Can AI disrupt the books business? All the signs are… no. But the reasons why are interesting. CC-licensed photo by Martin Hearn on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Why generative AI won’t disrupt books • WIRED
Elizabeth Minkel:
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Last month, Justine Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, provided a sort of bookend to Munjal’s “AI-animated books” proposal. “The three largest fanfic sites—[Archive of Our Own], Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad—get 3 billion-plus annual visits in the US alone,” she wrote. “Imagine how much bigger this market could be if you could chat with characters vs. reading static stories?” The thread was likely a reference to Character.ai, a startup that lets users chat with fictional heroes and villains; Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round for the company in March. The comment also came after the revelation that large language models (LLMs) may have scraped fanfiction writers’ work—which is largely written and shared for free—causing an (understandable) uproar in many fan communities.
Setting aside the fact that fandom role-playing has been a popular practice for decades, Moore’s statements felt like a distillation of tech’s tortured relationship with narrative prose. There are many kinds of fanfiction—including an entire subgenre in which “you” are a character in the story. But those are still stories, sentences deliberately written and arranged in a way that lets you lose yourself in an authored narrative. “Imagine having such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of reading fanfiction—let alone reading fiction more broadly,” I wrote in response to her thread. What’s so wrong with people enjoying reading plain old words on a page?
…One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken—whether through their failure to see the real problems facing the industry (namely, Amazon’s stranglehold), or their insistence that books are not particularly enjoyable as a medium. “It’s that arrogance, to come into a community you know nothing about, that you might have studied as you study for an MBA, and think that you can revolutionize anything,” says writer and longtime book-industry observer Maris Kreizman. “There were so many false problems that tech guys created that we didn’t actually have.”
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So classic: (figurative) tech bros thinking they know why people like something better than the people who like it do.
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Twitter accused of bullying anti-hate campaigners • BBC News
Chris Vallance:
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Since Mr Musk took over Twitter, the platform has been accused – including by former employees – of not doing enough to counter hate-speech and misinformation. Conversely, in December Mr Musk tweeted that hate speech was down by a third.
On Sunday the platform reinstated Kanye West after an almost eight-month ban for a series of offensive tweets – one of which appeared to show a symbol combining a swastika and the Star of David.
In the letter to the CCDH [Center for Countering Digital Hate], X Corp lawyer Alex Spiro rejected the campaign group’s allegations that Twitter “fails to act on 99%” of hateful messages from accounts with Twitter Blue subscriptions.
Mr Spiro criticised the organisation’s methodology, writing that “the article is little more than a series of inflammatory, misleading, and unsupported claims based on a cursory review of random tweets.”
He also alleged that CCDH was supported by funding from “X Corp’s commercial competitors, as well as government entities and their affiliates”.
The letter accused the organisation of attempting to drive away advertisers and said X Corp was considering legal action. The company has lost lost almost half of its advertising revenue since his $44bn (£33.6bn) takeover, Mr Musk revealed in July.
In its reply CCDH’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said the allegations in the “ridiculous letter” had no basis in fact but were “a disturbing effort to intimidate those who have the courage to advocate against incitement, hate speech and harmful content online”.
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Musk’s rather bizarre “free speech for me but not for thee” principles aside, it might be hard for the CCDH to prove its case; accessing the API for the full feed would be incredibly expensive. It’s working on a sample.
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More than 50m Americans under alert as heatwave persists • The Guardian
Erum Salam:
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Over 50 million Americans remain under a heat advisory in one of the hottest summers ever recorded, and a heatwave continues to affect vast parts of the country. Nasa recently confirmed June was the hottest June ever.
The hot and dry weather in the south-west of the US has set off a wave of wildfires. California and Nevada are currently battling a major fire that is uncontrolled. Another out-of-control fire that originated in Washington state has spread into Canada, forcing residents in the town of Osoyoos, British Columbia, to evacuate.
Sunday marked the 31st consecutive day where temperatures reached at least 110F (43.3C) in Phoenix, Arizona. The city’s previous record was 18 days in June 1974.
Doctors in the region reported a rise in first-, second-, and third-degree contact-burn cases, some fatal, amid extreme heat conditions. The reports of severe burn incidents came from hospitals in Arizona and Nevada, where deaths from heat-related conditions have surged.
In Texas, San Antonio hit an all-time high of 117F in June.
Bodies of water around the world are experiencing a phenomenon known as “marine heatwave”, when waters warm to unprecedented levels. A sharp rise in temperatures has been seen in the Caribbean Basin, the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the already fragile ecosystems of marine life, particularly coral reefs. The conditions cause coral to bleach, and in many cases, die.
Andrew Baker, director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami told the Washington Post: “This is definitely the worst bleaching event Florida has ever seen.”
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Radical ways to fix the Earth: are they magic bullets or just band-aids? • The Guardian
Robin McKie:
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“The problem is that climate change itself is already one huge experiment on our planet,” said Prof David Reiner of Cambridge University. “Now we are trying to combat that experiment with other experiments. That will have unknown consequences.
“On the other hand, I take solace from the fact that many more scientific minds are now turning to these problems, that more research is being started, and that a lot more public and private funding is going into ways of tackling global warming so there is room, in the long run, for some optimism.”
However, it is the second form of geoengineering – solar radiation modification (SRM) – that causes most unease. Among the proposed SRM projects are schemes that would scatter the upper atmosphere with tiny reflective particles, such as sulphate aerosols, which could then reflect sunlight back into space. Alternatively, this could be done by placing huge mirrors into orbit around Earth.
The problem is that such schemes would still allow carbon dioxide to build up in the planet’s atmosphere. The world might cool a little as sunlight was diminished, but how this would affect weather patterns is not clear. Carbon dioxide would still have to be removed some time in the future. More and more carbon dioxide would dissolve in the sea and ocean acidification would continue to intensify, triggering even more damage to coral reefs and other marine ecosystems.
Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”
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This probably means that tons of venture capital money is going to go into SRM projects, and Elon Musk will launch one.
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The fall of Stack Overflow, explained • Devmoh
Priyam:
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There are four reasons that explain the slow decline of Stack Overflow.
1. The Google Analytics Change: The first reason is actually the quickest reason. Stack Overflow hasn’t actually lost 50% of its traffic, its more like 35%. In May 2022, Google Analytics changed how a cookie was stored due to privacy laws, leading to a reported 15% loss in traffic. The link above has an update clearing this up.
2. Stack Overflow is hostile to its users: For a place to ask questions, Stack Overflow is surprisingly one of the most toxic and hostile forums on the internet, but in a passive-aggressive way. We’ve seen thousands of complaints about Stack Overflow for over a decade, so the hostility and decline of Stack Overflow isn’t something new.
There are hundreds of Reddit posts about Stack Overflow’s hostility. People have been talking about the “Decline of Stack Overflow” for almost a decade now. But it seems to have finally stuck.
This was from 14 YEARS ago! 2009! The site its linking too doesn’t even exist anymore.
Often, if you try to ask a question on Stack Overflow, it’ll get marked as a duplicate with a link to a question that is absolutely not a duplicate. Or the duplicate will be to a question that was never answered.Other times, valid questions will get downvoted. If you try to answer, you get downvoted. If you try to post a comment.. wait, you can’t! Because you don’t have enough karma.
For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, but also through people commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you dumb.
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Other reasons: Google’s ranking Stack Overflow lower; and yes, AI is having an effect on it. Since November, traffic has fallen a lot.
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Facebook to unmask anonymous Dutch user accused of repeated defamatory posts • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Starting today, Facebook users may feel a little less safe posting anonymously. The Court of the Hague in The Netherlands ruled that Meta Ireland must unmask an anonymous user accused of defaming the claimant, a male Facebook user who allegedly manipulated and made secret recordings of women he dated.
The anonymous Facebook user posted the allegedly defamatory statements in at least two private Facebook groups dedicated to discussing dating experiences. The claimant could not gain access but was shown screenshots from the groups, one with about 2,600 members and one with around 61,000 members. The claimant argued that his reputation had suffered from the repeated postings that included photos of the man and alleged screenshots of his texts.
The claimant tried to get Meta to remove the posts, but Meta responded with an email saying that it would not do so because “it is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation.”
At that point, Meta suggested that the man contact the anonymous user directly to resolve the matter, triggering the lawsuit against Meta. Initially, the claimant asked the court to order Meta to delete the posts, identify the anonymous user, and flag any posts in other private Facebook groups that could defame the claimant.
While arguing the case, Meta had defended the anonymous user’s right to freedom of expression, but the court decided that the claimant—whose name is redacted in court documents—deserved an opportunity to challenge the allegedly defamatory statements.
Partly for that reason, the court ordered Meta to provide “basic subscriber information” on the anonymous user, including their username, as well as any names, email addresses, or phone numbers associated with their Facebook account.
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Generative AI and the future of work in America • McKinsey
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• By 2030, activities that account for up to 30% of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated—a trend accelerated by generative AI. However, we see generative AI enhancing the way STEM, creative, and business and legal professionals work rather than eliminating a significant number of jobs outright. Automation’s biggest effects are likely to hit other job categories. Office support, customer service, and food service employment could continue to decline.
• Federal investment to address climate and infrastructure, as well as structural shifts, will also alter labor demand. The net-zero transition will shift employment away from oil, gas, and automotive manufacturing and into green industries for a modest net gain in employment. Infrastructure projects will increase demand in construction, which is already short almost 400,000 workers today. We also see increased demand for healthcare workers as the population ages, plus gains in transportation services due to e-commerce.
• An additional 12 million occupational transitions may be needed by 2030. As people leave shrinking occupations, the economy could reweight toward higher-wage jobs. Workers in lower-wage jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than those in highest-wage positions, and most will need additional skills to do so successfully. Women are 1.5 times [ie 50%? – Overspill Ed.] more likely to need to move into new occupations than men.
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There’s a graphic, a fair way further down, showing how much McKinsey thinks is going to be done by generative AI across multiple sectors. The biggest (forecast) changes are in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), education and workforce training, and creative and arts management.
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War in Ukraine spurs revolution in drone warfare using AI • The Washington Post
John Hudson and Kostiantyn Khudov:
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Ukraine, which is known for agriculture and other heavy industry, is not an obvious setting for drone innovation. The exigencies of war, however, have turned the country into a kind of super lab of invention, attracting investment from vaunted business luminaries including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. More than 200 Ukrainian companies involved in drone production are now working hand-in-glove with military units on the front lines to tweak and augment drones to improve their ability to kill and spy on the enemy.
“This is a 24/7 technology race,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview at his office in Kyiv, the capital. “The challenge is that every product in every category must be changed daily to gain an advantage.”
Fedorov, 32, is in charge of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” program, an effort to maximize Kyiv’s use of reconnaissance and attack drones to offset Russia’s big advantage in air and artillery power.
The program has assisted private companies in training more than 10,000 drone operators in the past year, with the goal of training an additional 10,000 over the next six months.
Russia’s air force is estimated to be 10 times larger than Ukraine’s, but Kyiv has kept much of it grounded after shooting down several fighter jets in the opening days of the conflict. Drones have allowed Ukraine to surveil and hit sensitive targets far behind enemy lines while improving the accuracy of its conventional artillery.
Drones have far less firepower than fighter jets, however, which is why Kyiv has requested F-16s and other big-ticket items such as ATACMS (shorthand for Army Tactical Missile System) long-range missile systems. In the meantime, cultivating a domestic drone industry is a top priority.
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Threads has to change user habits to compete with Twitter • Quartz
Scott Nover:
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Joseph Bayer, an assistant professor at Ohio State University’s school of communication, says that Twitter and Instagram are culturally very different spaces, but also not necessarily overlapping networks. Instagram is more centered around shopping, influencers, and visuals, while Twitter is centered more around news, sports, and its Black community. “It depends how much overlap people have in their Twitter and Instagram,” he said. “These are very different networks.”
Bayer wasn’t surprised that I keep forgetting about Threads. In order to switch fully from Twitter to Threads, I would need to reap social rewards from Threads. And he’s noticed that engagement on the app—such as likes, reposts, and replies—still seem paltry as compared to Twitter.
But he also said that I’m not just talking about building a new habit with Threads, but also ditching an old one with Twitter. “Even if you remove some of the rewards—which, for many people, it’s become much more of a mixture of positive, negative, and neutral rewards—you’re still driven to that because you have hard-wired that automatic behavior,” Bayer said. “There are certain cues you’ve developed, whether it’s boredom or anxiety or just fear of missing out on some new idea or informational lens that triggers you automatically without any deliberation.”
There’s one other big reason that Maddox, on the other hand, thinks users might be struggling with when they use Threads: app fatigue, which happens when users get tired from using too many apps—and too many new apps.
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App fatigue is definitely a thing. Plus the huge overlap in content, which makes you wonder why you’re on this app rather than that one. When social media was new, there was a lot less content to pick from; it was a new and expanding frontier. Not any more.
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Who paid for a mysterious spy tool? The FBI, an FBI inquiry found • The New York Times
Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman:
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When The New York Times reported in April that a contractor had purchased and deployed a spying tool made by NSO, the contentious Israeli hacking firm, for use by the US government, White House officials said they were unaware of the contract and put the FBI in charge of figuring out who might have been using the technology.
After an investigation, the FBI uncovered at least part of the answer: it was the FBI.
The deal for the surveillance tool between the contractor, Riva Networks, and NSO was completed in November 2021. Only days before, the Biden administration had put NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, which effectively banned US firms from doing business with the company. For years, NSO’s spyware had been abused by governments around the world.
This particular tool, known as Landmark, allowed government officials to track people in Mexico without their knowledge or consent.
The FBI now says that it used the tool unwittingly and that Riva Networks misled the bureau. Once the agency discovered in late April that Riva had used the spying tool on its behalf, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, terminated the contract, according to US officials.
But many questions remain. Why did the FBI hire this contractor — which the bureau had previously authorized to purchase a different NSO tool under a cover name — for sensitive information-gathering operations outside the United States? And why was there apparently so little oversight?
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Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. A bit amazing that the ban didn’t percolate through, though. (Thanks G for the link.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 