Good Lord. The Washington Post blew this, choosing not to report on the Alitos' (plural) flag at the time, dredging it up now, masking the failure amid background paragraphs. Democracy dies in terrible, irresponsible, credulous, complicit news judgment. Shame.
We need to hear from the editors who made this decision. Marty Baron retired the following month. I also want to hear from Robert Barnes, the reporter whose story was killed. An inquest of this damning decision is required. So is the existence of an ombudsman to perform it.
The Missouri Granger, May 12, 1874, on the invention of the typewrtier: "All we now want is a spelling machine and a patent brain-worker, through which a man may hatch machine poetry, and the summit of human ambition will have been attained."
Guess we've made it.
The Holt County (MO) Sentinel, December 4, 1874, on the typewriter:
"Ministers will print their own sermons, and perhaps every family make its own newspaper. The child is young yet, but what it will grow into remains to be seen."
As an aside, the reason I object to moral entrepreneurs' scare phrase "surveillance capitalism" as it relates to web cookies is that it diminishes the impact of the word "surveillance" by governments such as this:
Xi Jinping’s Recipe for Total Control: An Army of Eyes and Ears https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/world/asia/china-surveillance-xi.html?smid=tw-share
I repeat: Guardrails are futile. Generative AI has no sense of meaning or (dis)information. So, yes, it can be made to say anything. This is not news. It reminds me of early days when people fainted that something could be wrong on Wikipedia. #MoralPanic
See How Easily A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/19/technology/biased-ai-chatbots.html
The "safety" team were the more fanatical doomsters but the rest of OpenAI is still a cult building their BS god, AGI. Reporters aren't reading up on #TESCREAL and so they are missing the real story here. At least Axios links to AGI skeptic Gary Marcus.
I think I just finished a draft of an afterword for an academic book about the formation of the role of publisher in the early modern period. Many fascinating chapters and lessons. I pray my contribution will be worthy.
The way things are going, @jeffjarvis may need to write another book as a followup to his classic, "What Would Google Do?" to be entitled "What Did Google Do?"