benjclarke.me
Tech writer (sort of...) and mediocre data scientist. Self-employed. Opinions do not represent those of my employer.
Newsletter - benjclarke.me (independent and most content is free)
417 posts
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AI videos look incredible... now. But will we all just learn to spot them in the near future? Will they have the same "AI-ness" that images have, no matter how much better they become?
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Anyone reading a book in 2 hours is either a speed demon or really needs to move passed children’s literature.
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I appear to have reached an age where I need a bigger screen - spectacles aren’t enough for me.
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Living in England, this just doesn’t feel genuine. It’s AI or satire. The guy’s voice, the perfectly imperfect edges around the painted flag, an outside light on in the daytime, it’s all a bit off.
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Will we see new companies doing new things? Or will existing preferred suppliers - several of whom provide shockingly outdated, overpriced and inadequate solutions - swallow the lion's share of this money?
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You need an equivalent of the British House of Lords. It's essentially an unelected advisory body with an arbitrary number of members who can show up, or not, whenever they like. Politicians who won't retire get sent there all the time.
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It’s nice that Velma can take a week off, Scooby and Shaggy can handle this one.
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Not everybody gets used to phallocentric stuff. You might try it at university but quite often, it just isn't for you.
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Every dog's worst nightmare - a postal worker combined with a vacuum cleaner.
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How much genetic difference do they think exists between north Europeans who have been interbreeding for millennia? Or any humans, for that matter?
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500%
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I'm in no way a royalist, but we need more of this between our kingdoms.
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Agreed - the in grand scheme of near 100% renewable energy solving most problems. I get vaguely annoyed turning lights down and keeping the heating low in winter, knowing that fossils are the issue, not me reading in comfort.
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Thanks, @probablymonty.bsky.social
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Thanks for reading. Again, if you want more, consider subscribing: www.benjclarke.me
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And that brings up a horrid irony. If OpenAI successfully monetizes through an ad-based social platform, then it'll be an even more boring revenue engine than the dull information retrieval that's happening in healthcare. Except healthcare helps people when they're at their most vulnerable.
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But, so is the difference between GenAI spambots and GenAI versions of influencers, and there are people happily interacting with those as you read this. Facebook's GenAI user troubles might be a marketing problem, not a fundamental one.
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Putting a pin in Facebook's GenAI users, older AI has been on social media since the beginning. Spambots started with rudimentary AI, now, they use GenAI to interact with human users. The difference between this and one of Facebook's GenAI users is... subjective.
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Possible answer - OpenAI is reportedly planning an AI-enhanced social media platform. This would be very dull. Not only would it be a step towards ad-revenue instead of something new and exciting, it's not even a new way of getting there. Neither, to be honest, is folding AI into social media.
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Now we have AI, and ever since ChatGPT dropped - just twenty-nine months ago - the elephant-in-the-room question around AI hasn't been 'how will it unlock a new revenue engine?' but 'how will AI do advertising?'
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Three have been three web revolutions. Search engines that allowed us to find websites we didn't already know; social media that made everyone a creator; and smartphones that put the web in our pockets. Ad revenue - or rather, investors eyeing its riches - underpinned everything.
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For thirty years, the capital driving in info tech has come from advertising. I'm cool with that. Without ads, something that starts in, say, Seattle, wouldn't reach London for years, and Dave Grohl would barely be known east of Minneapolis. But let's call it - the web is a billboard.
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If you're enjoying this thread, consider subscribing to receive more: www.benjclarke.me
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...Magic machines that produce vacuous content and promise the least inspired CEO's a reduction in their staffing budgets will. We live in this world.
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The AI hype bubble is excruciating, the stock bubble is worse. That's not investment advice - I'm financially incontinent. But I know boring information retrieval isn't going to fuel trillion-dollar companies with a herd of unicorns behind them...
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I know stupid uses of AI are causing harm, but as I write this, intelligent uses are improving patient outcomes and population health in ways that were impossible a few years ago. Sadly, our world does not attach a particularly high monetary value to this.
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If you have a letter, then a human will extract information from that letter far better than an AI will. But if you have 10,000 letters, the AI will extract information in seconds, a human will take forever. Getting information in seconds, even with errors (and big ones!), can be very useful.
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