Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
The underlying costs of these generative AI services are tumbling. OpenAI’s price cut is a sign of how quickly the new technology is moving into mass adoption, and a warning sign that this may be a business with few producers.
Richard Waters writing in the Financial Times
If you catch yourself referring to people on your team by their job titles as often as by their names, beware—you're on the road to becoming more of a manager than a leader. A real leader thinks of people individually and holistically, and tries hard to understand strengths and weaknesses, goals and interests. I saw this all too often in the military, for example, where great leaders grew to know their soldiers, and lesser leaders referred to them generically, either by their ranks or occupational specialties.
Bill Murphy Jr. writing in the Understandably newsletter
UPDATE MARCH 14 PM: Access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 will be available to users who "sign up to the waitlist and for subscribers of the premium paid-for ChatGPT Plus in a limited, text-only capacity,” GPT-4 is superior to the previous version of the program, but it “can still generate biased, false, and hateful text; it can also still be hacked to bypass its guardrails.” The MIT Tech Review has more information here.
POSTED MARCH 14 AM: The next ChatGPT update is coming soon. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November. A Microsoft executive recently implied the launch of GPT-4 is just days away. It will apparently be a multimodal tool, able to translate users’ text into images, audio and video. AI multimodal tools are not new. Meta released its "Make-A-Video" option last year, which creates a video based on a short prompt. OpenAI’s CEO has warned that many rumors about GPT-4 on the internet are “ridiculous.”
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. -Albert Einstein (born March 14, 1879)
Monday, March 13 - AI & the Future of Journalism
What: We will examine the AI field and its impact on journalism, for good and for ill. What features of AI hold the most peril for journalists? Which hold the most promise? How does an AI program actually work? Does AI threaten journalism jobs? Can journalists investigate AI tools? If so, how? Are there practical hacks for determining whether content is AI-generated or real?
Who: Garance Burke, global investigative reporter, The Associated Press; Daniel Verten, head of creative at Synthesia; Emilia Diaz Struck, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; Justin Gluska, founder of Gold Penguin and AI technology blogger.
When: 6:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free but registration is required
Sponsor: The Deadline Club
Tue, March 14 - Elevating Your Nonprofit's Online Presence: Best Website Practices for 2023
What: The trends and strategies that will help your organization stand out in the digital landscape. Whether you're a new or a well-established nonprofit, this webinar has everything you need to take your website to the next level. From mobile-first design to accessibility compliance, we'll cover all the essential elements that go into creating a seamless and satisfying online experience for your users.
Who: Erin Mastrantonio of Elevation which designing websites for nonprofits.
When: 11 am, Pacific
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Nonprofit Learning Lab
Fri, March 17 - Firewalls & Journalism: What to know about Internet shutdown trends
What: Join us for a virtual panel discussion that will delve deep into the worrying spread of Internet kill switches and what it specifically means for a free press.
Who: Ksenia Ermoshina, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and Center for Internet and Society; Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel for digital rights watchdog group Access Now; Nat Kretchun, senior vice president for programs at the Open Technology Fund; Moderator: Rachel Oswald, National Press Club press freedom team lead and a foreign policy reporter for CQ Roll Call
When: 11:30 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsors: National Press Club & The Journalism Institute
Sat, March 18 - Ask an Editor: The Craft & Business of Writing
What: We will answer questions and offer insights into the craft of writing and the struggles we all face in these uncertain times.
When: 10 am, Pacific
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Allegory Editing
Tues, March 21 - The state of digital publishing: metrics, insights and revenue strategies
What: A look at the current state of digital publishing and what will it look like in 2023 and beyond with information from Pugpig’s State of the Digital Publishing Market report. Including: Comparison of reader engagement across users and platforms, case studies of innovation in digital publishing, the use of audio and how it drives engagement, and how news publishers intend to retain readers in 2023.
Who: Jonny Kaldor, founder and CEO, Pugpig, a digital publishing platform for hundreds of news, consumer, specialist and B2B media brands.
When: Noon, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: America’s Newspapers to take a deeper look into the report.
Tues, March 21 - AI-Generated Art: Boom or Bust for Human Creativity?
What: A discussion on how generative AI works, how artists are using these tools, and whether AI-generated art will be a boom or bust for human creativity.
Who: Ahmed Elgammal, Professor, Rutgers University; Patrick Grady, Policy Analyst, Center for Data Innovation; Marian Mazzone, Associate Professor, College of Charleston; Irene Solaiman, Director of Policy, Hugging Face; Brigitte Vézina, Director of Policy, Creative Commons
When: 11 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Center for Data Innovation
Wed, March 22 - ChatGPT, Journalism, and the Future of Creativity
What: What happens when leading journalists who cover science and eminent scientists who reach mass audiences get together to exchange ideas? What do their differing perspectives tell us about how science communication is changing and how we can do it better?
Who: Joanna Stern writes and makes videos at the Wall Street Journal, where she is the senior personal technology columnist. She won an Emmy in 2021. Jean Oh is an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University who builds robots with advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
When: 6:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Journalism Institute at New York University
Thu, March 23 - Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism
What: A discussion of the inspiring stories of pioneering women journalists. You’ll hear about the challenges they faced and how they paved the way for the next generation.
Who: Brooke Kroeger, Kim Todd, and Knopf editor Jonathan Segal about their book “Undaunted”
When: 7 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: American Journalism Online
The hottest new programming language is English
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) January 24, 2023
Andre Karpathy is an AI expert at OpenAI (which created ChatGPT).
Criticism must be sympathetic, or it will completely miss the mark; but it must also be dispassionate and relentless. -William Temple
Grammarly will off an AI tool staring next month that can produce content in your personal writing style. Based on situational context, GrammarlyGo will offer prompts to adjust the message's tone for different scenarios while adhering to you or your company’s voice. More Generative AI tools here.
It’s very disturbing when you realize that our brains are a fiction-making machine. We make up all kinds of crazy things to help us feel better and to justify the decisions that we’ve made. The inner voice is the one who arbitrates a lot of that maneuvering around the truth, so we have to be very careful. It’s a master storyteller and far more important than you may realize.
Jim Loehr, performance psychologist and cofounder of the Human Performance Institute, quoted in Fast Company
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Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. -Arthur Koestler
Watch the video below from KTVB-TV or read the story here.
An emotionally intelligent leader is always clear about their intentions and where they are coming from. This means employees don’t have to worry about deciphering messages from leadership and keeps them best informed about the organization’s goals and motives.
Authentic emotionally intelligent leaders share as much as they are able to with their people at all times and expect the same from others in their circle. They don’t feel the need to hide things from others, cover up their mistakes, or play favorites in their workplace. They treat everyone the same, regardless of their position or station in life.
Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
There is reason to believe that AI could really be the new variant of disinformation that makes lies about future elections, protests, or mass shootings both more contagious and immune-resistant. Consider, for example, the raging bird-flu outbreak, which has not yet begun spreading from human to human. A political operative—or a simple conspiracist—could use programs similar to ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to easily generate and publish a huge number of stories about Chinese, World Health Organization, or Pentagon labs tinkering with the virus, backdated to various points in the past and complete with fake “leaked” documents, audio and video recordings, and expert commentary. A synthetic history in which a government-weaponized bird flu would be ready to go if avian flu ever began circulating among humans. A propagandist could simply connect the news to their entirely fabricated—but fully formed and seemingly well-documented—backstory seeded across the internet, spreading a fiction that could consume the nation’s politics and public-health response. The power of AI-generated histories, Horvitz told me, lies in “deepfakes on a timeline intermixed with real events to build a story.”
Matteo Wong writing in The Atlantic
Wed, March 7 – Storytelling for Impact
What: Tips, techniques and tools to help the modern marketer tell better and more impactful stories to activate their audiences around ideas and actions.
Who: Kiersten Hill Director of Nonprofit Solutions for FireSpring
When: 2 pm, Central
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: FireSpring
Thu, March 8 - Will AR and VR change war reporting forever?
What: A discussion of how augmented reality and virtual reality will affect war coverage.
Who: Khalil Ashawi and Hail Khalaf, co-founders of Frontline in Focus. Khalil Ashawi, based in Istanbul, is an award-winning photojournalist with 10 years' experience in conflict zones. Hail Khalaf recently won a Google News Initiative award.
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Reuters Institute
Thu, March 9 – Online News Association Career Day
What: Job, higher ed and fellowship opportunity seekers are welcome to attend this event at no cost to make valuable connections and participate in career-focused learning and networking. Share your resume with recruiters and program representatives.
When: 12-5 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Online News Association
Fri, March 10 - A master class in copyediting from the author of Dreyer’s English
What: Dreyer will share his tips and tools for writing before taking questions.
Who: Benjamin Dreyer, Random House executive managing editor
When: 11:30, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Journalism Institute of the National Press Club
Fri, March 10- How to Pitch a Story
What: By attending this class, you'll learn: Why pitching a story is a critical skill for journalists of all backgrounds and employment status. How to develop relationships with those who will be considering your pitch. How to craft and deliver the most effective pitch for your stories.
Who: Maggie Mulvihill, associate professor of the practice of computational journalism at Boston University
When: Noon, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: New England First Amendment Coalition
You’ve had an awful day—the cat peed on the rug, the dog peed on the cat, the washing machine is busted, World Wrestling has been preempted by Masterpiece Theatre—and you naturally feel out of sorts.
If at that moment you try to imagine how much you would enjoy playing cards with your buddies the next evening, you may mistakenly attribute feelings that are due to the misbehavior of real pets and real appliances ("I feel annoyed") to your imaginary companions ("I don't think I'll go because Nick always ticks me off").
Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.
Vacation? Romance? A night on the town? No thanks, I'll just sit here in the dark.
Their friends get tired of seeing them flail about in a thick blue funk, and they tell them that this too shall pass, that it is always darkest before the dawn, that every dog has its day, and several other important cliches. But from the depressed person's point of view, all the flailing makes perfectly good sense because when she imagines the future, she finds it difficult to feel happy today and thus difficult to believe that she will feel happy tomorrow.
We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present. But rather than recognizing that this is the inevitable result of the Reality First policy, we mistakenly assume that the future event is the cause of the unhappiness we feel when we think about it.
Our confusion seems terribly obvious to those who are standing on the sidelines, saying things like "You're feeling low right now because Pa got drunk and fell off the porch, Ma went to jail for whupping Pa, and your pickup truck got repossessed—but everything will seem different next week and you'll really wish you'd decided to go with us to the opera."
At some level we recognize that our friends are probably right. Nonetheless, when we try to overlook, ignore, or set aside our current gloomy state and make a forecast about how we will feel tomorrow, we find that it's a lot like trying to imagine the taste of marshmallow while chewing liver. It is only natural that we should imagine the future and then consider how doing so makes us feel, but because our brains are hell-bent on responding to current events, we mistakenly conclude that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. - Robert Louis Stevenson
By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of illuminations and clarification.
Finally, they are totally free to be. They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguise. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self-discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness.
The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.
M Scott Peck
The Road Less Traveled
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