The challenge of getting younger editors for Wikipedia is being taken seriously – but what’s the answer? CC-licensed photo by Roger on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.
It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 10 links for you. Edited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Chats with AI bots found to damp conspiracy theory beliefs • Financial Times
Michael Peel:
»
Conspiracy theorists who debated with an artificial intelligence chatbot became more willing to admit doubts about their beliefs, according to research that offers insights into dealing with misinformation.
The greater open-mindedness extended even to the most stubborn devotees and persisted long after the dialogue with the machine ended, scientists found.
The research runs counter to the idea that it is all but impossible to change the mind of individuals who have dived down rabbit holes of popular but unevidenced ideas.
The findings are striking because they suggest a potential positive role for AI models in countering misinformation, despite their own vulnerabilities to “hallucinations” that sometimes cause them to spread falsehoods.
The work “paints a brighter picture of the human mind than many might have expected” and shows that “reasoning and evidence are not dead”, said David Rand, one of the researchers on the work published in Science on Thursday.
“Even many conspiracy theorists will respond to accurate facts and evidence — you just have to directly address their specific beliefs and concerns,” said Rand, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
«
The paper’s full text is available at the link. Getting a chatbot to talk to people is certainly a bonus – those things will have a lot more patience than a human.
unique link to this extract
Triple hearsay: original sources of the claim that Haitians eat pets in Ohio admit no first-hand knowledge • Newsguard
Sam Howard and Jack Brewster:
»
In just days, a bizarre and baseless claim accusing Haitian migrants of eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, went from an obscure Facebook post in a private group to a talking point by Republican Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
The journey of the viral claim from vague, third hand gossip among Ohio neighbors to the presidential debate stage — where it was broadcast to 67 million people — is as stunning as the claim itself, according to those who started it all.
NewsGuard identified and tracked down the two people central to the claim: Erika Lee, the Springfield resident who wrote the original Facebook post, and Kimberly Newton, the neighbor who had provided her with a third-hand account of the rumor, making Lee’s social media post a fourth-hand account: the alleged acquaintance/cat owner; Newton’s friend; Newton; and Lee, who posted it on Facebook.
In exclusive interviews, NewsGuard spoke both with Lee, a 35-year-old hardware store worker who has lived in Springfield for four years, and Newton, her neighbor and a 12-year resident of Springfield. The interviews reveal just how flimsy and unsubstantiated the rumor was from the beginning — based entirely on third hand hearsay. Yet it quickly gained traction and, remarkably, found its way to Trump’s lips on a national stage.
“I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” Newton said about the rumor she had passed on to her neighbor, Lee, the Facebook poster. Newton explained to NewsGuard that the cat owner was “an acquaintance of a friend” and that she heard about the supposed incident from that friend, who, in turn, learned about it from “a source that she had.” Newton added: “I don’t have any proof.”
«
Facebook: a much, much more efficient way to spread “friend of a friend” rumours.
unique link to this extract
OpenAI releases new o1 reasoning model • The Verge
Kylie Robison:
»
OpenAI is releasing a new model called o1, the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have been trained to answer more complex questions, faster than a human can. It’s being released alongside o1-mini, a smaller, cheaper version. And yes, if you’re steeped in AI rumors: this is, in fact, the extremely hyped Strawberry model.
For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a “preview” to emphasize how nascent it is.
ChatGPT Plus and Team users get access to both o1-preview and o1-mini starting today, while Enterprise and Edu users will get access early next week. OpenAI says it plans to bring o1-mini access to all the free users of ChatGPT but hasn’t set a release date yet. Developer access to o1 is really expensive: In the API, o1-preview is $15 per 1 million input tokens, or chunks of text parsed by the model, and $60 per 1 million output tokens. For comparison, GPT-4o costs $5 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens.
The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details. He says o1 “has been trained using a completely new optimization algorithm and a new training dataset specifically tailored for it.”
«
Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? • The Guardian
Stephen Harrison:
»
In Katowice, Poland, at last month’s annual Wikimania conference – an event that feels a bit like an international summit of librarians crossed with Comic-Con – many of the speakers highlighted how Wikipedia faces an existential threat of fading into obscurity or disrepair. But there was also talk of a solution that may help secure Wikipedia’s future, or at least prevent its premature demise: recruiting more younger editors from generation Z and raising their awareness of how widely Wikipedia content is used across the internet.
Wikipedia operates on a model of unpaid and independent volunteers who create, update and maintain the content. Casual editors may make minor stylistic edits to a page, while others devote substantial time to creating full-fledged articles. A significant number of Wikipedia contributors are already gen Z; according to a 2022 survey, about 20% of Wikipedia editors are between the ages of 18 and 24. Although this is roughly reflective of the global population, there is a clear desire to increase this percentage.
As a tech writer, and in my research of Wikipedia for my novel The Editors, I have often heard the same handful of issues that dissuade the younger generation from joining the cause. First and foremost, the smartphone is gen Z’s preferred internet access device, but it’s not an easy tool for editing Wikipedia. Even the savviest digital natives find it frustrating to edit the encyclopedia with a small screen.
There are exceptions. Hannah Clover, a 22-year-old Canadian, was the youngest ever winner of “Wikimedian of the Year” at last month’s Wikimania. She also happens to be a rare breed: a highly prolific Wikipedian who has made more than 75% of her edits using mobile devices. A lot of those were edits she made on the go, while commuting on the bus or during shift breaks at her former job at McDonald’s. For Clover, adding to the global encyclopedia helped provide a sense of purpose. “Serving ice-cream to people isn’t really that much of a world-changing endeavour,” she told me.
«
Suspicious phrases in peer reviews point to referees gaming the system • AAAS
Jeffrey Brainard:
»
When University of Seville researcher Maria Ángeles Oviedo‑García began to look at the peer reviews some journals publish alongside their papers, she was surprised to see the same vague, generic phrases kept turning up.
“In abstract, the author should add more scientific findings.” “Discuss the novelty and clear application of the work in the abstract as well as in introduction section.”
She ultimately identified 263 suspicious reviews prepared for 37 journals in multiple disciplines between 2021 and this year. One reviewer used duplicated phrases in 56 reviews, she reported last month in Scientometrics.
It’s an unusually detailed analysis of a little-noticed scheme that may be allowing some researchers to reap undeserved benefits for boilerplate or downright manipulative reviews. The practice may also be compromising the integrity of the scientific literature. “Some other researchers will probably base their future research on those fake-reviewed papers, and it’s scary,” especially for ones about health and medicine, says Oviedo-García, who primarily studies marketing and tourism.
Oviedo-García and other research integrity experts suspect the reviewers worked off a template to quickly crank out reports. They could then take credit for the work on their CVs to gain a boost in professional evaluations. Some may have additional self-interest: Several reviewers asked the author to include citations to their own papers, and some authors complied.
The reviews Oviedo-García analyzed appeared almost exclusively in journals from MDPI, which publishes reviews alongside many of its papers if the author agrees. (Reviewers are named if they consent.) The privately held company based in Switzerland publishes all its articles open access, charging authors a fee and promising prompt publication.
«
Once more we discover a problem with the open access model.
unique link to this extract
Celebrity Number Six and the unreal power of crowdsourced investigations • Links I Would GChat You
Caitlin Dewey on the crowdsourced discovery of the identity of a face on a set of old curtains (really):
»
This is viral frivolity of the purest and highest order: a whole lot of hijinx and hysteria for a “mystery” whose stakes could not conceivably be lower. But it’s also a testament to the growing power and efficacy of crowdsourced investigations — for good as well as for evil. In the past five months alone, online sleuths have closed out three high-profile, long-running “internet mysteries,” culminating with Celebrity Number Six. Recent crowdsourced investigations have also cracked cold cases, outed January 6 rioters and advanced historic research, said Kurt Luther, a professor of computer science and the director of Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab.
Empowered with new generative AI and facial recognition tools that make their work more effective, and armed with far more free time than experts could ever muster, these sleuths have raised significant questions about privacy, vigilantism and the so-called wisdom of crowds. But when they get it right … it’s kind of magical.
“There have been so many misidentifications,” Luther acknowledged. “But there have been so many successes, as well: missing people found, criminals identified — there are a lot of compelling examples of the power of crowdsourced investigations.”
Identifying “Six” might seem trivial next to something like, you know, solving a 50-year-old homicide. But the technologies and social dynamics at play in r/CelebrityNumberSix are actually pretty similar to those playing out in other online investigative communities, Luther said. For years, Sixers have deployed a mix of conventional and open-source investigative techniques to try to identify the woman on the curtain: contacting the original fabric supplier, for instance, or running the stylized print through facial recognition engines.
Over the past 18 months, as generative AI tools became both more powerful and more accessible to the wider public, members of the community began attempting to create more photorealistic, 3D images of Celebrity Number Six, rather like a police sketch artist drawing out a portrait. Last week, a 20-year-old Redditor named u/StefanMorse tried a slightly different approach, shading the print with skin-like colors but leaving it two-dimensional. When uploaded to PimEyes, the terrifying facial recognition search engine beloved by many a TikTok doxxer, that colourised version of the Number Six image repeatedly matched the obscure Spanish model Leticia Sardá.
«
Simultaneously we can solve ages-old puzzles like this, and yet we can’t locate ten-year-old web pages which have been scrubbed from the internet and the Wayback Machine.
unique link to this extract
New Google Wallet features for travelers and commuters • Google Blog
Jenny Cheng, VP and GM of Google Wallet:
»
People are increasingly looking for ways to digitize everyday items — with one of the top requests being a digital ID. Last year we began rolling out the ability to save select state-issued digital IDs to Wallet. Starting soon, we’ll begin beta testing a new type of digital ID in Google Wallet, giving more people in more places a way to create and store a digital ID, now with a U.S. passport. This new ID pass works at select TSA checkpoints, saving you time and stress at the airport when you’re traveling domestically.
Creating an ID pass is easy: select the prompt in the Google Wallet app to “create an ID pass with your U.S. passport” and follow the instructions to scan the security chip in the back of your passport. You’ll be asked to take a selfie video to verify your identity, and Google Wallet will notify you when your ID pass is ready (typically within a few minutes). While ID passes are accepted at select TSA checkpoints today, we’re working with partners so you can use digital IDs in even more situations — for example, in the future we believe you should be able to use digital ID for things like account recovery, identity verification and even car rentals. This technology is in its early stages, so it’s important to know that a digital ID in Google Wallet is not a replacement for your physical ID. For now, you need to carry a physical ID with you when traveling.
«
This is quite an advance. Unusual too for Google get a step ahead of Apple on something like this. Though.. what if your phone is out of juice at your destination?
unique link to this extract
Five reasons I think Apple will be the surprise winner in the AI race • Tom’s Guide
Ryan Morrison:
»
Apple may have been late to the generative AI game, lagging behind Google, Microsoft and newcomers like OpenAI and Anthropic, but it is quickly catching up. It could easily surpass the capabilities of the current industry leaders.
While it is true that Apple didn’t jump on the large language model bandwagon soon after ChatGPT launched, unlike Google and Microsoft, the Cupertino company has been heavily involved in machine learning and forms of AI for decades, using it throughout its operating systems.
This heritage and other reasons, including a focus on privacy, deep software and hardware integration, and access to personal data, are why I think Apple is well-placed to lead the AI pack.
«
He suggests privacy, integration of hardware and software, personal context (on the phone), simplicity of focus, and AI being built into the camera. Whether that will really create an edge over Google – even on the Pixel? – is an open question, for now.
unique link to this extract
How China has ‘throttled’ its private sector • Financial Times
Eleanor Olcott and Wang Xueqiao:
»
“China used to be the best VC destination in the world after the US,” says one Beijing-based executive, referring to the business of private investment in high-risk start-up companies.
Founders and investors harbour few hopes of a return to the glory years before the Covid-19 pandemic, when the likes of Alibaba and Tencent took advantage of rapid economic growth and the rise of the mobile internet to become globally significant technology companies.
“The whole industry has just died before our eyes,” the executive continues. “The entrepreneurial spirit is dead. It is very sad to see.”
The downbeat mood is reflected in the statistics. In 2018, at the height of VC investment, 51,302 start-ups were founded in China, according to data provider IT Juzi. By 2023, that figure had collapsed to 1,202 and is on track to be even lower this year.
Keyu Jin, associate professor at the London School of Economics, says the industry “has been critical to spur China’s entrepreneurial dynamism”.
“The outflow of global investment and the massive drop in the valuation of Chinese companies will impinge on the nation’s innovation drive,” she warns.
The crisis in the sector partly reflects the slowdown in the Chinese economy, which has been buffeted by the protracted Covid-19 lockdowns, the bursting of its property bubble and the stagnation of its equity markets. As bilateral tensions have risen, US-based investors have also largely pulled out.
But it is also the direct result of political decisions taken by President Xi Jinping that have dramatically changed the environment for private business in China — including a crackdown on technology companies regarded as monopolistic or not attuned to Communist party values, and an anti-corruption crusade that continues to ripple through the business community.
«
That’s going to cause a dearth of successful companies in a few years’ time; Xi may have cause to regret it. Unless the plan is that only state-sponsored companies get to do tech, and be big.
unique link to this extract
Mark Zuckerberg says he’s done apologizing • TechCrunch
Maxwell Zeff:
»
Shortly after hopping on stage, [Mark] Zuckerberg joked that he might need to schedule his next appearance in order to apologize for whatever he was about to say. After a beat, he added that he was just kidding and that, in fact, his days of apologizing are over.
Zuckerberg has had something of a rebrand recently. He raises cattle in Hawaii now, has long bouncy curls and a gold chain, and commissions Roman-style statues of his wife. On stage, the Facebook founder wore a boxy T-shirt he designed himself alongside fashion designer Mike Amiri that read “learning through suffering” in Greek letters.
The tongue-in-cheek comment about apologizing was a reference to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who himself addressed a flub he’d made on the Acquired podcast earlier this year, via a pre-recorded video on a screen hanging over the crowd. Huang’s original comment — that he never would have started Nvidia if he knew what he did today — was grossly taken out of context, he said. In the video, he clarified that he absolutely would start Nvidia again, and that his comment was more about the blissful ignorance of startup founders.
While Zuckerberg’s opening comment was just a friendly jab at Huang, it set the tone for Zuckerberg’s new attitude toward life and business. The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook’s content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control.
“Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
«
| • 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 