Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
Grassroots infomercials: Ipodsdirtysecret.com. Keep watching. It’s great media jamming. (possible solution if you do want an ipod: get an extended warranty, they’d just give you a new one, then)
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My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]
Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]
I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]
I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]
This LLM-generated paper demonstrates how LLMs fail to cite core scholarship on a topic but generate misaligned citations systematically.
This paper is a great example of why you probably shouldn’t use a systematic literature review for a theoretical and conceptual research question like “How does artificial intelligence affect the perception of authenticity and aura in art?” However, if you’re looking for an annotated list of 48 recent articles about […]
Jean
Maybe the consumer pressure has worked – Apple has now introduced a $99 battery replacement service
http://www.info.apple.com/support/applecare_products/service/ipod_service.html
Jill
Oh good – thanks for the link.
Mike
Does it really qualify as “media jamming”? Here’s how I was reading it: the Neistat brothers, with a contact address in what looks like a Tribeca zip code, took the time to make a self-celebratory movie on a $1000+ computer about a very fancy $300+ MP3 player of theirs that broke, when it was no longer covered by warranty. There’s nothing there about whether this is a common problem (perhaps the stencil should have read “my ipod’s unreplaceable battery only lasted 18 months”?), and indeed no link as pointed out above. They then paid to host 362,944 viewings (when I looked) of this 6.5MB movie: that’s some bandwidth.
I mean, I love what adbusters does to combat the corporate consumerist mindset. But it strikes me that the Neistat brothers are reinforcing that mindset, demanding their “rights” (ugh) as consumers. Or, to put it another way, acting like overprivileged kids with a broken toy. I mean, couldn’t they find something better to get all fight-the-power (check out the movie’s white-kid-appropriating-NWA soundtrack) worked up about?
There’s a long and interesting (and sometimes acrimonious and not so interesting) discussion of the movie at Metafilter.
Jill
This FAQ not only explains how you can now get a battery replacement for $99, it says this was implemented before the video was released. Etc.
Alecia
Man have times changed. the battery in my ipod went out recently so i did a whole bunch of research and found a new ipod battery kit from this company that sells the battery and tools and instructions to pull out the old one wwithou breakin the damn thing. Well i took the plunge and was surprised at how easy it was. Apple doesn’t charge 99 bux anymore – closer to 60 now but with ipod Juice i completed the project for a third of that cost (patting myself on the back now!).
I never understood that neistats bros video either – it just seemed like whining – go out and fix the problem yourself like i did and move on!
-A