by JCM | 5 Aug, 2024 | Systems & Technology
Given the music industry’s track record of building successful cases for unauthorised sampling and even inadvertent plagiarism (aka Cryptomnesia, as with the George Harrison ‘My Sweet Lord’ lawsuit back in the 70s) this will be the one to watch.
The music industry’s absolutist approach to copyright is a dangerous path to follow, however. How can you legally define the difference between “taking inspiration from” and “imitating”? What’s the difference between a GenAI tool creating music in the style of an artist, and an artist operating within a genre tradition?
*Everything* is a mashup or a reference, to a greater or lesser extent – that’s how culture works. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants – as well as myriad lesser influences, most of which are subconscious. Hell, the saying “there’s nothing new under the sun” comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes, written well over 2,000 years ago.
Put legal restrictions on the right of anyone – human or bot – to build or riff on what’s come before, and culture risks hitting a dead end.
So while I have sympathy with artists’ concerns, the claim that GenAI could “sabotage creativity” is a nonsense in the same way claims that the printing press or photocopier could sabotage creativity are. Creativity is about the combination of ideas and influences and continual experimentation to find out what works – GenAI can help us all do this faster than ever. If anything, this should help increase creativity.
What *does* sabotage creativity is short-termist, protectionist restrictions on who’s allowed to do what – exactly like the ones these lawsuits are trying to impose.
by JCM | 1 Aug, 2024 | Systems & Technology
“When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions.”
An interesting finding, this – especially as it transcends product and service categories – though perhaps to be expected at this stage of the GenAI hype cycle.
This kind of scepticism isn’t easy to overcome – with new technologies acceptance and mass adoption is often a matter of time – but as the authors of the study point out, the key issue to address is the lack of trust in AI as a technology.
Some of this lack of trust is due to lack of familiarity – natural language GenAI seems intuitive, but actually takes a lot of practice to get decent results.
Some will be due to the opposite – follow the likes of Gary Marcus, and it’s hard not to get sceptical about the sustainability, benefits, and reliability of the current approach to GenAI.
The danger, though, is that this scepticism may be spreading to AI as a whole. The prominence of GenAI in the current AI discourse is leading to different types of artificial intelligence becoming conflated in the popular imagination – even though, just a few years ago, the form of machine learning we now call GenAI wouldn’t even have been classified as artificial intelligence.
Tech terms can rapidly become toxic – think “web3”, “NFT”, and “metaverse”. Could GenAI be starting to experience a similar branding problem? And could this damage perception of other kinds of AI in the process?
by JCM | 1 Aug, 2024 | Systems & Technology
The decline in news audiences reported here – 43%, or 11 million daily views – is shockingly high. This follows Canada’s ill-considered battle with Meta, which led to Meta pulling news from its platforms, including Facebook, in the Canadian market last year, rather than arrange content licensing agreements with news publishers.
This amply demonstrates the vast power these tech platforms have in society and over the media industry, and so justifies the Canadian government’s worries. But it also more than shows – once again – how utterly dependent the online content ecosystem is on these channels for distribution.
Meta/Facebook obviously isn’t a monopoly, but a 43% decline in news consumption thanks to the shutting down of one set of distribution channels? It’s a safe bet that much of the rest of the traffic will be from Google, so it’s more of a duopoly.
What impact is this level of reliance on a couple of gatekeeping tech platforms – who can change their policies on a whim at any time – going to have on public awareness of current events and society at large
Elsewhere in the article we have an answer: “just 22 per cent of Canadians are aware a ban is in place”.
Shut down access to news, little wonder that awareness of news stories stays low.
Both Canada (with Meta) and Australia (with Google and Meta) have tried forcing the tech giants into doing licensing deals for content that their platforms promote. In both cases, this has – predictably – backfired, and led to the opposite effect to that intended.
But what’s the solution?
This question is becoming more urgent now that GenAI is in the mix, and starting to provide summaries of stories rather than just provide a headline, image, and link.
Meta/Google were effectively acting like a newsstand – showing passing punters a range of headlines to attract their attention and pull in an audience.
GenAI’s summarisation approach, meanwhile, is much closer to what Meta and Google were being (unfairly) accused of doing by the Canadian and Australian governments: Taking traffic away from news sites by providing an overview of the story on their own platforms.
But the GenAI Pandora’s Box has already been opened. Publishers need to move away from wishful thinking – the main cause of the failed Australian/Canadian experiments – and back to harsh reality.
Unlike the Meta news withdrawal – which could be reversed – this new threat to content distribution models isn’t going away.
by JCM | 31 Jul, 2024 | Systems & Technology
“If your website is referenced in a Perplexity search result where the company earns advertising revenue, you’ll be eligible for revenue share.”
How many qualifiers can be fitted into one sentence, all while providing next to no information?
To be clear, I’ve loved WordPress ever since I migrated my old blog to it [checks archives] *18* years ago [damn…] I also fully get why they’re doing this – some money is better than none, it may work out, and it may actually lead to more traffic / engagement / visibility for WordPress sites.
But this all feels a little like promises of scraps falling from the table of people who are getting scraps falling from an even higher table.
Perplexity currently claims to be making US$20 million from paid subscriptions to its pro service – about the only source of income it currently seems to have, despite its $2.5-3 billion valuation. If they’re now giving away some of that limited income, I can’t see an obvious path to profitability, given the hefty running costs of GenAI.
This doesn’t just go for Perplexity, but for all these GenAI tools:
- What’s the path to a sustainable content publishing-based business model (and all these GenAI companies are content companies) when being able to produce infinite content on demand means the traditional route for making money for these kinds of companies – advertising inventory – is also infinite?
- Value comes from scarcity. Content / as inventory is no longer scarce. How do you make something that’s not scarce seem valuable enough to get people to pay for it?
- And when all GenAI models offer more or less the same output, and more or less the same level of reliability, and successful features and approaches can be replicated by the competition in next to no time, how do you stand out from the crowd?
Being a content/tech geek I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of years. Perplexity’s approach is one I like (I did history at university, so I love a good list of sources, even if they’ve mostly just been added to make your work look more credible and most of them are irrelevant, as is often the case with Perplexity) – but I’m far from convinced it has money-making potential. As Wired has put it, Perplexity is a bullshit machine. How valuable is bullshit?
Basically, we’re firmly in the destruction phase of creative destruction. The creative part is yet to come
But still – at least the providers of the raw material these LLMs are so reliant on are starting to get thrown a few bones. That’s a step in the right direction – because as that recent Nature study made clear, the proliferation of AI-generated content risks surprisingly rapid synthetic data-induced model collapse.
Human-created content may no longer be king, but it remains vitally important. Without it – and a hefty dose of critical thinking – the whole system comes tumbling down.
by JCM | 16 Jul, 2023 | Marginalia
Fascinating long read, combining my old focus on film with my current one on tech, business, and society.
Core to this piece is a fundamental question: What is a fair wage in a digital era in which the connection between the effort and means of production and the business bottom line is utterly obscure?
Lots of interesting questions – not least of which is: Could Hollywood actors striking be a tipping point for AI awareness and regulation?
“SAG-AFTRA is one of the most well-known labor unions in the United States (everybody loves a celebrity). Partnering with WGA to draw a line in the sand over the AI threat to workers is a huge deal that I believe can benefit people in the many different industries beyond Hollywood that are facing the same existential danger that the technology presents. Precedents are important, and big wins on national platforms can help the little guys get what they deserve too.”
by JCM | 21 Nov, 2022 | Narratives & Meanings
“Telling stories should be a tool we use to understand ourselves better rather than a goal in and of itself.”
– from Beware the Storification of the Internet, in The Atlantic
This, for me, has always been the real value of trying to produce “Thought Leadership” in a business context: The process of thinking and constructing a coherent explanation of that thinking can have far more lasting impact on an organisation than the one-off piece of content that appears to be the end result.
Every stakeholder involved in the creation of the thought leadership content should, during its course, have at least a few moments where they really stop and question what they think and believe, why, and how they can better articulate it. This can then positively impact how they operate day to day, how they interact with clients and customers, and how they articulate the benefits of their products and services.
It’s not about the piece of content – it’s about the *thinking*.
*That* is the value of putting an emphasis on “Storytelling” – because the narrative form insists on forcing us into shaping our thoughts in ways others can follow. Ideally in a relatively entertaining, relatively memorable way.
The risk, though, is that we start buying into the myths of our own stories – and forget that they are just one way of looking at the world, created to simplify.
This is why, as we try to produce a piece of content, we need to do a Rashomon on our own thinking.
There’s never only one story, one narrative, one way of looking at the world. Look at things from only one perspective, and you risk ending up like the blind men and the elephant. If you’re serious about producing real thought leadership, you should challenge yourself to look for alternative approaches every time.
This is why Critical Thinking is probably the most important skill when writing and editing: Question your assumptions and preconceptions, consider all the objections and alternative interpretations, and – as long as you can avoid the twin traps of analysis paralysis and editing by committee – the end result *will* be stronger.
Stylistic flair can disguise sloppy thinking – but only so much. And how much better is it to have both style *and* substance?
by JCM | 12 Mar, 2021 | Systems & Technology
As the FT points out, big tech has so much data on us, surely ad targeting should be good by now?
The real solution to increasing your chances of reaching the right people isn’t marketing automation, it’s user experience. One’s a tactic, the other’s a strategy.
After all, if even Facebook struggles to identify audience interests with any degree of accuracy, what hope do more limited platforms have?
The risk isn’t just that you’re wasting your paid media spend on micro-targeting, it’s that you’re wasting your production budget producing multiple variants of marketing content for audiences that may never see your material. It’s lose-lose.
The magic bullet isn’t audience segmentation in promotion plans – it’s focusing on your audiences’ interests in the content and messaging development phase. This helps ensure what you’re saying (and how you’re saying it) can appeal to multiple target groups at the same time – from niche to broad. Then you can let your audiences self-select the next step on their customer journey via clear signposting of where to go to find what they want.
One size may not fit all perfectly, but with a skilled tailor one size can be given the *illusion* of fitting all. People will pay attention to the things they’re interested in, not the things they aren’t. Which makes people far more capable of deciding what’s relevant to them than any algorithm.
by JCM | 25 Nov, 2020 | Structures & Models
What’s your preferred approach for coming up with good ideas? This podcast from The Accidental Creative suggests there are four steps to true creativity:
1) Preparation
2) Incubation
3) Illumination
4) Verification
While everyone seems to focus on that Eureka moment of illumination / inspiration (I tend to get them in the middle of long walks, or while reading a totally unrelated book), and agencies often focus on the first (the mythical perfect brief), the second and fourth of these are actually the most vital.
The best creative ideas need deliberation, interrogation, to be stepped away from and ignored for a while, then returned to with fresh eyes. They need to be poked, questioned, critiqued, bounced off other people, sense-checked, confirmed as not having been done before – all that good due diligence of verification. But creativity can’t be rushed.
At least, that’s the theory.
Sometimes, a ridiculous deadline is *exactly* what we need – even if it’s one of our own making, caused by dawdling on stage two until the last possible moment, or prevaricating with other, less important tasks. I tend to do that more often than I’d care to admit.
But then, we’re all different. The truth is creativity doesn’t follow a set formula or. If it did, it wouldn’t be creative. What it needs is the right mindset.
by JCM | 25 Oct, 2020 | Systems & Technology
As I scroll through feeds filled with poor auto-cropping and shoddy machine-generated summaries, it’s hard to disagree with this:
“it is a myth that new innovations don’t need editorial oversight. If you’re going to build automated content curation without a sub-editor, you’re taking a needless risk. Just as editors need better algorithms, algorithms need better editors.”
Will AI eventually get good enough at contextual understanding and sense-checking to truly compete with humans’ ability to parse nuance, sarcasm, irony, and humour, as well as verify facts in a world where disinformation comes in a deluge? Possibly. But it’s still a long way off.
Makes it even more of a shame to see my old employer Microsoft / MSN recently ditch even more of its remaining human editors in favour of algorithms.
by JCM | 16 Sep, 2020 | Narratives & Meanings
Seeing this graphic doing the rounds. Pretty. Still, call me a cynic, but:
1) [citation needed] – the full graphic lists multiple top-level sources, but without details – what were the exact sources? What was the methodology for identifying this data used by each of those sources? How credible is this information?
2) So what? What useful insight do these lump sums tell us without context? Most of the numbers are random, unrelated big figures, so how does this help us understand the world? What are the trends? What’s the insight?
This is superficially a great bit of marketing, as it’s getting shared a lot and is designed to promote a company flogging a data analytics platform. But there’s no further detail on their site, which is a masterclass in promising a lot (e.g. “Solve back-end integration of any data, at cloud scale, without moving data”) without actually saying or revealing anything about how their tools actually work. To find out more, you need to give them your contact details.
For true data geeks, as for ex-journalists like me, alarm bells start going off at this point:
– Data without context is meaningless
– Single data points don’t equal insight
– Data needs to be well sourced to warrant trust
– Don’t give away your data if you don’t know what you’re getting
