Did you know that June 2 is Decoration Day in Canada?
Yet, a simple online search on the words “where is 2nd June Decoration Day” will produce so many hits about Memorial Day in the U.S., you’d think the U.S. had taken over all the holidays imperialism works wonder about things like SEO and geopolitics. Apparently, it was once called Decoration Day, too.
The only reason I know this is because I read this blog. And the blog is Nik Nak’s Old Peculiar.
That’s a link to yesterday’s teaser.
Did you know that Azerbaijan celebrated the 86th anniversary of Civil Aviation Day? Yesterday. As in Sunday. When I’m writing this.
PS: OMG! Is everyone rebranding now?
PPS: Sure beats the shit out of reading Jeff Bezos’s pet project The Washington Post.
PLUS my own badly-drawn cartoon! How to Write a Hollywood Movie: The Graphic Novel Comic Strip?
I’ve obviously never seen a Pulitzer. Apparently, it’s a coin.
I was just too much of a lazy bastard to look it up then.
Shall we have a song? 🙂
PPS: You can find my occasional badly-drawn art and lots of photos on my Instagram.
PPPS: Publishers are already using way too much AI.
Here’s a short quote from the piece:
So much to say, this all needs to be read with a grain of salt, but it’s an interesting insight into how the bigwigs are talking amongst themselves. What, according to Bertelsmann, is tech doing for books? Here are some of the report’s lowlights for the book world:
Many publishers are already using generative tools for content creation. The report specifically calls out “Hachette, Harper Collins, and Macmillan Education” who are contracting “technology providers like OpenAI, Jasper, and Google” for content creation.
Penguin Random House has an automated ad tool it’s using. The program is called BookBoost, “a proprietary platform that leverages first-party data, automation, machine learning, and AI to fully automate the process for Facebook and Instagram advertising,” or whatever. The example ads in the report look very muddy and uninteresting, but it already seems to be accomplishing its goal of quickly flooding social media with book ads — the report says that BookBoost is hitting its “key metrics.”
Hachette is putting out a gimmicky book of poetry written by an OpenAI generator. Not sure who this book is for exactly, since so many lame experiments like this have already been floating around online, but disappointed in everyone involved, all the same!
Amazon is of course up to no good, “using Generative AI to summarize product reviews, including those on books.” This will no doubt just make their already janky website look even worse. Why is it that a company that has more money than God still has a Geocities-ass website?
And, for good or ill, there’s more …
What’s also left out of this report is that the conversation is already turning against this tech. AI still can’t make anything that’s very good, it’s destroying Google’s search engine, and workers are pushing back. It’s not just the celebrities who are complaining and suing, but also the vast, invisible tech underclass that makes this glittering promised future possible. Just this week, a group of African workers begged President Biden and Kenya’s President Ruto for help with tech companies that are “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers.” Wired wrote about the brutal and underpaid work:
A typical workday for African tech contractors, the letter says, involves “watching murder and beheadings, child abuse and rape, pornography and bestiality, often for more than 8 hours a day.” Pay is often less than $2 per hour, it says, and workers frequently end up with post-traumatic stress disorder, a well-documented issue among content moderators around the world.
There’s exploitation at every level here, and it’s important to remember that every time evangelists like Bertelsmann drool over a picture on their phone of a melting, six-fingered woman selling you a burger, it didn’t come out of thin air.
So … how are we all feeling about the wonders of new technology now? 🙂
Resistance is not futile, but I’m fast running out of fucks about the whole mess.
PPPPS: It’s not a coin. It’s a medal. Looks like a friggin’ coin.
I’m such a lazy bastard! 🙂
Random and Sundry Things 