We’re about to see a wholesale restructuring of how people get the feeds of information that matters to them, especially news. Right now there are three types of players. News organizations create news content and surround it with advertising. Consumers consume news and ads, sometimes paying for subscriptions. And between the two are intermediaries. The…
In 1951, the science fiction writer Cyril M. Kornbluth published a story called “The Marching Morons” in Galaxy Magazine. (You can read the whole thing here.) It tells the story of a near future world in which stupid people with limited skills overpopulate the world, forcing a dwindling group of intelligent people to take on…
I admit it: I’m obsessed with why ChatGPT and other AI services can’t be funny. I’m convinced the answer is that true humor demands an unexpected shift in perspective, and AI machines, trained to mimic patterns in what they’ve read, have problems with both “unexpected” and “shift in perspective.” Monty Python is the master of…
AI can write now, but it needs supervision. And failing to supervise it will make you look very stupid. Don’t believe me? My friend Maggie Langrick, the proprietor of the hybrid publisher Wonderwell, recently received this financing pitch, which she has allowed me to share with you. From: Tanner SyftestadDate: January 31, 2023 at 6:21:22…
Real writers have wit. AI doesn’t. And that is unlikely to change. Christopher S Penn did a fascinating comparison of how an advanced AI tool, GPT-J-6B, completes writing content based on patterns it has digested from massive amounts of source material. His conclusion: I am bullish on AI creating content at scale. I am bearish…
The Guardian newspaper in the UK assigned GPT-3, an AI writer from OpenAI, to write an essay. The results are pretty good. But as long as writing requires creativity, AI won’t replace human writers. GPT-3’s essay, and how it was created Here’s the start of what you can now read at The Guardian: I am…
IngramSpark, a self-publishing service, has now defined a set of trash book categories that it will no longer feature or distribute, including AI-generated books. As AI books get better, though, they might want to reconsider. IngramSpark is a print-on-demand and ebook distribution service offered by Ingram, a major book distributor. It delivers the same features…
In a minor league baseball game in the Atlantic League, a robot called balls and strikes this week. But there was still a home-plate umpire, and he was still essential. This is a nice metaphor for the future of AI-assisted work. As described in The New York Times, the system applies rules about the strike…
Two years ago, I got the opportunity to start work on a book about artificial intelligence. Today, you get to see the result. AI is one of the most powerful forces driving technology right now. Conversational interfaces — whether that’s online chat or Alexa — are another. Artificially intelligent chatbots, also known as virtual agents,…