Cogent – Curated – Updated || Since 1999 || Information you need-produced by humans
Background: “Often, doomscrolling starts with a goal of becoming more aware of a situation so you can understand what’s happening and prepare yourself for it … However, with doomscrolling, this search for answers becomes obsessive and unproductive. Rather than helping you to learn useful information, you waste time as you surf from one outrageous story to another, all the while feeling worse about the world,…
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Background: “Ghostwriting occurs when someone makes substantial contributions to a manuscript without attribution or disclosure. It is considered bad publication practice in the … sciences, and some argue it is scientific misconduct. At its extreme, … ghostwriting involves … companies hiring professional writers to produce papers promoting their products but hiding those contributions and instead naming academic physicians or scientists as the authors.” From: Gøtzsche,…
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In a world increasingly filled with AI-generated slop of all kinds and a social media landscape dominated by an outrage machine that is engineered to addict people and steal their attention and privacy, it is important to know there is an alternative. And that alternative does not mean burying your nose in other media 24 hours a day. The alternative is simple … but can…
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Should information be shared freely? That is, should content (text, images, videos, etc.) be shared without heavy external control (usually aimed at making as much money or gaining as much power as possible)? And should the information be able to be accessed and shared at no additional cost? Is transparency and free access a part of the common good? Or, at the other end of…
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“… AI tools to generate and edit content are getting more advanced, easier to operate, and cheaper to run—all reasons why the US government is increasingly paying to use them. We were well warned of this, but we responded by preparing for a world in which the main danger was confusion. What we’re entering instead is a world in which influence survives exposure, doubt is…
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JT Torres, Washington and Lee University and Jeff Saerys-Foy, Quinnipiac University (from The Conversation) The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they’re “addicted” to their phone. Tech companies, influencers and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation. Considering this…
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Francesco Agnellini, Binghamton University, State University of New York (from The Conversation) The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study showing that more than 50% of articles on the…
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It can seem–sometimes very visibly and brutally–that we are losing the ability to make and influence decisions about our own lives. That no matter what we do and what we want, forces greater than us and our families and even our communities will steamroll us in order to impose someone else’s will–and that generally means greater power and greater wealth for a set of politicians…
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It is common these days to see people walking their dogs or walking along streets, in parks, staring at or speaking to their smart phones. Yes, they are physically out in the “real” world but, in reality, they are deeply immersed within the artificial world created by AI, social media, and, yes, the Internet. Background: In this hybrid existence, what is real? What actually exists?…
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Aaron French, Kennesaw State University (from The Conversation) Back in 2008, The Atlantic sparked controversy with a provocative cover story: Is Google Making Us Stupid? In that 4,000-word essay, later expanded into a book, author Nicholas Carr suggested the answer was yes, arguing that technology such as search engines were worsening Americans’ ability to think deeply and retain knowledge. At the core of Carr’s concern…
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