A few bits of mass media observations
Chatbots visiting a Blog Very Near You
The AI impact on everything from television to visual art has recently come to the forefront thanks to the writers and actors strike.
Writers, actors, authors, and artists are striking and suing to assert their stake in these upheavals. But the fight over A.I. and creative work implicates us all. Language-based A.I. models work by digesting vast quantities of existing content, tracing patterns, and then drawing on what they have learned. We marvel at their ability to generate prose that seems indistinguishable from what a human could pen; one small experiment showed Harvard professors giving chatbots high grades on their essays. Yet A.I.-generated creations are innately derivative and, by definition, at some level predictable. It is true that critics for a century have accused the entertainment industry of producing unoriginal and hackneyed content and even conditioning audiences to lap up such fare. But despite commercial constraints that can drive toward sameness, writers, actors, and other creative talents have always managed to produce original, thought-provoking, and exciting works of art. SOURCE LINK: New Republic
For blog writers, I would like to draw attention to comments to your posts. I very recently have had comments that look genuine and content related, but felt a bit off. In the first case, I gave the commenter the benefit of the doubt. I soon had a number of comments that were very persistent in asking me to follow them, and wondering why I wasn’t following them – “Very nice artwork. Why won’t you follow me?”
Of course, I ended up marking the comments as spam. I very recent comment from another blog showed up, giving a very detailed 2 paragraph response to a recent post on some nature photographs (See Photos HERE). In this case, what struck me was that the comment was really a restating of the information that included with the photos. Checking the actual blog, I discovered only content related to a product that was being recommended.
My impression is that some bloggers are using a Chatbot to assist in generating more elaborate, informative responses to posts, in order to enhance their online visibility and draw other bloggers to their posts.
Fediverse and Mastodon Update
As more people join various the Fediverse, various groups and organizations are setting up instances (servers). Some are leaving the corporate Social Media platforms (Big Social) entirely, while others are creating an alternative space, waiting to see if Big Social will totally deteriorate/collapse. As of today, there are 10,555,990 Fediverse users, an increase of +1,877,580 since last month. The total number of servers is 24,767, an increase of +1,594 since last month Stats are regularly updated HERE-LINK. For more current news on the Fediverse, check out The Fediverse Report, a curated blog, giving you links and context to all the news that is happening in the fediverse. (LINK_HERE)
– Changes in Reddit policies, similar in nature to X-Twitter, created a large migration of users to Lemmy, which is a Fediverse alternative to Reddit. SEE: 2023 Reddit API Controversy.
– Opt-in search is really coming to Mastodon, and is now available in public beta testing, and already available on servers like mastodon.social. It is fully opt-in, and people have to manually enable a new setting ‘include public posts in search results’ under their privacy settings. Search has always been a contentious issue in Mastodon, even though other fediverse platforms have had it for a long while, often with full opt-in consent. The full opt-in nature of the implementation does satisfy people’s requirements for getting consent to be included in search results. It does come with the cost of increasing complexity for Mastodon; people will have to be told about the option, make a decision for themselves whether they want it, and then find the button that is 3 clicks deep in the personal preferences page.
– The German Rhineland-Palatinate State Parliament has stopped using X (Twitter) in favour of open-source decentralised Mastodon. (SOURCE) X-Twitter, like Meta and Google, haves not yet complied with the EU Digital Services Act (Online moderation rules-laws) (SOURCE), and the penalties could see the platforms blocked. For this reason, German Parliament members were being encouraged to leave X-Twitter, and use Mastodon instance set up my the government. If the Canadian government had set-up a similar solution when the CBC was blocked by X-Twitter, an official Canadian presence on the Fediverse would have helped deal with the impact of Meta (Facebook & Instagram) blocking Canadian News, as government officials and communities deal with severe weather events of the 2023 Wildfires. ~ Trudeau denounces Meta’s news block as fires force evacuations
Dark Pines Media 