Update, Nov. 20, 2020, at 12:03 p.m.: After creeping into the Top 100 on Amazon, this title was removed from the site on Friday morning. Other “University Press” books are still for sale, however.
Perhaps you’ve heard that there is an exciting new Barack Obama book that everyone’s talking about! I’m not talking about A Promised Land, the 751-page memoir and large physical object for which publisher Crown paid Obama tens of millions of dollars and which Obama spent four years writing (without a ghost, he brags).
No, I’m talking about Barack Obama Book, a 61-page tome by an author named “University Press.” Why is Barack Obama Book selling so well? Thanks to sponsored listings and canny search engine optimization, the book appears above Barack Obama’s actual memoir if you search Amazon for—you guessed it—“barack obama book.” Read More
Tag Archives: News Summarization
The AI Company Helping the Pentagon Assess Disinfo Campaigns
In September, Azerbaijan and Armenia renewed fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory in the Caucasus mountains. By then, an information warfare campaign over the region had been underway for several months.
The campaign was identified using artificial intelligence technology being developed for US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which oversees US special forces operations.
The AI system, from Primer, a company focused on the intelligence industry, identified key themes in the information campaign by analyzing thousands of public news sources. In practice, Primer’s system can analyze classified information too. Read More
Text to speech, automation and AI: How Google is backing Middle East news providers
Google says it’s backing Middle Eastern news projects that develop new business models.
Google has awarded just under $2m to 21 projects in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, following the first Google News Initiative (GNI) Innovation Challenge in the region.
The move is part of a wider series of regional innovation challenges, and a global commitment from Google News to give $300m “to help journalism thrive in the digital age”. Read More
Data driven financial news.
University of Florida students have created an app to help investors spend less time analyzing stocks and newsfeeds in order to make investment decisions. The app analyzes news and social media to help better understand what’s happening in the world around you.
String uses AI to analyze strings of text which include millions of news and social media threads in order to better understand the fabric of society and the events happening in the world. Read More
What We Learned About Editors vs. Algorithms from 4,000 Stories in Apple News
If you check Apple News on June 4th, you’d find a “Spotlight” about the U.S. protests that features rights for protestors, educational resources, mental health resources for BIPOC, and a list of organizations where you can donate to support racial justice.
In case it is not obvious, these stories are curated by a team of human editors at Apple News, and not an algorithm. They show further evidence of the value of human curation, in a time when news is especially important. This was the topic of my recently-published research study, which I will summarize in this blog post. Read More
Microsoft sacks journalists to replace them with robots
Dozens of journalists have been sacked after Microsoft decided to replace them with artificial intelligence software.
Staff who maintain the news homepages on Microsoft’s MSN website and its Edge browser – used by millions of Britons every day – have been told that they will be no longer be required because robots can now do their jobs. Read More
How Artificial Intelligence Can Save Journalism
The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented crisis in journalism that could decimate media organisations around the world.
The future of journalism – and its survival – could lie in artificial intelligence (AI). AI refers “to intelligent machines that learn from experience and perform tasks like humans”, according to Francesco Marconi, a professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York who has just published a book on the subject: Newsmakers, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism. Read More
Google Brain’s AI achieves state-of-the-art text summarization performance
Summarizing text is a task at which machine learning algorithms are improving, as evidenced by a recent paper published by Microsoft. That’s good news — automatic summarization systems promise to cut down on the amount of message-reading enterprise workers do, which one survey estimates amounts to 2.6 hours each day.
Not to be outdone, a Google Brain and Imperial College London team built a system — Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive SUmmarization Sequence-to-sequence, or Pegasus — that leverages Google’s Transformers architecture combined with pretraining objectives tailored for abstractive text generation. They say it achieves state-of-the-art results in 12 summarization tasks spanning news, science, stories, instructions, emails, patents, and legislative bills, and that it shows “surprising” performance on low-resource summarization, surpassing previous top results on six data sets with only 1,000 examples. Read More
New powers, new responsibilities A global survey of journalism and artificial intelligence
No, the robots are not going to take over journalism. Yes, the machines might soon be able to do much routine journalism labour. But the reality and the potential of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data processing is to give journalists new powers of discovery, creation and connection.
The hope is that journalists will be algorithmically turbo-charged, capable of using their human skills in new and more effective ways. AI could also transform newsrooms from linear production lines into networked information and engagement hubs that give journalists the structures to take the news industry forward into the data-driven age.
Algorithms will power the systems. But the human touch – the insight and judgement of the journalist – will be at a premium. Can the news industry seize this opportunity? Read More
Remember that scary AI text-generator that was too dangerous to release? It’s out now
OpenAI today published the final model in its staged release for GPT-2, the spooky text generator the AI community’s been talking about all year.
GPT-2 uses machine learning to generate novel text based on a limited input. Basically, you can type a few sentences about anything you like and the AI will spit out some ‘related’ text. Unlike most ‘text generators’ it doesn’t output pre-written strings. GPT-2 makes up text that didn’t previously exist– at least according to OpenAI‘s research paper. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 