tnlnyc

[tnlnyc]

23

There’s an odd pattern to getting older: Some things feel like self-indulgent nostalgia while others remain engraved as promises you were meant to keep. In the days following 9/11, it was common to exclaim “Never Forget” and yet, as other crises came along, American society moved on, forgetting the lessons of those days. What made America great in the days following 9/11, what made the world…

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Building Defensive AI

Since OpenAI revealed ChatGPT, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with generative AI and its potential for making creating content even cheaper than it is today. Few appear to be creating tools to identify and de-emphasize such content as part of our content consumption. The ones who will may well be laying out the most important tools to allow humans to continue consuming online content. A Tale…

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Burning Down The House

If you followed me on Twitter/X, you recently received my Twitter breakup message: Thanks for following me on Twitter but I’m now moving all this activity over to https://www.threads.net/@tnlnyc and https://mastodon.social/@TNLNYC so this will be my last message to you on Twitter. Looking forward to seeing you over there. I will remove you from my follower list on Twitter as I’m sending a…

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22

For most people, today is Monday, a day to remember the fun of the past weekend and get on to the workweek ahead. But for New Yorkers who were in the city 22 years ago, today is another marker on the calendar of a grim anniversary few remember to note: 9/11. Memory is a difficult thing. For the internet, memory is even more complicated. In the days following the attacks on the world trade…

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AI Copyright : It's complicated

Delving into the intriguing realm of AI and Copyright! How does generative AI challenge content ownership? Let's unravel the complexities of copyright, fair use, and the future of AI-generated creativity. Join the conversation! #AI #Copyright

The ownership of creative work has long been fundamental to the spread of ideas. Creators have been remunerated for their work, allowing them the ability to live off their creativity. The recent explosion of generative AI may destroy the creative arts unless we can better define who owns AI-generated work products and what AI copyright may look like. The Berne Convention The Berne Convention,…

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Beware the AI Hype

Every day, claims of an “extinction-level threat” by new generative AIs fill the press. Beware the AI Hype as it comes with a carefully crafted sleight of hand. Current State of AI Generative AI has some basic uses around remixing but gets everything else pretty wrong I’m not opposed to generative AI. MidJourney has created the picture at the top of this page. I have edited the content of this…

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Gen AI Doom Loop

Since the rise of ChatGPT, the tech industry has been obsessed with the power of generative AI. While coverage has focused on the impact of generative AI on creative work, little has been written about its long-term impact on itself. How AI works At their core, tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Llama are advanced auto-complete systems. Looking at what is being typed, the AI systems guesses…

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Data Capture in the New Social Media Age

Data Capture in the New Social Media Age

With the arrival of Threads, a Twitter clone from Instagram, much is being made about the aggressive data gathering efforts from Meta within that new platform. So I became curious as to whether Threads was different from other offering or more of the same. As regular readers of TNL.net know, this is where I pull a spreadsheet and start gathering data from different sources to analyze it, showing…

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Alone Together

“F*** You Marvel” That anguished expletive came from a fan on the opening night of “Avenger: Infinity Wars,” as Black Panther disappeared into dust after the snap. There was a collosal shock in the movie theater and one could feel the experience of every other attendee reflecting your own experience of what you had seen (some on YouTube have recorded similar dismay yet the recording does not do…

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"The Vision Thing"

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about how Thomas Edison won the race to a commercially successful incandescent light bulb. At the time, many people had created incandescent light bulbs but the challenge was that none of them could last for more than a few minutes. Edison assembled a team of experts and gave them ownership in the company in exchange for figuring out a way to create such a…

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Gradually, Then Suddenly

This week marked a turning point in social media. Some parts, like the massive layoffs at Meta (owners of Facebook) and the ongoing drama at Twitter, made the news. But one critical part hasn’t, and it’s the one that will mark the beginning of a substantial change in social media history. To understand the move, you have to first look back and believe in Geoffrey Moore theory of change. In…

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20

Twenty years passed but the holes left in my heart by what happened 20 years ago will never get fully filled. This year, as the city is still struggling through recovery, I’ve been thinking about history vs. memory. To younger people who weren’t here on this day 20 years ago or were too young to really feel the impact, the events of 9/11 are something that is part of history, similar in weight to…

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An American Tragedy

I was recently telling a friend that I had no concerns about the future of the USA because, as bad as things as have ever been, there was one thing that was always clear about American democracy: ever since Washington stepped down, there had always been a peaceful transfer of power in this country. This rich tradition stood in contrast to other parts of the world, where violent behavior by losers…

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19

“The truth is, it’s always been bad.”

2020 is being marked by a pandemic, a financial crisis, and a reckoning over racial justice.  19 years ago, the country was marked by the arrival of foreign terrorism on our borders. It reshaped us and redefined the US relationship with the world. This pandemic, and the current social justice movement may do that, driving a similar reshaping of America,…

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A Time for Hope

A Time for Hope

In a country already set ablaze, and with flames still burning in the background, French president Emmanuel Macron made his intentions clear:

“We will rebuild… altogether… it is part of our French destiny… because that is what our history deserves.”

And in that somber moment, Macron reminded the world that hope always trumps despair, that the future can be bright, and that when we pull together,…

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2019 Predictions

As a new year is upon us, this is a good time to start thinking about context and read through the tea leaves of what’s next. I did miss out on predictions last year but I’m resuming past that hiatus. So here are some predictions about 2019

The easy one: Instability

We’ve had a preview of what 2019 in the last month of December: the stock market has been going on wild gyrations as investors are…

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17

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance…