"Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn't to faithfully represent the author's spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of 'correct' English - it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in."
"100 Things We've Lost to the Internet. Its form seems to fit an era of short attention spans, breaking up its author's writing into short essays with headings such as "Solitude", "Ignoring people", "Leaving a message" and "A parent's undivided attention". At its best, the book reads like it mixes journalism with sociology and anthropology. To its credit, it also manages the rare feat of exploring what technology has done to us without succumbing to doom and panic."
"It is high time the Congress and Biden administration placed reasonable democratic constraints on online advocacy of violence and extremism. The choice is clear: we can either protect our democracy from extremism or lose it.
In the real world, your postal carrier is prevented by law from reading your mail and selling your information to recruiters who wish to spam you with violent extremist material. Those same protections must be extended to Facebook and other companies."
"The combination of the infinite scroll and lack of live links has led to a very specific kind of information economy on the app. Creators whose brand involves discussing news or popular culture (and there are a lot of them) opt to screenshot headlines, summarize articles, and offer their takes. But it's impossible to know whether the creator even read the article or if they're just offering a summary of the online discourse. Even worse are the accounts that spread false headlines, whether they know it or not. Without live links, all these possible situations are presented to you in the exact same way: with a familiar face on your FYP speaking authoritatively."
"The CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for creating artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E 2, said "regulation of AI is essential" as he testified in his first appearance in front of the US Congress.
The apocalypse isn't coming. We must resist cynicism and fear about AI
Stephen Marche
Stephen Marche
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Speaking to the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, Sam Altman said he supported regulatory guardrails for the technology that would enable the benefits of artificial intelligence while minimizing the harms.
"We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models," Altman said in his prepared remarks."
"Schwartz told the court that he "greatly regrets" using ChatGPT to do his research for the case "and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity."
Judge Castel, however, doesn't seem swayed, and in his May 4 order he in no uncertain terms described the gravity of the situation.
"The Court is presented with an unprecedented circumstance," reads the judge's order for a future hearing. "A submission filed by plaintiff's counsel in opposition to a motion to dismiss is replete with citations to non-existent cases... six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations.""
" This is wholly unacceptable behavior. Our books are copyrighted material, not free fodder for wealthy companies to use as they see fit, without permission or compensation. Many, many hours of serious research, creative angst and plain old hard work go into writing and publishing a book, and few writers are compensated like professional athletes, Hollywood actors or Wall Street investment bankers. Stealing our intellectual property hurts.
Well, sure, Mr Cohan, but I have to point out: there are humans out there reading your books and getting ideas from them. Or at least, one sure hopes there are, because otherwise all those many hours of serious research etc have really gone to waste. As writers, if we don't influence what people think, what's the point? Furthermore, if we get a chance to influence what robots write, shouldn't we leap at it?"
"Meta has apologised after inserting the word "terrorist" into the profile bios of some Palestinian Instagram users, in what the company says was a bug in auto-translation.
The issue, which was first reported by 404media, affected users with the word "Palestinian" written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word "alhamdulillah" written in Arabic. When auto-translated to English the phrase read: "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom."
TikTok user YtKingKhan posted earlier this week about the issue, noting that different combinations still translated to "terrorist"."
"Commentary: Our emails are getting more impolite and that might be a problem
Although some choose to dive into their content immediately, starting your emails with an opening greeting could raise the chances of them being read, says the Financial Times' Pilita Clark."
"Has the introduction of social media in the past 10-15 years caused the increase in prevalence of mental health problems in teens?
At this point, most of what I'm reading and hearing is a resounding yes (especially for girls).
I don't necessarily disagree with this. Just to level set: I think there is a very good chance (my current number is probably around 75%) that social media has contributed to the teen mental health crisis. At the same time, I think large-scale mental health crises are complex phenomena, that there are likely multiple causes, and that we need to make sure we're approaching the data with the scrutiny it deserves. It's this nuance that, I think, has been missing from the conversation."
"Caroline, the 28-year-old behind a popular TikTok account where she posts satirical skits, found herself dropping the comedic tone when the child of a family vlogger sent her a letter and asked Caroline to share it with her 2.3 million followers. "To any parents that are considering starting a family vlog or monetizing your children's lives on the public internet, here is my advice: you shouldn't do it," the letter read. "Any money you get will be greatly overshadowed by years of suffering… your child will never be normal… I never consented to being online.""
"A collaboration between Oxford University, The Education University of Hong Kong, Reading University and Durham University has found "no evidence to suggest abstaining from social media has a positive effect on an individual's well-being." The researchers noted that this contrasts popular beliefs about the benefits of digital detoxes.
Moreover, this international study found that those who took a break from social media didn't replace online socializing with face-to-face, voice, or email interactions, as the researchers had expected. Taking a break from social media therefore led to reduced overall interaction and loneliness as social media was not replaced with forms of socializing."
"Nearly half of three to four year-olds (48 per cent) were reported by their parent or guardian in the Ofcom survey to have used apps or sites to send messages or make video or voice calls. Those who did mainly used WhatsApp (25 per cent) and Facetime (19 per cent).
"It's likely that children of this age were receiving help with these communication activities as they are still developing basic reading and writing skills," said Ofcom.
The disclosures prompted a warning by Dame Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner, that young children should not have internet-enabled phones because of the risk of them accessing harmful content."
"The economist Oren Cass has a compelling answer for these concerns. He says they suffer from bias: the idea that this technological revolution is somehow unique, when we have lived through many epochs of innovation and upheaval. They also overestimate the pace of change (robots are a long way off from competing with humans in many areas) and assume that new kinds of jobs will not be created in the process."
"In an act of cyber vandalism that appeared more embarrassing than destructive, the Twitter and YouTube accounts for US military forces in the Middle East and South Asia were hacked by supporters of Islamic State militants on Monday."
"More and more independent thinkers are realizing that when being an employee is the equivalent to putting all your money into one stock - a better strategy is to diversify your portfolio. So you're seeing a lot more people looking to diversify their career."
Faith Popcorn, a futurist, echoes the idea that we will all have to become as agile as possible and "have many forms of talent and work that you can provide the economy".
"Generally, it questions the advance of computing in the absence of a deeper knowledge of how the human brain perceives the world to be computed. We want computers to have perception, yet we know little about the workings of our own human perception."