Blog  ⌇ What was I thinking…?

(Un)read in the ledger: Monday 29 April–Sunday 5 May 2024

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A pile of different sized books stacked on top of each other. The books have different coloured covers in orange, yellow and purple. They are on a blue background with a hexagon shape.

My weekly reading list

Meta has made AI weird, the open community is building open training data and there’s lots of new reports to read.


Read

What I’ve been reading the week:

‘Can you steal back something that’s already stolen?’: how radical art duo Looty repatriated the Rosetta Stone

Art duo repatriate digital surrogates of culturally significant objects taken during colonisation

Art duo Looty have been digitally repatriating artefacts such as the Rosetta Stone to their places of origin using a bevvy of tech, including Lidar 3D scanning, location-based augmented reality (AR), blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) technology. The art duo are ‘looting back’ stolen cultural artefacts from museums founded in the colonial era. It’s a clever but also very important project for raising awareness of the importance of repatriation of cultural property to their country or community of origin. Just days before this article came out, a ceremony held in the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge saw four spears taken by James Cook and Joseph Banks on 29 April 1770 permanently repatriated to the La Perouse Aboriginal Community.

The Guardian

Common Corpus: Building AI as Commons

AI models were built on copyright material used without permission, but what if they were trained on open licensed material?

As the AI and Copyright court cases continue we are seeing AI companies shift to direct licensing deals. If this trend continues ⟨  and it very likely will⟩ Style: italics there’s “… more risk of gatekeeping, as only the largest companies will be able to afford the licensing costs.” The recently launched Common Corpus public domain dataset for training large language models (LLMs) “… is an attempt to address these challenges by presenting a new way of contributing to the development of AI as Commons.” It’s built on open data, “CC-licensed YouTube videos, 21 million digitized newspapers, and millions of books …” and “… reflects a vision of fostering a culture of openness and accessibility in AI research.” To say I am excited about this endeavour is such an understatement!

Open Future

Meta’s AI search is weird and uncanny — and I’m not sure who it’s for

Everything about Meta AI is weird, starting with where to find it.

Katie Notopoulos takes a funny look at how weird and out of place Meta AI is in the Facebook and Instagram apps. Placing it in the search section is weird enough, but given how much data Meta has on all of us, its its suggested AI prompts are strange ⟨  and often shallow⟩.

Business Insider

How advertising, not social media, killed traditional journalism

The News Bargaining Code didn’t address the fact that news isn’t a high priority for social media

In a piece that is similar to Alex Bruns’ blog post in last week’s Reading list, Amanda Lotz has a piece on 360 that argues that social media and news are both in the attention business, and that attention was used to prop up their business models by selling advertising. As Lotz said, “The development of more effective and efficient advertising tools is what killed traditional newspaper operations, not the circulation of news on social media.” We know Meta is increasingly convinced news isn’t that important to its platforms. We also know that the News Bargaining Code didn’t address the core of the problem for journalism. And we know that journalism is good for democracy. But we also know that governments aren’t that interested in funding journalism. So the problem persists.

360info.org

Add it to the pile

New additions to the unread pile:

Countess Report 2022

More data on gender disparities in the arts.

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I am keen to get into the third edition of the arts sector-wide report on gender representation in the Australian art sector. This report also included First Nations representation for the first time. NAVA has a detailed news article about the report, and it was covered in a number of media outlets, including The Guardian.

National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA)

The Big Picture 4: Public Expenditure on Artistic, Cultural and Creative Activity by Governments in Australia in 2007-08 to 2021-22

Arts funding in Australia is slipping.

A New Approach (ANA) also released an important report this past week: the latest report in The Big Picture series “… tracking the long-term trends in arts and cultural investment by all three levels of government in Australia, shining a light on how governments are supporting the creators, activities and institutions that connect communities.” This report notes that “… while government spending on arts and culture increased in 2021-22, it is still not keeping pace with population growth nor with our OECD peers. The scale of cultural funding by state and territory governments is now neck and neck with the federal government, while the local government share has decreased.”

A New Approach (ANA)

Content Moderation in a Historic Election Year: Key lessons for industry

No surprises, but social media plays an important role during elections.

I also haven’t read it yet, but the Oversight Board has put out a report on social media platforms and election content moderation. It notes, “… [2024 is an] historic year of elections, with the populations of at least 80 countries around the world set to participate, there has never been a more critical time for democracy, human rights, and open and fair societies.” Given the role social media plays in disseminating political material and hosting political discourse, the Oversight Board has released key lessons for social media platform operators which should be important reading.

Oversight Board

More to read

Of course, there’s lots of other stuff I have been reading that doesn’t make it into the weekly round up. If the long list is too much, I also group links into collections:

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Disclosure

Conflict of interest

In the interest of disclosure, I am Co-lead of Creative Commons Australia.

AI use

This blog post was drafted using Google Docs. No part of the text of this blog post was generated using AI. The original text was not modified or improved using AI. No text suggested by AI was incorporated. If spelling or grammar corrections were suggested by AI they were accepted or rejected based on my discretion (however, sometimes spelling, grammar and corrections of typos may have occurred automatically in Google Docs).

The banner image (i.e. the first image at the top of the blog post) was generated by AI using Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator.


Credits

Image: A pile of books with orange, yellow and purple covers. An adaptation of an image generated by Elliott Bledsoe using Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator. Prompt: ‘pile of books uneven hand-drawn’.


Reuse

A bright green version of the Creative Commons brand icon. It is two lowercase letter Cs styled similar to the global symbol for copyright but with a second C. Like the C in the copyright symbol, the two Cs are enclosed in a circle.A bright green version of the Creative Commons brand icon. It is two lowercase letter Cs styled similar to the global symbol for copyright but with a second C. Like the C in the copyright symbol, the two Cs are enclosed in a circle.

Unless otherwise stated or indicated, you can reuse this blog post – (Un)read in the ledger: Monday 29 April–Sunday 5 May 2024 – under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Please attribute Elliott Bledsoe. View the full copyright licensing information for clarification.


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