see any kind of revenue share is also a mystery, which might put some foreign publishers in a bad place in particular.

Still, in general, although there will certainly be kinks to work out, this sets a really good precedent. More, please.

#AI

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[Bron Maher at PressGazette]

"Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies."

I believe this would have been illegal were the UK still a part of the EU. Meta is in trouble for a similar sort of scheme. Here, though, in a UK free from EU constraints, there are no such issues.

It's a terrible approach, both in terms of user privacy, and in terms of the newsrooms' own business models: the people most likely to pay to remove ads are also the wealthier people ad buyers want to reach. So not only does this create bad feeling with the reader-base as a whole, but it reduces the value of the ads. It's lose-lose. (Also: who is actually paying for the Daily Express online?)

The irony, as always, is that contextual ads which adjust themselves to the content of articles are more lucrative than targeted ads that rely on reader surveillance. The business model reason to track users is overstated. But here it is again.

#Media

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[Shiraz Shaikh on Global Network on Extremism & Technology]

"Video games and their associated platforms are vastly becoming hubs of radicalisation, extremism and recruitment by far-right extremist organisations. The development of bespoke games and modifications, often known as MODs, has given extremist organisations the ability to further spread their digital propaganda."

This is both depressing and inevitable: games are incredibly popular and share social media's ability to let people share with each other at scale. Unlike social media, some of the modes of communication directly have violent modes of expression.

Valve's apparent under-investment in trust and safety, and protections against extremism, are also partially inevitable. How do you police voice communication across disparate games? But there's more to it than that:

"In terms of the material and content available on these gaming platforms, there is evidence of far-right propaganda available in huge amounts. The materials include books, videos, documents, manifestos, memes and more. Even on other platforms apart from Steam, interviews of far-right leaders, such as Andrew Anglin, are available for users."

This seems easier to police, and should be. That this material is available says a lot about Valve's priorities.

#Technology

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[Kate Conger at the New York Times]

""Time and again, Ms. Yaccarino has faced similar situations, as Mr. Musk is always one whim away from undoing her work. Ms. Yaccarino’s task of repairing and remaking X’s business over the past year has been complicated by Mr. Musk’s seeming disregard for the advertising industry and his constant unraveling of her efforts."

This reads like damage control - she's possibly leaving, although if that happens it's not clear if she's jumping or she's being pushed.

I have little sympathy: she knew what she was getting into. And she'll do just fine. But the project of supporting Elon Musk's work has been one of supporting right-wing ideologies, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and reactionary politics. Nobody who aligns themselves with this gets a pass.

I thought this detail was interesting:

"The internal documents about X’s revenue show that Ms. Yaccarino hopes to net $8 million in political advertising this quarter. If she succeeds, it would represent a marked increase from the company’s political earnings when it was still Twitter — the company earned less than $3 million from political advertisers during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, the last cycle before it banned political advertising."

This is likely what Musk's Trump alignment is about: he wants to encourage that side of the aisle to advertise extensively on X. And likely, they'll bite. Nothing is as deeply-felt or as ideological as it appears; this is, however ham-fistedly, about money.

#Technology

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[Ian Sample in The Guardian]

"England’s former chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, has said there is no safe level of alcohol intake. A major study published in 2018 supported the view. It found that alcohol led to 2.8 million deaths in 2016 and was the leading risk factor for premature death and disability in 15- to 49-year-olds. Among the over 50s, about 27% of global cancer deaths in women and 19% in men were linked to their drinking habits."

This is important: older studies which suggested that there are some health benefits from light drinking are wrong, and the harms of alcohol have been understated. It's bad for you, end of story, and the alcohol industry has used similar techniques and arguments to the tobacco industry in order to cover that fact.

And the outcomes may be really bad:

"Last year, a major study of more than half a million Chinese men linked alcohol to more than 60 diseases, including liver cirrhosis, stroke, several gastrointestinal cancers, gout, cataracts and gastric ulcers."

It's disappointing news for people like me who enjoy a drink from time to time - but it's better to know than not. There's a real trade-off to those glasses of wine.

#Health

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[Carl Sullivan at Flipboard]

"Flipboard has worked with local papers and websites since its inception. Now, as part of the gradual federation of our platform, we’re bringing some of those publications to the fediverse."

Flipboard turns the fediverse on for a whopping 64 US-based local and regional publications. This is big news - if you'll pardon the pun - and an enormous step forward for bringing journalism onto the fediverse. I love how easy Flipboard has made it.

I also really like this approach:

"To learn more about what fedi folks actually want when it comes to local outlets, we simply asked them. They told us the specific publications they’d like to see, and voted in a poll on the region they were most interested in. (The Midwest, it turns out!)"

Asking people is always the best approach. And as I've learned, the fediverse is full of highly-engaged, well-informed people who are hungry for great journalism.

#Fediverse

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[David Ingram at NBC News]

"Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said Thursday in her first interview that he was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine."

Her full Threads thread is worth reading. She seems to have her head screwed on correctly and comes across as a far better person than the father she disowned.

On puberty blockers, she says:

“They save lives. Let’s not get that twisted. They definitely allowed me to thrive.”

That's really the kicker with Musk's current nonsense. Lives are at stake, and while his rhetoric might soothe whatever it is inside him that is hurt by his child disowning him for being a bigot, taking it to the national policy stage and endangering vulnerable communities is far from okay.

It's also a wild distraction when the valuations of his companies are at risk. Privately, investors and partners have to be up in arms: this is not what he needs to be concentrating on. In effect, one of the world's richest men is having such a public personality crisis that it's putting the well-being of both a very vulnerable group and his wealthy backers at risk.

#Equality

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[Samantha Cole at 404 Media]

"A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films."

404 Media has linked to the spreadsheet itself, which seems to be a pretty clear list of YouTube channels and individual videos.

Google is clear that this violates YouTube's rules. The team at Runway also by necessity downloaded the videos first using a third-party tool, which itself is a violation of the rules.

This is just a video version of the kinds of copyright and terms violations we've already seen copious amounts of in static media. But Google might be a stauncher defender of its rules than most - although not necessarily for principled reasons, because it, too, is in the business of training AI models on web data, and likely on YouTube content.

#AI

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[Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge]

"Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast.

“Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.”"

No, you don't.

As I've discussed before, investors like Andreessen and Horowitz are putting concerns about crypto regulation and taxation of unrealized gains over a host of social issues that include mass deportations, an increase in death sentences, military police in our cities, and potential ends to contraception and no-fault divorce. It's myopic, selfish, and stupid.

It looks even more so in a world where Trump is reportedly already regretting appointing JD Vance as his Vice Presidential candidate and where Musk has reneged on his $45M a month pledge to a Trump PAC. They come out looking awful.

The progressive thing to do would be to starve their firm: founders who care about those issues should pledge not to let a16z into their rounds, and other VCs should refuse to join rounds where a16z is present. This is likely too much activism for Silicon Valley, but it would send the strong signal that's needed here.

The desire for profit must never trump our duty of care to society's most vulnerable. Agreeing with this statement should be a no-brainer - but we're quickly learning how many would much rather put themselves first.

#Technology

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[Anthony Robledo at USA Today]

"Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his estranged transgender daughter was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" after he was tricked into agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures."

The thing is, his daughter Vivian is perfectly happy with the decision. The thing that's causing Musk pain is not her decision to transition; it's that she's cut him off and no longer speaks to him. Interviews like this illustrate why.

That so many of his decisions are governed by this absolute loser energy says a lot. Just calm down, call your daughter, and reconcile.

As USA Today points out:

"Gender-affirming care is a valid, science-backed method of medicine that saves lives for people who require care while navigating their gender identity. Gender-affirming care can range from talk or hormone therapy to surgical intervention."

It's not done flippantly; a huge amount of care and attention is undertaken, particularly for minors. This backlash is pure conservative hokum: it does not have any scientific or factual basis. It just makes some small-minded, old-fashioned people feel uncomfortable.

#Democracy

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[Christine Hall at FOSS Force]

"The Apache Software Foundation is making changes in an attempt to right a wrong it unintentionally created when it adopted its name 25-years ago."

This is an unnecessarily awkward article (why describe the existing logo as cool in this context?!) to describe a simple premise: the Apache Software Foundation is slowly, finally, moving away from its appropriation of the Apache name and its racist use of faux Native American imagery.

For a while, it's preferred to refer to itself as ASF, and now it's going to have a much-needed logo change. That's fine, but it needs to go much further. It's past time to just rip off the Band Aid.

Still, this is far better than the obstinate response we've seen in the past to requests for change. A new logo, slight as it is, is hopefully an iteration in the right direction.

#Technology

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[Kayleigh Barber and Seb Joseph at Digiday]

"After much back and forth, Google has decided to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. Turns out all the fuss over the years wasn’t in vain after all; the ad industry’s cries have finally been heard."

Advertisers are rejoicing. In other words: this is bad.

It's possible that Chrome's "new experience" that lets users make an "informed choice" across their web browsing is really good. Sincerely, though, I doubt it. Moving this to the realm of power user preferences rather than a blanket policy for everyone means that very few people are likely to use it.

The result is going to be a continued trend of tracking users across the web. The people who really, really care will do the work to use the interface; everyone else (including people who care about privacy!) won't have the time.

All this to help save the advertising industry. Which, forgive me, doesn't feel like an important goal to me.

Case in point: Chrome's Privacy Sandbox isn't actually going away, and this is what Digiday has to say about it:

"This could be a blessing in disguise, especially if Google’s plan gets Chrome users to opt out of third-party cookies. Since it’s all about giving people a choice, if a bunch of users decide cookies aren’t for them, the APIs in the sandbox might actually work for targeting them without cookies."

A "blessing in disguise" for advertisers does not read as an actual blessing to me.

#Technology

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[Gerben Wierda at R&A IT Strategy & Architecture]

"ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two."

The distinction is indeed important: it's akin to making an easy reader version, albeit one with the odd error here and there.

This is particularly important for newsrooms and product teams that are looking at AI to generate takeaways from articles. There's a huge chance that it'll miss the main, most pertinent points, and simply shorten the text in the way it sees fit.

#AI

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