Prickly City by Scott Stantis for January 31, 2023

If we’re desperate enough, maybe we could even re-institute the Fairness Doctrine.

And maybe laws that prevented one or two giant corporations from owning every radio station.

And multiple tv stations in the same market.

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Or are those extreme radical left wing socialist communist fascist concepts?

Your local npr station still does solid local journalism, go get that tote bag!

News outlet I trust??? All just companies trying to sell an overpriced, cheap product, left right or in-between.

Progress in AI systems often feels cyclical. Every few years, computers can suddenly do something they’ve never been able to do before. “Behold!” the AI true believers proclaim, “the age of artificial general intelligence is at hand!” “Nonsense!” the skeptics say. “Remember self-driving cars?”

The truth usually lies somewhere in between.

We’re in another cycle, this time with generative AI. Media headlines are dominated by news about AI art, but there’s also unprecedented progress in many widely disparate fields.

Everything from videos to biology, programming, writing, translation, and more is seeing AI progress at the same incredible pace.

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There’s a reason all of this has come at once. The breakthroughs are all underpinned by a new class of AI models that are more flexible and powerful than anything that has come before.

Because they were first used for language tasks like answering questions and writing essays, they’re often known as large language models (LLMs). OpenAI’s GPT3, Google’s BERT, and so on are all LLMs.

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The problem of understanding and working with language is fundamentally different from that of working with images.

Processing language requires working with sequences of words, where order matters. A cat is a cat no matter where it is in an image, but there’s a big difference between “this reader is learning about AI” and “AI is learning about this reader.”

( Very long article ✁ )

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https:

//arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/the-generative-ai-revolution-has-begun-how-did-we-get-here/

How do we know Scott isn’t using AI?

You say A.I., I hear SkyNet.

Don’t worry, Carmen, we have those loony, conspiracy theory spreading local rags being shipped into smaller towns. That should fix things.

It’s the fault of the news companies. I’m sorry if this is harsh, but unless they can suspend the laws of supply and demand, they’re just going to have to find a new way for their product to make money. People aren’t going to pay for something where the supply is practically infinite, and they can get it elsewhere for free.

“…seek out news outlets that we trust…”. Let’s see…ratings might provide a tool to see which outlets are most popular with consumers, resonate with us, and are therefore trusted by us — so, which are withering away, and which getting the highest numbers of consumers???

News organizations are shifting journalism costs to IT generated creations.