Factions and Fractions: A Case Study of Power Politics in the Australian Labor Party
MOVEit: Australian fallout from massive cyber breach that caught PwC set to grow
New York Needs To Find Out Why Its Drivers Keep Hitting Low Bridges Jalopnik
Could organizations use artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT to induce voters to behave in specific ways?
Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters.
How AI could take over elections and undermine democracy
Plagiarism Engine: Google’s Content-Swiping AI Could Break the Internet
The GPTJudge: Justice in a Generative AI World (May 23, 2023). Duke Law & Technology Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4460184
“Generative AI (“GenAI”) systems such as ChatGPT recently have developed to the point where they are capable of producing computer-generated text and images that are difficult to differentiate from human-generated text and images. Similarly, evidentiary materials such as documents, videos and audio recordings that are AI-generated are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate from those that are not AI-generated.
To Truly Understand the Past, Pick Up an Old Magazine
The New York Times – “Find a print issue, preferably more than 20 years old, and read it cover to cover. You’ll find the old days stranger than you remember. How alien are the ways we once described the world; how swiftly we freeze the past into its mere idea, a cartoon of this or that distant year or decade. I’m writing a book about the singer Kate Bush, and another about my education, projects that require much paging through magazines from the 1980s.
In the London-based style monthly The Face, I find a cover story on “Electro: the beat that won’t be beaten.” It’s May 1984, the first wave of hip-hop is long past and this summer belongs to the Roland drum machine and the imported sounds of New York clubs. I turned 15 that month, and remember this musical cusp very well. What surprises me now in the pages of The Face: There are just the tiniest hints of the British miners’ strike and the swelling unemployment that are convulsing the country politically. And not a single mention yet of AIDS; in a Wrangler ad, a model’s speech bubble announces, oblivious:
“I’m Positive.” In these magazine pages, it both is and is not the 1984 of my memory….Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire. Find a print issue, specialist or popular, preferably more than 20 years old (though 10 may do the trick), and read it from cover to cover. You will execute no deep dive, vanish down no rabbit hole; your reading is instead a lateral slice through a culture, class or milieu.
A few years ago, while writing a book about great sentences, I went looking for photo captions that Joan Didion composed in the 1960s during her time at Vogue. I found these perfectly formed, uncredited fragments, but also Didion writing about a new museum in Mexico City —
“One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities” — and other high-toned pieces: Hardwick reviewing movies, articles on Alberto Giacometti and Günter Grass. There were fashion photographs by Gordon Parks and William Klein. I confirmed what I suspected about the aesthetic sophistication of midcentury American magazines and their readers…”
