Blog  ⌇ What was I thinking…?

(Un)read in the ledger: Monday 16–Sunday 22 September 2024

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A pattern made up of an icon of two books on top of each other. The top book has a yellow cover and the bottom book has a pink cover. The piles of books are on a teal colour background.

My weekly reading list

There was a lot of talk about mitigating the risks of AI, plus Instagram is getting accounts for teens and Queensland’s public libraries have a new roadmap.


Okay, so I fell off the weekly reading list blog post waggon but I am back on it!

Read

What I’ve been reading this week:

Public Libraries & IKCs Roadmap

There’s a new shared Roadmap for Queensland Public libraries and Indigenous Knowledge Centres.

Organised around three themes – Places and Programs, Collections and Resources and People and Partners – the Public libraries and IKCs (Indigenous Knowledge Centres) Roadmap for Queensland sets out 16 strategies for local action and collective impact. The plan is overlaid with a vision that sees public libraries and IKCs as valued cultural and social hubs contributing to local communities’ lifelong learning and liveability. This vision is complimented by a set of shared values and a recognition that flexible implementation is crucial to ensure the plan is achievable and aligned with the aspirations of libraries, council and communities.

State Library of Queensland

Content Moderation in a New Era for AI and Automation

The Oversight Board’s suggestions for AI content moderation on social media.

The Oversight Board released a new report looking at the increasing use of AI in automated decision-making (ADM) to moderate content on social media platforms. It raises concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) doing content moderation on social media platforms can be a blunt instrument in cases of over-enforcement – such as where strict application of nudity rules removes breast cancer awareness content because the system cannot understand context – while turning a blind eye to some harmful content. For example, under-enforcement can occur where hate speech is coded to evade detection.

If you are interested in the Oversight Board’s report, you can also read my summary of it.

Oversight Board

An update on our safety & security practices

Open AI Safety and Security Committee recommendations released.

Open A has published the recommendations of its Safety and Security Committee on safety and security-related processes and safeguards. Some of the key takeaways include:

  • making the Committee an independent Board oversight committee,
  • expand their risk-based approach to security through internal information segmentation and more staff for around-the-clock security
  • doing more industry collaboration on transparency and security, and
  • building an adaptable unified safety and security framework for model development and monitoring

OpenAI

How we’re increasing transparency for gen AI content with the C2PA

SynthID and provenance initiatives Google are working on for AI transparency.

Laurie Richardson, Google’s Vice President, Trust & Safety, has written a piece on Google’s commitment to transparency of AI-generated content. They are investing in provenance tools such as SynthID to that end. They also see industry partnerships as crucial to transparency. That’s why they are a member of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) and are integrating C2PA metadata into Search and Ads. While I am cautiously open to these initiatives, I am a little unsure about coalitions that are overly stacked with tech companies.

The Keyword, Google

Introducing Instagram Teen Accounts: Built-In Protections for Teens, Peace of Mind for Parents

Meta introduces Instagram Teen Accounts as teen social media bans loom on the horizon.

In a pre-emptive strike against the looming threat of regulation of children and teen’s use of social media in Australia and elsewhere around the world, Meta has announced Teen Accounts for Instagram, “to reassure parents that teens are having safe experiences with built-in protections automatically.” They will have built-in protections for teens for inappropriate content and interactions. Parents will have oversight of the settings for Teen Accounts and can set total daily time limits and block Instagram usage at specified times. Teens will automatically be included regardless of whether they are new and existing users. And Instagram will require more age verification for teens and proactively find teens claiming to be older.

Instagram

Publishers try skinnier books to save money and emissions

Different ways publishers are cutting the carbon impact of printing books.

Of course book printing has a carbon footprint. This BBC article looks at some of the ways publishers are reducing it. Emission reductions are coming through less wood fiber, lighter loads and using thinner paper, as well as smaller font sizes and more compact typefaces.

BBC

YouTube Hype gives smaller creators a place to shine

YouTube is exploring how to help smaller content creators cut through on the platform.

We all know that YouTube is a content behemoth making it difficult for new and small creators to get a look in. To support smaller channels and help users discover new content and creators, the platform has launched a new feature called Hype, with the most hyped vidoes populating a leaderboard. The exact details on how it will work are complicated ⟨  I recommend reading the article on The Verge and YouTube’s blog post for the nitty gritty ⟩ but the initiative will create an alternative mechanism for content discovery outside of the algorithm. It will be interesting to see if Hype can live up to its promise to let users feel more involved in what content gains attention, to incentivise fans to support the creators they are interested in and to promote content on smaller channels.

The Verge

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:

If you have a Google Account you can even share links with me.

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Disclosure

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

A pattern made up of an icon of two books on top of each other. The top book has a yellow cover and the bottom book has a pink cover. The piles of books are on a teal colour background.

Image: A pattern made up of an icon of two books on top of each other. The top book has a yellow cover and the bottom book has a pink cover. The piles of books are on a teal background. An adaptation of an image generated by Elliott Bledsoe using Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator. Prompt: ‘A simple hand drawn pile of books’.


Provenance

This blog post was produced by Elliott Bledsoe from Agentry, an arts marketing micro-consultancy. It was first published on 22 Sep 2024. It has not been updated. This is version 1.0. Questions, comments and corrections are welcome – get in touch any time.


Reuse

Good ideas shouldn’t be kept to yourself. I believe in the power of open access to information and creativity and a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture. That’s why this blog post is licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons licence.

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, this blog post – (Un)read in the ledger: Monday 16–Sunday 22 September 2024 – is licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Please attribute Elliott Bledsoe as the original creator. View the full copyright licensing information for clarification.

Under the licence, you are free to copyshare and adapt this blog post, or any modified version you create from it, even commercially, as long as you give credit to Elliott Bledsoe as the original creator of it. So please make use of this blog post as you see fit.

Whether AI-generated outputs are protected by copyright remains contested. To the extend that copyright exists, if at all, in the banner image I generated using AI for this blog post (i.e. the first image at the top of the blog post), I also license it for reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).



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