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.
#AI#GenerativeAI#Media#Journalism#News: "The promise of working alongside AI companies is easy to grasp. Publishers will get some money—Thompson would not disclose the financial elements of the partnership—and perhaps even contribute to AI models that are higher-quality or more accurate. Moreover, The Atlantic’s Product team will develop its own AI tools using OpenAI’s technology through a new experimental website called Atlantic Labs. Visitors will have to opt in to using any applications developed there. (Vox is doing something similar through a separate partnership with the company.)
But it’s just as easy to see the potential problems. So far, generative AI has not resulted in a healthier internet. Arguably quite the opposite. Consider that in recent days, Google has aggressively pushed an “AI Overview” tool in its Search product, presenting answers written by generative AI atop the usual list of links. The bot has suggested that users eat rocks or put glue in their pizza sauce when prompted in certain ways. ChatGPT and other OpenAI products may perform better than Google’s, but relying on them is still a gamble. Generative-AI programs are known to “hallucinate.” They operate according to directions in black-box algorithms. And they work by making inferences based on huge data sets containing a mix of high-quality material and utter junk. Imagine a situation in which a chatbot falsely attributes made-up ideas to journalists. Will readers make the effort to check? Who could be harmed?"
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"?
Israeli military recovers bodies of 7 hostages and pulls out of Jabalia area of Gaza due to widespread public outrage!!
Israeli forces have ended combat operations in the Jabalia area of north Gaza after destroying more than 10 kilometres of tunnels during days of intense fighting that included over 200 airstrikes.
This yearly celebration informs the public on the dangers of using tobacco, the business practices of tobacco companies, what WHO is doing to fight the tobacco epidemic, and what people around the world can do to claim their right to health and healthy living and to protect future generations.
Due to acute shortage of water in Delhi, government has imposed 2k fine for wasting water! Demand for water has peaked due to extreme weather conditions.
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).
A woman attempted to commit suicide due to being trolled on social media. Trolling is dangerous nowadays, it spreads hearted and take lives of innocent people!
The Kilpauk police on Tuesday arrested three YouTubers, including a woman anchor, on charges of driving a 23-year-old woman to attempt ending her life after they posted an interview of her without her consent.