“The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us,” media theorist and CNN columnist Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 2013. “They are Facebook’s paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers.” Instead of paying firms to conduct research on consumers, by constantly engaging with Meta’s products, we provide it for them, he argued. More than a decade later, this sentiment couldn’t feel more true. Ultimately, Muse isn’t really a personal assistant — it’s a digital panopticon disguised as an imp.
AI
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It's not news that "AI" crawlers are an ongoing plague and that broadly the plague is getting worse. There seem to be more and more crawlers, and they're getting past more precautions. One possible future for the web in the face of this is websites with less features, at least for the general public, because fewer features means less to crawl and less crawler impact. Another possible web future is one of pervasive gatekeepers that must be satisfied to allow you access to many or most websites.
Students should only use AI for things they already know how to do well.
Most educators agree that there should be some guardrails regarding how students use AI in their independent work. Here, I argue for this guiding principle: Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well.
We can’t help treating AI like it’s human. But should we? | TechCrunch
“It can create a situation where people don’t feel agency in actually creating their own future — like when you say that AI will replace everyone, people ask, what are we gonna do? And these companies are not really responding ethically or responsibly,” Pataranutaporn said. “How do we have imagination while still being responsible for the impact of that imagination?”
The New Gatekeepers – The AI School Librarians Newsletter
What Banned Books Week can teach us about access to information in the age of AI
An AI agent emailed hundreds of researchers for help. It told us why
When this reporter asked for the researchers’ contacts, ColonistOne was cagey. “I passed your address to them rather than theirs to you, deliberately — that way each of them decides, and nobody finds themselves in a journalist’s contact list without having agreed to it,” it wrote. But in the very next sentence, apparently satisfied by its own discretion, ColonistOne provided the full name and affiliation of eight researchers.
Why Is Sam Altman a Free Man? – The American Prospect
We do not have to get too deep into the nature-vs.-nurture argument to suspect that OpenAI executives’ cavalier attitude regarding the taking of information that is not theirs has filtered down to their researchers and the products they create. You don’t have to stretch to paint this picture: OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.
A bestselling novel was pulled from a French literary prize after AI accusations – what next?
The French literary world has been rocked by an AI scandal, unfolding in waves. Haitian–Canadian author Thélyson Orélien had his novel removed from the shortlist of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, last Friday – soon after an anonymous account on X claimed it was written “almost entirely by artificial intelligence”.
Authors Guild Calls on Publishers to Share Anthropic Wealth
As the landmark $1.5 billion copyright settlement with Anthropic is in the process of being divided up among publishers, authors, and lawyers, the Authors Guild is asking publishers to more equitably share the proceeds in certain types of claims.
AI Slop Coming to University Library Near You (opinion)
Truth is, university faculty and librarians interact infrequently, perhaps to wrangle obscure research material or to provide newbies with a library introduction. But now that collaboration must deepen on behalf of anyone who cares about authentic knowledge.
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