#casey-newton — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #casey-newton, aggregated by home.social.
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Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Let Fly The Claudes Of War, With Casey Newton
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Turning ChatGPT into the control room of a user’s digital life
I think this is spot on from Casey Newton about the vision guiding OpenAI’s recent development. It would be easy to read their developments as throwing a million things at the world to see what sticks (social video, online shopping, pulse, ad tech etc) but they are explicitly saying these are all part of a more or less unified vision:
OpenAI seems more likely to monetize its platform through revenue-sharing deals or auctioning off placement. Maybe you ask for help with algebra, OpenAI loops in the Coursera app, and takes a finder’s fee if you become a paid user of the latter.
To OpenAI executives, the move helps them pursue what they describe as the goal they had before they got sidetracked by ChatGPT’s success: building a highly competent assistant.
“What you’re gonna see over the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that is really useful into something that feels a little bit more like an operating system,” Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, told reporters in a Q&A session on Monday. “Where you can access different services, you can access software — both the existing software that you’re used to using, but … most exciting to me, new software that has been built natively on top of ChatGPT.”
https://www.platformer.news/openai-dev-day-2025-platform-chatgpt/?ref=platformer-newsletter
What will optimisation look like for them on this model? It’s not quite user engagement in the same way as social media platforms but equally there will be an incentive structure facing the firm and a range of data-intensive methods through which to act on these incentives.
And I think he’s right there’s a huge risk of a massive data privacy scandal:
At launch, OpenAI is promising a more rigorous approach to data privacy. OpenAI will share only what it needs to with developers, executives said. (They essentially hand-waved through the details, though, so the actual mechanics will bear scrutiny.) Unlike Facebook, though, OpenAI has no friend graph to worry about — whatever might go wrong between you, ChatGPT, and a developer, it will likely not involve giving away the contact information of all of your friends.
At the same time, the AI graph may prove even riskier. ChatGPT stores many users’ most private conversations. Leaky data permissions, either intentional or accidental, could prove disastrous for users and the company. It only took one real privacy disaster to end Facebook’s platform ambitions; I can’t imagine it would take much more to end OpenAI’s.
#CaseyNewton #ChatGPT #generativeAI #openAI #platform #platformisation
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The visibility of academics will be shaped through LLMs as much as social media in future
This observation by the tech journalist Casey Newton got me thinking about how LLMs are increasingly shaping the visibility of academics:
Thinking models have gotten surprisingly good at identifying potential sources — potentially academic ones. When writing about Grok last month, I wanted to talk to someone who had studied relationships between people and chatbots. ChatGPT led me to Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, and suggested someone to talk to, along with their email address. I wound up interviewing them for the piece. The fact that thinking models can quickly analyze the academic literature about any subject and identify prominent researchers on the subject, along with their email addresses and phone numbers, is beginning to save me a lot of Googling.
I realised early on that I was more visible in model responses (ChatGPT and Claude) than other academics of a comparable age, career stage and influence* which I assumed was because 6000 blog posts hosted on wordpress.com were gobbled up in training. It could talk at greater length, with more accuracy, about my work then it could about other academics because my online visibility translated into model visibility.
I suspect this also means I’m more prone to being suggested by the model for a topical discussion in the way that Casey points to when looking for experts to interview, though I’m unsure how to go about establishing this. The value of a long term blog also means that I figure prominently as a source for ChatGPT and software like Perplexity. Interestingly, I don’t recall ever seeing a single referral from Claude. In the last year I’ve had more referrals to this blog from ChatGPT than I have from Facebook or Bluesky, though interestingly LinkedIn drives more traffic.
In other words there’s a complex relationship between online visibility and model visibility. Given that online visibility is the key driver which led social media to be institutionalised into higher education in the UK, this is very significant for academic careers even if it takes a long time for it to consolidate into a widely recognised incentive structure.
What other factors lead to increased model visibility? Ultimately this is a matter of visibility within the training data, but the patterns of visibility produced by this are challenging to conceptualise. What are the positive and negative outcomes of increased model visibility? Casey illustrates one in terms of visibility to journalists but there are many others.
*I did this in a very impressionistic way but it would be interesting to do this as a robust quantitative exercise.
#CaseyNewton #GenerativeAIForAcademics #higherEducation #SocialMedia #socialMediaForAcademics #trainingData #visibility #wordpress
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"It's not clear why #CaseyNewton believes a large userbase means it'll sustain a large and profitable industry. Even though #OpenAI’s #ChatGPT is one of the largest consumer products on the Internet, it is burning through billions with no profit anytime soon.
…concerns raised about #generativeAI that touch on burn rate, energy input, scaling models, training data seem to be summarily dismissed by Newton as whining about #AI being “fake.”"
https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/the-phony-comforts-of-useful-idiots
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"Requiring that AI models add digital watermarks to their output disclosing their provenance."
https://www.platformer.news/thursday-newsletter-3/
Oooh. That's clever. Because it can apply to your home and garden (not actually) "Open Source" versions too.
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"... some huge part of... [the SubStack founders] actually enjoys being part of a Culture War, and they like fighting it."
#CaseyNewton, 2024
Seldom have I heard a better example of the principle known in psychology as "projection".
It's people like Casey who enjoy fighting Culture Wars. So much so that they keep trying to drag SubStack into them.
(1/?)
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"In particular, it will turn to the development of artificial intelligence. The rise of AI has already been the story during the relatively calm administration of Joe Biden. But with Trump likely offstage for good, reporters like us will have more room to explore the race to build super-intelligence."
#CaseyNewton, 2024
https://www.platformer.news/leaving-substack-platformer-year-four/
Calling #MOLE training "AI" is investor bait, not a serious attempt to "build super-intelligence". Has Casey really not noticed that yet?
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"... Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta all increased expenditures on AI dramatically in the first half of this year, to a collective $106 billion."
#CaseyNewton, 2024
https://www.platformer.news/ai-bubble-tech-stock-decline/
(1/?)
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"... many AI tools today absolutely are not 'ready for prime time', in the sense that you could trust them with your job or your life. AI needs close supervision, sometimes requiring more effort than it would take to simply have done the task yourself."
#CaseyNewton, 2024
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Das Web im kontrollierten Niedergang
Einige Jahre war Google der Zugang zum Web. Dann schob sich das Unternehmen immer mehr zwischen Leserschaft und Kreative. Jetzt will der Konzern das Web ersetzen.
https://kaffeeringe.de/2024/05/15/das-web-im-kontrollierten-niedergang/
#CaseyNewton #Gartner #Google #KI #MartinAndree #WashingtonPost #WWW
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"Bluesky has already contributed more new ideas to social networking than we have seen in quite a while."
#CaseyNewton, 2024
https://www.platformer.news/bluesky-public-opening-jay-graber/
This is fair comment though. They've definitely tried out a very different approach to the pioneers of the fediverse and the folks who standardised and deployed ActivityPub.
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"... the customization allows publishers to do a lot of useful, trust-building work that simply is not possible elsewhere. (To name another example, custom labels enable organizations to effectively verify their own employees’ accounts.)"
#CaseyNewton, 2024
https://www.platformer.news/bluesky-public-opening-jay-graber/
That's also wrong. Publishers can verify their employees' accounts on Mastodon;
https://joinmastodon.org/verification
If other fediverse apps don't offer this yet, they ought to, and I'd say it's just a matter of time.
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"The benefits of decentralizing power are often outweighed by corresponding problems they create in the user experience. Bluesky’s AT Protocol set out to solve that in various ways. Unlike Mastodon, for example, you can search for usernames across the entire network..."
#CaseyNewton, 2024
https://www.platformer.news/bluesky-public-opening-jay-graber/
I'm pretty sure that's wrong. If I enter a complete username into the search in my fediverse app, doesn't it use DNS to find the server and then search it for that username?
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"Bonus prediction: Despite endless talk about wanting to eliminate it among politicians, TikTok skates unscathed through another presidential administration. After Montana’s effort to ban the app failed decisively on First Amendment grounds..."
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://platformer.substack.com/p/14-predictions-about-2024
Well that was entirely predictable, and also good news. Imagine the precedent if supposedly democratic governments could arbitrarily stop citizens using any online platform they don't like...
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"What I said: 'Substack will launch an ad network.'
The reality: Wrong again. Though I still think Substack gets there in the end."
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://platformer.substack.com/p/14-predictions-about-2024
But... why? They have absolutely no incentive to do that.
For a start, it would undermine the pitch that their customers are publishers and their readers, and the trust they've built with them. Most likely it would lose them a huge number of each, to other ad-free subscription platforms out there.
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"Meanwhile, with a “jawboning” case pending before the US Supreme Court, the federal government has stopped sharing information with platforms for fear that putting any pressure on companies to remove content will be seen as a violation of the First Amendment."
#CaseyNewton, 2024
https://www.platformer.news/monday-newsletter/
... which it seems pretty obvious that it is. As are any attempts to weaken section 230 and make platforms liable to law suits for making independent moderation decisions.
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#CaseyNewton sniping once again at SubStack and others who defend free expression:
"... platforms that have rejected calls to actively moderate content have created a means for bad actors to organize, create harmful content, and distribute it at scale. In particular, researchers now have repeatedly observed a pipeline between the messaging app Telegram and X, where harmful campaigns are organized and created on the former and then distributed on the latter."
https://www.platformer.news/taylor-swift-deepfake-nudes-x/
(1/?)
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#CaseyNewton also has some valid criticisms of the generative #AI trend;
"... its rise has led to a flood of AI-generated spam that researchers say now outperforms human-written stories in Google search results. The resulting decline in advertising revenue is a key reason that the journalism industry has been devastated by layoffs over the past year."
https://www.platformer.news/taylor-swift-deepfake-nudes-x/
Of course this is just finishing off a dying ad-funded journalism model decimated by recommendation media #DataFarms.
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I've been picking on #CaseyNewton a lot recently over his coverage of SubStack's recent freedom of expression controversy. So it's only fair to point out that Platformer is generally a good publication, to which I still subscribe. His article on the shuttering of iconic music magazine Pitchfork, for example, is timely and insightful;
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"If it won’t remove the Nazis, why should we expect the platform to remove any other harm?"
#CaseyNewton, 2023
'https://platformer.substack.com/p/why-substack-is-at-a-crossroads... and here it is.
As Casey openly admitted in his first piece on the subject it was never really about "Nazis". Demanding #SubStack boot "Nazi" publications was always about establishing a precedent for the banning of any other speech accused of being "harm" by Casey and his fellow travellers.
Classic Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse tactics.
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"Extremists on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for the most part had been posting for clout: those platforms made it difficult or even impossible for them to monetize their audiences."
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://platformer.substack.com/p/why-substack-is-at-a-crossroads
Casey, you know you put YouTube in that list, right? This one;
I'm assuming good faith with all my might here, but you're not making it easy.
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"[SubStack] began encouraging individual writers to recommend one another, funneling tens of thousands of subscribers to like-minded people. It started to send out an algorithmically ranked digest of potentially interesting posts to anyone with a Substack account, showcasing new voices from across the network. And in April of this year, the company launched Notes, a text-based social network resembling Twitter that surfaces posts in a ranked feed."
#CaseyNewton, 2012
https://platformer.substack.com/p/why-substack-is-at-a-crossroads
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"Aren’t you actually helping Nazis here, making their ideology seem alluring by turning into forbidden knowledge?
Genocidal anti-semitism is hardly forbidden knowledge; you can find it just about anywhere."
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://platformer.substack.com/p/why-platformer-is-leaving-substack
This is dodging the question. It also reveals a disturbing lack of understanding of fascist recruitment, a key facet of which is nurturing a sense of victimhood in recruits. Which actual censorship of fascist speech helps them do.
(1/4)
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"Substack deserves credit for kicking off a revolution in independent publishing. But the world it helped to birth is now much bigger than its own platform. Next week we will move to a new home in that world. One where readers can feel confident their money is not going to accelerate the growth of hate movements."
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://platformer.substack.com/p/why-platformer-is-leaving-substack
In Apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela was accused of leading a hate movement. Palestinian solidarity groups are accused of this now.
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"... several publications left the platform. Others, including Platformer, said they would leave if the company did not remove pro-Nazi publications."
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://www.platformer.news/p/substack-says-it-will-remove-nazi
I chose SubStack as a host precisely because they defend the universal human right to freedom of expression. In the face of increasingly entitled online censorship mobs from both the left and the right.
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"To continue building, [OpenAI] would have to take money from private investors — which meant setting up a for-profit entity underneath the nonprofit, similar to the way the Mozilla Foundation owns the corporation that oversees revenue operations for the Firefox browser, or how the nonprofit Signal Foundation owns the LLC that operates the messaging app."
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://www.platformer.news/p/openais-alignment-problem
That's an intriguing set of institutions to have essentially the same legal setup ...
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"Before the [Titter] takeover, Perez’s team was tasked with detecting efforts to manipulate elections around the world. Together, they added labels to posts containing election disinformation, and annotated content from state-affiliated media. Now, Perez says, much of that work has been abandoned."
#CaseyNewton and #ZoëSchiffer, 2023
https://www.platformer.news/p/twitter-is-dead-and-threads-is-thriving
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"But my views are also formed by my experiences growing up as a gay man online, where I used the then-nascent social web to find connections and community that I struggled to locate elsewhere. That history makes me skeptical of regulations that would make it harder for LGBT teens and other minority groups to find and speak to one another online, which is the express point of some (bipartisan!) legislation proposed this year."
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://www.platformer.news/p/the-states-sue-meta-over-child-safety
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"Over time, I have become more persuaded that social networks can be harmful to young people: in particular, certain groups of young people (those with existing mental health issues, victims of bullying) and in particular circumstances (those who are using social networks for more than three hours per day.)"
#CaseyNewton, 2023
https://www.platformer.news/p/the-states-sue-meta-over-child-safety