Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Geeking with Greg
Only as good as the data
The Washington Post reports on the data used for ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs): We found several media outlets that rank low on NewsGuard’s...
From Geeking with Greg
The biggest threat to Google
Nico Grant at the New York Times writes that Google is furiously adding features to its web search, including personalized search and personalized information recommendations...
From Geeking with Greg
Ubiquitous fake crowds
The Washington Post writes: "The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known...
From Geeking with Greg
Are ad-driven business models bad?
There's been a lot of discussion that ad-driven business models are inherently exploitative and anti-consumer. I think that's both wrong and not a helpful way to...
From Geeking with Greg
NATO on bots, sockpuppets, and shills manipulating social media
NATO has a new report, "Social Media Manipulation 2022/2023: Assessing the Ability of Social Media Companies to Combat Platform Manipulation". Buying manipulation...
From Geeking with Greg
Too many metrics and the Otis Redding problem
The "Otis Redding problem" is "holding people, groups, or businesses to too many metrics: They can’t satisfy or even think about all of them at once." The problem...
From Geeking with Greg
Superhuman AI in the game Go
For a few years now, AI achieved superhuman game playing abilities for Go. It was quite a milestone for AI. When I was in graduate school, people used to joke that...
From Geeking with Greg
Huge numbers of fake accounts on Twitter
It seems like this should get more attention, "hundreds of thousands of counterfeit Twitter accounts set up by Russian propaganda and disinformation" that are "still...
From Geeking with Greg
Details on personalized learning at Duolingo
There's a new, great, long article on how Duolingo's personalized learning algorithms work, "How Duolingo's AI learns what you need to learn". An excerpt as a teaser...
From Geeking with Greg
Massive fake crowds for disinformation campaigns
The Guardian has a good article, "'Aims': the software for hire that can control 30,000 fake online profiles", on fake crowds faking popularity and consensus to...
From Geeking with Greg
How can enshittification happen?
Cory Doctorow has a great piece in Wired, "The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok. Or how, exactly, platforms die." It's about that we regularly see companies make their...
From Geeking with Greg
Layoffs as a social contagion
Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote about the recent layoffs at tech companies, saying that it hurts the company in the long-term, but CEOs can't avoid the...
From Geeking with Greg
Are ad-supported business models anti-consumer?
Advertising-supported businesses are harder to align with long-term customer satisfaction than subscription businesses, but they make more money if they do. A common...
From Geeking with Greg
Focus on the Long-term
One of my favorite papers of all time is "Focus on the Long-Term: It's better for Users and Business" from Google Research. This paper found that Google makes more...
From Geeking with Greg
ML and flooding the zone with crap
Wisdom of the few is often better than wisdom of the crowds. If the crowd is shilled and fake, most of the data isn't useful for machine learning. To be useful,...
From Geeking with Greg
Alternatives to Twitter
About five years ago, I moved most of my blogging from here to microblogging on Twitter. In part that was from the shut down of Google Reader. In part I was finally...
From Geeking with Greg
Quoted in the Washington Post
I'm quoted in the Washington Post today in an article titled "It’s not your imagination: Shopping on Amazon has gotten worse." I'm talking about how Amazon used...
From Geeking with Greg
Experimentation and metrics
Since the early days of the Web, I've been a fan of A/B testing for promoting innovation and ideas. But A/B testing is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used well...
From Geeking with Greg
Making it more difficult to shill recommender systems
Lately I've been thinking about recommender algorithms and how they go wrong. I keep hitting examples of people arguing that we should ban the fewest accounts possible...
From Geeking with Greg