NEW RESOURCES

Washington Secretary of State: 41 Years of SGN now online at Washington Digital Newspapers; historic content available free to the public. “Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, recently digitized 1,745 issues of the Seattle Gay News (now known as SGN), as part of the Washington Digital Newspapers (WDN) program.”

Metro: New dashboard shows who’s spending big in mayor’s race. “A new data dashboard is letting Philadelphians follow the money just as this year’s mayoral race heats up. The city’s Board of Ethics, along with Mayor Jim Kenney’s Office of Information and Technology, launched the program this week with the aim of making campaign finance data more accessible to the public.”

Odessa American: Texas Film Commission announces new interactive exhibit. “The Texas Film Commission and the Texas Archive of the Moving Image announced Thursday the launch of a new interactive exhibit ‘Meet Me in San Antonio: HemisFair ’68 on Film.’… HemisFair ’68 was a sixth-month event celebrating the ethnic groups of the western hemisphere as well as San Antonio’s 250th birthday.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: ChatGPT firm trials $20 monthly subscription fee. “The firm behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT is trialling a subscription service in the US. For $20 (£16) per month, subscribers will get access to the platform even at peak times when it can be hard to log onto, and also ‘priority access’ to new features, chatbot creator OpenAI said.”

WordPress Blog: What’s New on WordPress.com: Tools to Make Designing Your Site Easier Than Ever. “At WordPress.com, we’re always adding features and pushing our blocks and Site Editor to do more so that you can create, design, and publish amazing things with ease. Our newest features are largely design-focused, giving you the confidence to explore a variety of styles and then easily apply them across your entire site.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Futurism: Leaked Messages Show How CNET’s Parent Company Really Sees AI-Generated Content. “Kevin Hughes, the head of AI content for Red’s EDU division, is a true believer in the company’s vision of sites populated largely by AI-generated content. On LinkedIn, for instance, he recently boasted that the company’s ‘dirt cheap’ AI can crank out articles so efficiently that it costs ‘less than a penny for 750 words’ — a practice that he wrote was ‘generating millions of dollars in revenue.'”

Engadget: China’s biggest search engine is to set launch a ChatGPT rival in March. “Chinese search giant Baidu aims to introduce a ChatGPT-like AI service that gives users conversational results, Bloomberg has reported. It’ll be based on the company’s Ernie system, a large-scale machine-learning model trained over several years that ‘excels at natural language understanding and generation,’ Baidu said in 2021.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Shady reward apps on Google Play amass 20 million downloads. “The applications promote themselves as health, pedometer, and good habit-building apps, promising to give users random rewards for staying active in their daily lives, reaching distance goals, etc. According to a report by the Dr. Web antivirus, though, the rewards may be impossible to cash out or are only made available partially after forcing users to watch a large number of advertisements.”

UK Government: UK sets out plans to regulate crypto and protect consumers. “The government will set out ambitious plans to robustly regulate cryptoasset activities – providing confidence and clarity to consumers and businesses alike.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Cambridge: Memes-field Park? ‘Digital natives’ are flirting with Jane Austen’s vision of the ideal man all over again. “In a newly-published analysis, literature specialists examined the phenomenon of internet memes about Jane Austen and her fictional creations, in particular those from Pride and Prejudice and, above all, Mr Darcy. Austen’s work is ‘memed’ – turned into bite-sized, ironic snippets of online content – more than almost any other author of classic fiction.”

CNN: AI reveals unknown play by one of Spain’s greatest writers in library archive. “Artificial intelligence (AI) technology used to transcribe anonymous historic works at Spain’s National Library archives has uncovered a hidden gem — a previously unknown play by one of the nation’s greatest authors, Felix Lope de Vega.”

BuzzFeed News: Why Are AI-Generated Hands So Messed Up?. “why do these programs mess up hands (not to mention bare feet) so badly? It’s a question that many people have asked. To find out, I emailed Midjourney; Stability AI, which makes Stable Diffusion; and OpenAI, which created DALL-E 2. Only Stability AI responded to my questions.” Good morning, Internet…

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