#AI#GenerativeAI#Search#Perplexity#Plagiarism#Journalism#Media#News: "AI-powered search startup Perplexity appears to be plagiarizing journalists’ work through its newly launched feature, Perplexity Pages, which lets people curate content on a particular topic. Multiple posts that have been “curated” by the Perplexity team on its platform are strikingly similar to original stories from multiple publications, including Forbes, CNBC and Bloomberg. The posts, which have already gathered tens of thousands of views, do not mention the publications by name in the article text — the only attributions are small, easy-to-miss logos that link out to them.
For instance, a Perplexity aggregation of Forbes’ exclusive reporting on Eric Schmidt’s stealth drone project contains several fragments that appear to have been lifted, including a custom illustration. Over the past several months, Forbes has broken a series of stories on the former Google CEO’s secretive efforts to develop AI-guided aircraft for the battlefield, and this week reported that Schmidt had poached talent from SpaceX, Apple and Google, and has been testing his drones in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park." https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/06/07/buzzy-ai-search-engine-perplexity-is-directly-ripping-off-content-from-news-outlets/
It’s #NewstodonFriday! It’s been another busy week for the many newsrooms who have an active presence in the #fediverse, and we’re highlighting their work in the thread below. If you like what you see, follow the profiles and boost their stories.
If you’re a journo or newsroom that we don’t know about or if there’s a newsroom you’d love to put on our radar, please let us know in the comments.
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Think of a publisher, and there's a good chance they'll have a Flipboard account. Now, we're in the process of federating them. Publishers — like just about everyone we know — have a hard time getting their heads around the fediverse and what it means to federate your Flipboard account, so @jejord has written this blogpost. In it, she explains the fediverse, what Flipboard federation looks like, the value of our Magazine feeds, and why we think all this is important. "The fediverse is potentially the One Ecosystem to Rule Them All, and is estimated to grow to 170M users by the end of 2024," writes Jessica.
The Epoch Times is under investigation for money laundering, but the site's role in spreading anti-trans misinformation has gone unmentioned in mainstream coverage of the case.
An Epoch Times link that showed up in a story for the Atlantic is a particularly clear example of the laundering process on trans stories that goes fringe right -> far right -> mainstream.
This month, Anime Herald is hosting a subscription drive. We'll donating to The Trevor Project in a dollar-for-dollar match for everything we raise this month through Patreon and Ko-fi (up to $800), so you can support independent anime journalism and help LGBTQIA+ youth at the same time. 💖
Looks like my old workplace is turning into another media shitshow. Editor Sally Buzzbee was shit-canned on a Sunday night and a WSJ dude who's pals with the reich-wing publisher is now in charge.
A friend of mine who was a science editor at the Post recently left after just 18 months. Abandon ship...
Local news is crucial to democracy, and it's disappearing — according to a new book by Steven Brill, excerpted in @Semafor, approximately twenty-two hundred papers and their websites went out of business between 2005 and 2021. That's created a vacuum into which "pink-slime" sites have poured. Brill writes about these sites that present themselves as legitimate publishers but are created to boost specific candidates and secretly financed by partisan funders, Democrats and Republicans alike.
while i'm almost impressed by otter.ai's hall of fame level #enshittification, i'm still outraged that they more than doubled the monthly price for the same services & i now need to find a solid offline non-subscription #transcription app. recommendations (besides macwhisper), anyone?
There was no evidence against them other than the word of this one undercover narcotics officer who never wore a wire, never had a second officer to corroborate, no drugs recovered during the roundup of these suspects. And so then the question became, “Were these cases even legitimate to begin with?” https://www.texasobserver.org/the-interview-nate-blakeslee-tulia/
It’s #NewstodonFriday — such a shame it’s been a slow news week! Just to refresh your memories, this is a day to feature work from newsrooms with an active presence in the #Fediverse. If you like what you see in the (long!) thread below, follow the profiles and boost their stories. If you’re a journo or newsroom that we don’t know about or if there’s a newsroom you’d love to put on our radar, please let us know in the comments below.
The overwhelming attention that the #Trump case has gotten in #Japan media (and probably most #Asia media) compared to the #Taiwan protests is a bit ridiculous.
The latter, IMO, is far more important the the region.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sent out a memo to its staff and freelancers this week, banning them from making any public comment regarding the War in Gaza:
"Our operating principles also say you may support human rights with limitations."
What do you mean by "human rights with limitations"?
Was just looking at a California Fruit & Vegetable Magazine "story" about UC Davis ending its licensing agreement with Eurosemillas. At the bottom of the story, it's attributed to Bill Kisliuk, UC Davis. I think I know what happened here...
UC Davis, like other UCs, has a huge "Strategic Communications" dept, staffed with ex-journalists who feed stories to news media, who usually publish UC Davis' words verbatim and not as a quote in a well-researched story.
This is one of many experiments we can do to find a sustainable community supported model for journalism. Meta has both embraced and sabotaged journalism in such a way that we have so few outlets in comparison to a decade ago. Today we need a new model. And we’re figuring out how to make it work by building it, together, open source, open protocol.
Nobel Prize winning journalist Maria Ressa is on PBS Newshour talking about how US gov't outsourcing tech to the private sector so often has strengthened surveillance capitalism. She said that journalists need to build their own independent platforms (paraphrase by me... consult the video).