I've been busy researching LLMs and their use in journalism while I've been quiet here — and I'm beginning to suspect that I'm a natural contrarian. Back in 2008, when nobody thought Twitter would be important, I was out there bigging it up. In the early 2010s, I was warning against Facebook while the publishing world thought it was the answer to our prayers. I've been banging the drum for on-site community building for over a decade — and finally the world is coming around to my view. And, right now, I'm deep in AI, pulling together a practical training course for newsrooms and journalists t ..read more

The questions about the power and influence globally of a social network based in China — which bans most others social networks — just won't go away. It's shot itself in the foot over the US attempt to force a sale of TikTok - or see it banned — by flexing its power: MG Siegler: Riddle me this: if you're a Chinese-owned entity under fire due to the concern that your app has immense power in swaying your user base to influence aspects of American life such as politics, what do you do to assuage such concerns? The answer, according to TikTok, is apparently use your immense power to sway your u ..read more

Om Malik These days, it is pretty common to hear venture capitalists wax eloquent about “AI”. But before the “official” launch of “OpenAI” and its sudden rise to prominence, most of the new experts were busy diddling around with crypto and web3. Buzzword bingo is a popular sport for the investor crowd. It’s clear that the tech industry has been flailing around looking for the next big thing for nearly a decade. From crypto and Web3 to the Metaverse, they’re constantly looking for the next engine to generate ever bigger profits. Merely obscene profits are not enough, it seems. They need to be ..read more

TikTok and AI under regulatory attack The days of governments only acting on tech when it’s too late — see the Internet Explorer debacle two decades or so back (Remember when IE had a monopoly on the browser market? If so, you’re old. Sorry.) — are well and truly over. Governments are getting antsy about new tech, and acting fast to bring it to heel. Tick-tock to the end of TikTok? In the US, a TikTok ban draws closer. The House has passed a bill, which has bipartisan support, which will ban TikTok unless its owner divests it. Why? Because the suspicion is that China is using it to both track ..read more

Those of you with long memories will recall that many moons ago, I wrote that Facebook was going through an ongoing, slow breakup with journalism: In the end, though, the relationship we once “enjoyed” with Meta properties is over. The divorce is underway and, perhaps, once it’s finalised, we can renegotiate a new relationship, that’s more like casual acquaintances than and deeply unhealthy relationship with co-dependence and toxic power relationships. Well, now it’s truly over. We’re in the “splitting the CD collection (ask your parents…) and bitching about your ex” phase of the divorce. No ..read more

Another wee round-up of podcasting news, loving culled from the internet firehose for the edification of the MA Podcasting students — and you! Here comes PSO — Podcast Search Optimisation This is a press release. Be warned. It's hard to read without throwing up a little. But it does mark something interesting. The growth in importance of SEO, and specific aspects of it, can be tracked through the rise of tools to support that. And now we're seeing the rise of PSO — Podcast Search Optimisation — as a skillset, with tools to support that. Podcast discovery is a huge issue. Demand for skills and ..read more

If you needed evidence that digital content is the new oil, fuelling the AI “revolution”, look no further: Tumblr and WordPress.com are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals. Yup. Automattic is going to sell access to your content, that you might be paying them to host, to the AI companies to train their models on. That’s unsettling. What’s worse is that some companies may have already been given data they shouldn’t have: One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a produc ..read more

Vice, as we know it, is dead. The swashbuckling, inspiring and often market-leading magazine turned digital player is bleeding out. The rumours were flying yesterday, with staff hearing whispers that they should save copies of their work while they still could. Then the WSJ got the story: the web edition was shuttering, and yet more journalists would be looking for a new job. From the WSJ piece: “It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Dixon told employees in the memo. He said the company could partner with established media co ..read more

Reddit, the long-established and popular social bookmarking and discussions site, has found a new way of monetising all that sweet, sweet free user content: Reddit made a $60 million deal with an “unnamed large AI company” to train its artificial intelligence models on the platform’s content, reported Bloomberg on Friday. Reddit, which is rumored to be valued at around $5 billion, could use the announcement to help bolster its looming initial public offering, Bloomberg speculated. Turns out that it’s Google. This at least partially explains something that happened last year. In a Tw ..read more

Well, last week OpenAI continue its assault on the creative industries by starting to preview its generative video model: Sora At first glance the results are pretty impressive: 0:00 /0:10 1× That looks like the sort of thing that would have taken weeks of expensive CGI work to do normally. 0:00 /0:08 1× And using AI to create a shot like that is a lot cheaper than travelling to the location and putting a drone up. It's an example of how technology makes ever cheaper: Arial shots used to need a helicopter: very expensive They they needed drones: buying a drone was cheaper than renting a heli ..read more