Are people actually using TikTok for news?

Mashable: “…Researchers Nick Hagar from the New York Times and Nicholas Diakopoulos of Northwestern University have published a study in New Media and Society [Algorithmic indifference: The dearth of news recommendations on TikTok] which investigated how news content was amplified and recommended on the TikTok For You Page. Bear in mind that at the end …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Social Media

Index of Aesthetics

“The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute is a collective association of researchers and designers dedicated to carrying on the important work of categorizing “consumer aesthetics” from the late mid-century, when work on the subject somewhat trailed off, through today. The cyclical relationship between a culture’s collective attitudes and the visual qualities of the artifacts it generates …

Subjects: Economy, Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

Violent and graphic content of the Gaza conflict served to minors’ accounts

Content warning: This dispatch contains graphic descriptions of violence, including to children. Institute for Strategic Dialogue: “Over a 48-hour period, ISD analysts surfaced more than 300 posts or videos across Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, portraying extremely graphic, distressing, or violent imagery around the conflict between Hamas and Israel, available to the accounts of 13-year-olds utilising …

Subjects: Health Care, Internet, Social Media

Introducing The Foundation Model Transparency Index

A new index rates the transparency of 10 foundation model companies and finds them lacking. Katharine Miller – Companies in the foundation model space are becoming less transparent, says Rishi Bommasani, Society Lead at the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), within Stanford HAI. For example, OpenAI, which has the word “open” right in …

Subjects: AI, Education, Freedom of Information, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech

The Atlantic – Editor’s note: This searchable database is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can read about the origins of the database here, and an analysis of what’s in it here. “This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems …

Subjects: AI, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Internet, Legal Research

The Necessary and Proper Stewardship of Judicial Data

Huq, Aziz Z. and Clopton, Zachary D., The Necessary and Proper Stewardship of Judicial Data (September 20, 2023). Stanford Law Review, Vol. 76, Forthcoming , Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 23-55, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4578337 – “Governments and commercial firms create profits and social gain by exploiting large pools of data. One source of …

Subjects: Congress, Courts, E-Records, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

OpenAI Finally Allows ChatGPT Complete Internet Access

Gizmodo: “OpenAI’s world-famous chatbot is free to rummage through the internet’s darkest corners. The company declared Tuesday that the “Browse with Bing” feature is ready for prime time for those ChatGPT users paying for Plus or Enterprise editions. This lets ChatGPT access up-to-date information, rather than being limited to the training data that was cut …

Subjects: AI, Education, Internet, Legal Research, Search Engines

Can AI detectors save us from ChatGPT?

ZDNet: “I tried 5 online tools to find out With the sudden arrival of ChatGPT, educators and editors are facing a worrying surge of automated content submissions. We look at the problem and what might be done. When I first looked at the question of whether it’s possible to fight back against AI-generated plagiarism, and …

Subjects: AI, Internet

Your Personal Information Is Probably Being Used to Train Generative AI Models

Scientific American: “Artists and writers are up in arms about generative artificial intelligence systems—understandably so. These machine learning models are only capable of pumping out images and text because they’ve been trained on mountains of real people’s creative work, much of it copyrighted. Major AI developers including OpenAI, Meta and Stability AI now face multiple …

Subjects: AI, Copyright, Digital Rights, E-Records, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries, Privacy

WastewaterSCAN Dashboard

“Participants in WastewaterSCAN are municipal treatment plants in the United States that serve >10,000 people, with some plants serving up to around 4 million people. The goal of analyzing wastewater at this level is to get a picture of infectious disease occurrence at a community population scale. Sampling at this scale covers a population large …

Subjects: Health Care

E-Bike Environment and Economics Impact Assessment Calculator

“RMI’s E-Bike Environment and Economics Impact Assessment Calculator for Cities simplifies the process of assessing the impact of mode-shift from electric bikes (e-bikes) for policymakers, transportation officials, advocates, and other interested stakeholders. The tool estimates the impact of e-bikes as a substitute for short vehicle trips, based on a city-wide mode-shift to e-bikes goal; it …

Subjects: Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Law, Transportation