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Archive for Internet

AI Threatens to Frame Researcher For Murder

Okay, this is getting a little ridiculous.

In one long-running conversation with The Associated Press, the new chatbot complained of past news coverage of its mistakes, adamantly denied those errors and threatened to expose the reporter for spreading alleged falsehoods about Bing’s abilities. It grew increasingly hostile when asked to explain itself, eventually comparing the reporter to dictators Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin and claiming to have evidence tying the reporter to a 1990s murder.

Is Bing too belligerent? Microsoft looks to tame AI chatbot

Remember that chatbot that the internet taught to be racist in record time? It seems like no AI project can survive contact with humanity without quickly becoming unhinged.

Honestly, not that surprising when I think about it.

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red and black abstract illustration

Internet

Recommended Newsletter read: Garbage Day

If you’re interested in the intersections between popular culture and the internet, I highly recommend Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter. Substacks and the like have turned into the new blogs — I suspect because of the tools that allow people to subscribe to them for pay so there’s a profit motive. Should I be writing a Substack instead? Nah. Sounds like work.

Wednesday’s newsletter about the future of internet traffic now that search engines are in a rush to turn themselves into AI tools, is particularly interesting. Not all of the issues are relevant to my professional interests, but this one especially is. Social media has been a driver to websites for a long time, but that era is ending. And now search engines might go the way of the dodo too? Where’s that leave us? Interesting times ahead.

I used to be able to keep up on these things on my own just by being young and involved. Now I’m old and busy and I no longer have my finger on the pulse. I refuse to use Instagram or TikTok so I need younger people like Broderick to explain to me how these platforms are influencing things. I really need to subscribe and pay him for his hard work. Writing this here is my mental note to do so in the future.

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garbage near forest

Internet

Thoughts on the 2020 Nebula Conference Online

Some time back in late February, I messaged Terra LeMay and asked “have we started talking about canceling the Nebulas yet?” I’d been watching this pandemic unfold and I could see the writing on the wall. SFWA had not yet started that conversation, but by early March, we began talking about what it would take to convert the experience of the Nebula Conference to an online one. I had an initial phone call with Colin Coyle to discuss technical feasibility and together we tentatively decided that it would be possible. We gave the word to the rest of the SFWA team and not long after that, we got started building things.

My responsibility on the project was for the attendee-facing website. I needed to build a members-only platform that would allow us to put content behind an attendee paywall, and integrate with our chosen video and chat platforms (Boxcast and Chatroll). It needed to integrate with our existing platforms as much as possible as well, and we had about two months to build it and launch, to keep the original conference schedule.

I quickly built a website on top of WordPress utilizing the Astra Pro theme, with MemberPress doing the heavy lifting of selling memberships. We integrated with our membership management tool Wild Apricot for sign ins, as well as selling memberships directly to non-members as well. I also wrote quite a bit of custom code and blocks to bring everything together cohesively. All told, it took me about 100 hours of work to bring the site elements together into a functional system and make changes on the fly during the conference itself. There were a lot of sleepless nights on a very tight timeline to get it done, and there will doubtless be many improvements to make going forward, as I expect the website will be a component of what SFWA does for the conference moving forward.

All that was accomplished under a tight timeframe and I stumbled a bit out of the gate, but we got things done in the end, thanks to the patience of Terra, Kate Baker, and especially Mary Robinette Kowal, among many others. That the site looks as good as it does is a credit to Lauren Raye Snow. She was brought on board to design the entire conference and new logos for the org. her assets and direction was used on the website as well. I’m so thankful for her involvement on this one. I’d be happy to code for her design work any time.

I’ve been involved in the Nebula Conference process a bit in the past in very limited ways, but this online shift has given me a much better perspective on what goes into the sausage making. I learned so many things about the hard work that goes into making these experiences run smoothly, but there was one big takeaway for me. What I didn’t realize was just how large the army of volunteers it takes to run a conference. If you’re considering trying to reproduce what we did on your own for another conference or convention, you will want to have a look at the credits of the Nebula Award presentation–that’s a good glimpse at the more than a hundred people it took to pull things off like the team did.

Thank you so much to all of you who helped out in tech support, moderation, and more. I didn’t interact directly with many of you, but there was no way we could have pulled this off without that army backing us up. It wouldn’t have mattered how good of a job I did building the website running under things if it hadn’t been for your efforts.

My part of the process was a small one, but I’m proud of it, and witnessing the event go off without much of a hitch was one of the more satisfying moments of my career so far.

PS: you can see the work we did here for yourself. You can buy a discounted membership and watch recordings of all the panels at what I think is a pretty great price!

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I Trained a Neural Network With the Titles of 3,500 Horror Movies

It’s funny what kinds of things can spark you into going down a rabbit hole and losing an evening of your time to some creative concept. The following conversation inspired me to finally learn something I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

Steve: First up on my Shudder playlist is Prince of Darkness, Sennentuntschi, The Old Dark House, VIY, The Changeling, The Beyond, Monster Party, Revenge, Phantasm Ravager.

Jeremy: You are just making those names up!

Jeremy: I kind of want to train a neural net to make horror movie titles now.

It turns out that with a little minor programming knowledge and some general technical know-how, you can build a neural network and train it off of text pretty easily. This Lifehacker article got me started. I got textgenrnn installed and up and running pretty easily, but the hardest part was figuring out how I was going to build my database of titles.

Luckily, the hard-working people behind Wikipedia had collated tables of movie titles throughout the decades. Copying and pasting a single column of an HTML table isn’t easily accomplished, except I found a Chrome extension that made it simple. From that, I began the laborous process of going through each year and decade and about an hour later, I had 3,500 horror movie titles to serve as grist for my neural mill. I just used all the titles from the 1940s onward that were in Wikipedia. I imagine there are many missing from my dataset, but it seemed large enough to work from.

I trained it on 10 epochs and played around with a temperature score from .5 to 1.0 (anything higher than 1.0 resulted in complete nonsense, and oddly, the rare actual title). Some of the results were awesome. Some were funny. Anyway, enough about methodology. You want to see some of the titles! Here are some of my favorites out of about 110 that I kept.

Top Ten Cool/Want to Actually See Or Possiblly Write

  • Nervosis
  • Cat Mantis!
  • Primal in the Red Wicks
  • A Vampire’s Dead on Elsion
  • Stigmatary
  • Or, Vampire for the World of Grave
  • The Nine Shelley
  • Eat the Night
  • The Chainsaw Mentor
  • Creep Baseball

Top Ten Funny (Or At Least They Made Me Laugh)

  • The Terror of Part II: The Dead Row
  • Lake Bad Haunted Hunter
  • Serial Sister
  • Stard vs. Piss
  • The Night Babes from Maris
  • Shark 2
  • Hot Ransomer
  • Don’t Comb Your Soul
  • Lips from the Wizard
  • Pirhana 33DD (I spit out my soda when I saw this one)

Some of these, for all I know, may be actual titles, but I tried to check them against my master list.

Which ones are your favorites?

Photo by Pelly Benassi on Unsplash

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