Scripting News: Saturday, November 25, 2023

Saturday, November 25, 2023

I was watching Christiane Amanpour on PBS the other night, at the end of a special report on AI. In her closing she said that OpenAI has a market evaluation of $50 billion, yet they only gave $5 million to journalism. This is a big loop. The same was said about Apple and IBM with their personal computers in the 80s. They make so much money they should give it to us. Then Google, Twitter and Facebook in the 00s and 10s. And now in the 20s the same tired appeal, a highly conflicted one (you don't hear similar cases made for other industries that are disrupted by tech). Now they've got the tin cup out for AI. Journalism could have owned Twitter, but they would have had to work with each other. Insiders in journalism chuckle at the idea, but it isn't funny. They keep letting tech own their means of distribution. In this case, it isn't too late. Start an AI news service, combine the flow of all competitors, and distribute the money the way you wish OpenAI would. That's honorable, and it might work. Basically, all information, including journalism is making another leap, with or without journalism. (Another random idea, don't bother publishing the news, just feed it into the AI mind and let us use the mind. That's what we want.)#

One side-effect of using ChatGPT is I don't do nearly as many braintrust queries here on Scripting News. #

I changed something about the way FeedLand displays too-tall items. There's a screen shot on this page and a place to comment. Can you see what changed?#

Linkblog items for the day.

'We will coup whoever we want!': the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros. theguardian.com

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