Incinerators are used to dispose of a lot of British household rubbish – but they’re very polluting. CC-licensed photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about Bluesky.
A selection of 9 links for you. Fired up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI • Bloomberg via NDTV
Rachel Metz, Shirin Ghaffary, Dina Bass and Julia Love:
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OpenAI was on the cusp of a milestone. The startup finished an initial round of training in September for a massive new artificial intelligence model that it hoped would significantly surpass prior versions of the technology behind ChatGPT and move closer to its goal of powerful AI that outperforms humans.
But the model, known internally as Orion, did not hit the company’s desired performance, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss company matters. As of late summer, for example, Orion fell short when trying to answer coding questions that it hadn’t been trained on, the people said. Overall, Orion is so far not considered to be as big a step up from OpenAI’s existing models as GPT-4 was from GPT-3.5, the system that originally powered the company’s flagship chatbot, the people said.
OpenAI isn’t alone in hitting stumbling blocks recently. After years of pushing out increasingly sophisticated AI products at a breakneck pace, three of the leading AI companies are now seeing diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build newer models. At Alphabet Inc.’s Google, an upcoming iteration of its Gemini software is not living up to internal expectations, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Anthropic, meanwhile, has seen the timetable slip for the release of its long-awaited Claude model called 3.5 Opus.
The companies are facing several challenges. It’s become increasingly difficult to find new, untapped sources of high-quality, human-made training data that can be used to build more advanced AI systems. Orion’s unsatisfactory coding performance was due in part to the lack of sufficient coding data to train on, two people said. At the same time, even modest improvements may not be enough to justify the tremendous costs associated with building and operating new models, or to live up to the expectations that come with branding a product as a major upgrade.
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AI systems are already hitting the asymptotic point, you say?
Also this in the story:
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Anthropic declined to comment but referred Bloomberg News to a five-hour podcast featuring chief executive officer Dario Amodei that was released Monday.
“People call them scaling laws. That’s a misnomer,” he said on the podcast. “They’re not laws of the universe. They’re empirical regularities. I am going to bet in favour of them continuing, but I’m not certain of that.”
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If someone who was not my editor had told me to go and find some information they already had by listening to a five-hour podcast I would have made it my life’s work to find them and torture them horribly.
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The election proved the media is in crisis. Here’s what it needs to do to regain its relevance • CNN Business
Brian Stelter:
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Some of these trends have been evident for years, but the election results have put an exclamation point on the concerns about distrust and dissatisfaction with the media status quo. Now, a reckoning is underway. Media executives and rank-and-file reporters are wondering what needs to change. What can news outlets do to regain trust and appeal to new audiences without alienating existing readers and viewers?
For the past week, CNN’s media team has been receiving feedback from readers of the Reliable Sources newsletter. Here are some of the concrete recommendations and ideas that have emerged.
First, recognize the scope of the problem: Mainstream media outlets have been losing public trust for decades, particularly among Republicans, but also among Democrats and independents. Alternative sources, often lacking any semblance of journalistic standards, have filled some of the voids. And smart phones, social networks and streaming services have introduced an almost infinite amount of competition for people’s attention. Algorithms have replaced human editors and artificial intelligence systems have started to replace search. These are huge changes that warrant equally big adjustments by news outlets.
Pop the bubbles: Many news consumers, and a good number of journalists, think national news coverage is too Washington-centric. Maybe, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan commented last week, the media collectively spent “too much time obsessing about polling (where did that get us?) and not enough time talking to people!” O’Sullivan and other correspondents interviewed voters all election season long, but those conversations and focus groups should inform editorial decisions and panel discussions.
Geographic diversity would also help. “When we cover MAGA,” a former ABC News executive said, ruefully, “it’s like going to the zoo to report on an exotic animal.” One logical takeaway: Publishers should embrace the Zoom era and have employees spread out across the country to balance out New York and Washington groupthink.
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There’s plenty more, but you have to wonder if an organisation with so much inertia is going to be able to adjust. And the journalists too will have to consider quite what journalism looks like in this modern age.
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Google executive picked to supercharge news efforts has resigned • WSJ
Alexandra Bruell:
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Shailesh Prakash, a Google News executive central to the tech giant’s relationships with publishers, has resigned, according to people familiar with the situation.
The high-profile departure comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets over how the search engine drives traffic and uses their content.
Prakash, a vice president and general manager for Google News, joined the tech giant two years ago from the Washington Post, where he spent more than a decade overseeing data and technology.
At Google, he brought an understanding of publishers’ frustrations as they have grappled with traffic declines and seek compensation for the Alphabet unit’s GOOGL -1.51%decrease; red down pointing triangle use of their content. While he oversaw product and engineering for the News group, he also communicated with leaders at news publishers regarding changes related to search and generative AI.
A representative from Google declined to comment on Prakash’s departure.
During his decade-plus tenure at the Post, where he was chief information officer, Prakash helped transform the news outlet’s digital operation and oversaw a number of technology experiments, including an advertising technology and digital publishing business that serviced publishers beyond the Post.
…Google is the greatest source of traffic to publishers’ websites, because when people search for information, the results often direct them to news articles. Publishers have balked in recent years at payment offers from Google, arguing that their content is worth more than Google has been willing to pay.
Currently weighing on publishers is Google’s use of their content to produce generative AI overviews, which respond to search queries with a complete answer, along with a link icon to the publishers’ sites that source the information.
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Burning household rubbish now UK’s dirtiest form of power, BBC finds • BBC News
Esme Stallard, Matt McGrath, Patrick Clahane & Paul Lynch:
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Burning household rubbish in giant incinerators to make electricity is now the dirtiest way the UK generates power, BBC analysis has found.
Nearly half of the rubbish produced in UK homes, including increasing amounts of plastic, is now being incinerated. Scientists warn it is a “disaster for the climate” – and some are calling for a ban on new incinerators.
The BBC examined five years of data from across the country, and found that burning waste produces the same amount of greenhouse gases for each unit of energy as coal power, which was abandoned by the UK last month.
The Environmental Services Association, which represents waste firms, contested our findings and said emissions from dealing with waste are “challenging to avoid”.
Nearly 15 years ago, the government became seriously concerned with the gases being produced from throwing away household rubbish in landfill and their contribution to climate change. In response, it hiked the taxes UK councils paid for burying waste.
Facing massive bills, councils turned to energy-from-waste plants – a type of incinerator that produces electricity from burning rubbish. The number of incinerators surged – in the past five years the number in England alone has risen from 38 to 52. About 3.1% of the UK’s energy comes from waste incinerators.
…In the past few years, more plastic has been going to incinerators and less food waste – which councils are now sending to anaerobic digesters or to be composted. But the government’s own calculations continue to assume that we send the same mix of rubbish as we did back in 2017 – potentially underestimating the scale of the issue.
The BBC’s five-year analysis used data on actual pollution levels recorded by operators at their incinerators, and found that energy-from-waste plants are now producing the same amount of greenhouse gases per unit of electricity as if they were burning coal.
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Oh. That’s really not what we wanted at all.
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AI-powered bots on X spread disinformation in Ghana’s election • Rest of World
Caroline Haskins:
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The accounts — which appear to have AI-generated profile photos, and have names such as “Glenn Washington,” “Netflix Series&Movies,” and “Patriot” — also disparage John Mahama, the presidential candidate from the rival left-wing party National Democratic Congress. These posts often use hashtags such as #mahamaisaliar and #DrunkmaniMahama, accusing Mahama of being a drunkard. (Mahama has denied this.)
“The primary goal of the network appears to be to amplify pro-NPP messaging, promote the Bawumia administration and take aim at the opposition National Democratic Congress,” McKenzie Sadeghi, an editor of AI and foreign influence at NewsGuard who contributed to the research, told Rest of World.
Dimitris Dimitriadis, NewsGuard’s director of research and development, said in an interview with Rest of World that the bot accounts tend to post at “regular” and “predictable” intervals, often ten or more times per day. He said the accounts — which tend to be active between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Ghana — mostly receive likes and reposts from others in the bot network. These regimented patterns in timing and style tipped the researchers off that the accounts may be fake.
NewsGuard’s research team fed all 171 of the posts from the accounts into a tool from Pangram Labs, which assesses the likelihood of text being generated by AI, Dimitriadis said. The tool concluded that it was “highly likely” that all of the accounts were posting AI-generated content created by ChatGPT.
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Don’t tell me – the moderators at X don’t care. Also, a Newsguard survey recently found that a quarter of (American) respondents thought users with blue ticks were more reliable than those without. (They’re not.)
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Visualizing 13 million BlueSky users • Joel Gustafson
Joel Gustafson:
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Anyone who uses Twitter a lot knows that it’s a big place. Not just that it has a lot of active users, but more that there are lots of different parts.
Over time, everybody develops their own mental map of the landscape, infering how vast and foreign the whole network is from hints and clues, stray tweets escaping containment, and chance encounters in a big account’s replies. But we never get to see the whole thing for real.
We can’t make a map of all of Twitter, because the data isn’t available and scraping it would be difficult and illegal. But we can do it for BlueSky, which has seen massive growth over the last several months thanks to Twitter’s ongoing antagonization of its userbase and Brazil banning Twitter outright in October 2024.
Here’s a sneak peek at the final result.
You can also explore the map interactively at https://aurora.ndimensional.xyz, although you’ll need desktop Chrome/Chromium since it uses WebGPU.
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It’s an interesting thread, though it tells us what we’d expect: these networks tend to cluster, either by country or topic.
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Guardian quits X social media platform, citing racism and conspiracy theories • Reuters
Andy Bruce:
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British news publisher the Guardian said on Wednesday it will no longer post to X, citing “disturbing content” on the social media platform, including racism and conspiracy theories.
The left-leaning Guardian, which has 10.7 million followers on X, becomes the first large UK media company to retreat from the platform that Elon Musk purchased in 2022.
Critics say Musk’s hands-off approach has allowed lies and hate speech to spread on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the Guardian said in an editorial published on its website.
“This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism.”
In response, Musk posted, opens new tab on X and said of the Guardian: “They are irrelevant.”
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Guardian reporters are still OK to gather info from the site, and (if they want) to post there, and can embed content from it. It seems a slightly odd move: my view is that time spent there all costs Musk money (because it sure isn’t making a profit), and for the Guardian posting there has minimal marginal cost, and its stories might get picked up.
Come a long way from 2007 or so when I was technology editor and did an analysis suggesting that posting there was bringing in thousands of clicks per week for the Technology section alone. (It’s possible that bit.ly, the URL-shortening site which generated the metrics, didn’t ignore bots as well as it should have.)
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How The New York Times beat the algorithm and became Facebook’s top publisher • Sherwood News
Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas:
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According to Garbage Day data, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign trounced Trump on Facebook. And the top publisher on the world’s largest social network in the lead-up to the big vote wasn’t some far-right disinformation operation, nor was it even a right-wing tabloid. For the first time in years, the leading news outlet on Facebook was The New York Times.
Times articles have been among the platform’s most popular shared links since August. The standout articles have included election reporting, like their August article about Black men supporting Harris, as well as more general stories, like coverage of the US Open. In October, 7 of the 10 most popular articles on Facebook came from the Gray Lady. Leading the pack was the single most-shared article in more than a year since Garbage Day started tracking: the website’s ongoing coverage of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, which included multiple references to Harris’ reaction.
The only outgoing link shared more times all year, in fact, was the donation page for the pro-Democrat PAC ActBlue. Across Facebook, the link was shared just under 2 million times after Harris announced her candidacy in July, including 1.4 million times in the first 10 days. For comparison, the most popular Trump donation link peaked at 174,000 shares in October.
That figure is perplexing compared to actual voting results, but the emergence of the Times as the top publisher on Facebook last month is even stranger — especially when you consider the sites that have occupied that spot all year. Between November 2023 and July 2024, the most popular news articles on the platform were all from a blog called Catholic Fundamentalism. Only obituaries for beloved cultural figures like Matthew Perry and Shannen Doherty came close to breaking its run.
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But but but:
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Garbage Day data confirms that news engagement on Facebook has cratered since early last year. The Times’ popularity has sent it higher than it’s been in a while, but even still, it’s less than half of where it was in early 2023.
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No joke: The Onion parody website buys Alex Jones’ Infowars out of bankruptcy • Reuters
Dietrich Knauth and Katie Paul:
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Like a headline lifted from the Onion, the parody news website is buying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars in a bankruptcy auction.
The Onion said in a statement on Thursday it aims to replace Infowars’ “relentless barrage of disinformation” with the Onion’s “noticeably less hateful disinformation.”
Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed. Infowars’ website was shut down on Thursday and the Onion said it aimed to relaunch the platform in January.
The purchase marks a sharp turn for Infowars, one of the internet’s most notorious purveyors of right-wing conspiracy content and misleadingly marketed, opens new tab dietary supplements.
Founded in 1999, it became a prime example of how online media platforms could exploit tech companies’ hands-off approach to moderating content and disseminate evidence-free claims to vast audiences.Among those theories were false claims that the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were staged.
The Onion, led by a CEO who spent years covering online disinformation and extremism as an NBC News reporter, had the backing of several families of Sandy Hook shooting victims for its bid.
It will acquire Infowars’ intellectual property, including its website, customer lists and inventory, certain social media accounts and the Infowars production equipment, the families said.Jones filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022 after courts ordered him to pay $1.5bn for defaming the families of 20 students and six staff members killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.
Unable to pay those legal judgments, Jones was forced to auction his assets, including Infowars, in bankruptcy.
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Irony is, in fact, not dead. It could only have been better if Jones had had to give the title away, rather than getting some money for it in the auction. Not that that will cover his court debts. Update: the sale is on hold because there were only two bidders and.. Jones had a higher bid?
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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. |
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