It's not nice to fool Mother Nature and Apple wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. The company mines precious metals to use in its products and creates a non-renewable waste stream from these same products, and runs massive data centers that suck electricity all day every day, nevertheless, Apple is aligned with Mother Nature. That's what this new piece of branded content says, and who are we to argue with the …
The Valley’s High Priests Want AI Allegiance and Adoption
The Valley's hype machine has been in full grind mode since the dawn of AI as a mass market tool. Since the start of 2023, I've seen a lot of over-the-top nonsense masquerading as product promotion, but what I saw last week in venture capitalist Mark Andreesen's verbose defense of the technology, is unprecedented. This is no longer PR or promotion. It's religion. The stakes here are high. The opportunities are …
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Tweet, Tweet: Twitter Is Failing Harder Every Single Day
Once upon an Internet moment, Twitter was a big deal. Then a braggadocious billionaire bought the company and within minutes the social media platform's engine began to sputter and its wheels flatten. Flash forward to the present. An internal presentation obtained by The New York Times reveals that Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 …
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TV and Film Writers Are Fighting for All Workers Threatened By AI
The Writers Guild of America is out on strike. After six weeks of negotiations with Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Discovery-Warner, NBC Universal, Paramount, and Sony (under the umbrella of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), members of the strongest writer's union in the land collectively walked off the job. It sounds like a glamorous job—writing for TV or film. For a select few, it is, and …
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What ChatGPT “Thinks” About Ageism in Advertising and Media
Discriminating against people due to their age is a pox upon advertising and media houses. It's bad business, and another bad business practice is the last thing that these industries need, right now. Ageism is also a particularly perplexing issue emanating from professional workers who truly ought to know better. Given that everyone who is alive is aging, it's just a matter of time before it's your turn. The …
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Why Artificial Intelligence is Not a Replacement for Human Creativity
With the rise of artificial intelligence and automation, it is no surprise that some individuals are beginning to worry about the future of writing. As machines become more advanced, they are now capable of not only mimicking human speech but also producing entire articles, reports, and even novels. This has led to the development of programs like Jasper, which can create content that is grammatically correct and …
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Sky High on AI
AI. Have two letters in combination ever received the hype, press, and speculation behind them that AI presently enjoys? One has to wonder what's so special about the latest shiny object and exactly who stands to gain the most by seeing artificial intelligence take off. The pace of AI-related product releases and promotions since November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT was first released to the public has been brisk. Take …
Long Live the Indie Bookstore
As a former English major, professional writer, and fan of books, I was happy to read in The New York Times that "small booksellers not only survived the pandemic, but many are thriving." More than 300 new independent bookstores have sprouted across the United States in the past couple of years. Given how bookstore sales fell nearly 30 percent in 2020, things could have turned out differently. “It’s kind of …