Ever since Google climbed onto the artificial intelligence bandwagon last year by announcing that AI results would start appearing at the top of search pages, there has been a suspicion that by using AI to provide answers, Google would inevitably wind up displacing websites and media companies whose businesses depend
As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous research. Obviously, there are some things
Hi everyone! I'm going to keep this (mercifully) short. I don't do this a lot, and in fact I think I've only done this one other time. I write and publish this newsletter because I love writing about tech and the impact it has
You might have noticed that there’s a tiny bit of anxiety about artificial intelligence these days — its design, its implementation, its uses and misuses, its reason for existing at all. Is it ruining society? Is it making our kids stupid? Is it going to kill us? Etc. A lot
I'd like to apologize in advance for the topic of this week's newsletter, which I fear may not interest all (or perhaps even most) of you. It would be nice to think that lots of people care about the nuances of how news and information gets
Ever since ChatGPT first emerged on the scene in 2022, there has been a vociferous debate about whether the indexing (or "scraping") of public content that AI companies do when they are training a large-language model should be considered an infringement of the copyright held by publishers and/
A little over six months ago, I (and pretty much everyone else with a pulse) was writing about Bluesky's meteoric growth, which seemed to be driven in equal parts by frustration with Elon Musk's MAGAfication of Twitter/X and the search for somewhere to talk about
This isn’t an AI newsletter per se, in the sense that I don’t always write about it. However, I do write about it fairly often, mostly because I don’t think there’s anything else happening — apart from maybe crypto — that blends the surprising and the terrifying and
I've never met Marc Andreessen, although at one time in the distant past we were Twitter friends — I enjoyed the long threads he used to do, and I wrote about a few of them at Gigaom in a previous lifetime (including one about how newspapers should "burn
Let's get this out of the way right up front: I don't have an iPhone, I have a Pixel. And I run Windows and Linux on my desktops, not MacOS. That said, I am a longtime Macbook Air fan, having had more than half a dozen
If you've been following the news about Google's I/O conference at all, you probably know that it was all about artificial intelligence — and that isn't an exaggeration. Literally every announcement, every feature, and every app demonstration involved AI in some form or another.
As many of you may have noticed, some of these Torment Nexus newsletters involve the presentation of a bunch of evidence in the form of links, followed by a well-thought-out conclusion (some may be more well-thought than others, but I let's not quibble). I want to say up
It seems quaint now, but not that long ago, one of the biggest reasons for concern about the surveillance of our behavior by massive internet platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon — or by companies buying click data and GPS location from our smartphones — was that they might use that information
A recent New York Times piece arrived with a headline that asked "If AI systems become conscious, should they have rights?" If you were to judge the article by the response on social media like X and Bluesky (which is almost always a mistake, as many of you
It's been hard to avoid the US government's antitrust case against Meta lately, since CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent three days in front of the cameras in Congress, testifying about his company's alleged anti-competitive tactics. But another equally large Silicon Valley behemoth is arguably in
Writing about the government's antitrust case against Meta is a little like putting on an old sweater — it's comfortable and worn, but also has kind of a funky smell (maybe it's best for everyone if I don't continue with this metaphor). In
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Torment Nexus that was titled "Be careful what you post on social media, they are listening," which was triggered in part by the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia University who took part in pro-Palestine
Before anyone gets upset about my headline, I am using the term "thought process" in the loosest possible way. I realize that many people (perhaps even most people) would not describe what an AI model does as "thinking." After all, aren't LLMs just a
Until a couple of years ago, you couldn’t turn around without running into an academic article, university department, or even an entire nonprofit organization devoted to the evils of misinformation and its more sinister cousin, disinformation. Over the past decade or so, Facebook and YouTube have both been accused
In a post on X a little over a week ago, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said that the company had “trained a new model that is good at creative writing,” although he said he wasn’t sure how or when it would be released. Altman said reading the
I've been trying to resist writing about the political situation in the United States for some time now — all the terrible decisions and the venal motivations and the chaos and misery that have come with the Trump-and-Musk show — in part because I don't really know what
Digg. Reddit. Fark. Stumbleupon. Slashdot. If you were "extremely online" (as the kids say) in the early part of this century — i.e., the early 2000s — these were some of the sites you probably visited a lot, searching for interesting things to read, or just killing time between
In the old days of artificial intelligence — in other words, more than about ten years ago — one of the big debates was whether an artificial or computerized intelligence would ever be able to pass the Turing test. Designed by the pioneering computer scientist and code-breaker Alan Turing in 1949, before
If you've been following court cases that relate to artificial intelligence, you probably saw some headlines about a recent federal court decision in the US District Court for Delaware, in a copyright-infringement case filed by Thomson Reuters against a company called Ross Intelligence. I saw headlines that claimed