In this issue: Marvel and politics/AV Club GenAI woes/Old department stores turned office space/X throttling NYT?/ChatGPT lawsuit/Threads search q’s/AI documentation/The Cultural Critic walkthrough/Scripting YouTube vids + more.
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
Today’s links after the jump.
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“For Disney, which has owned Marvel Studios since 2009, the challenge is how to make superhero movies that feel relevant while staying out of the fray of politics and the culture wars. Getting that balance right is key to the future of Marvel, whose films have earned nearly $30 billion at the box office in just over a decade, revolutionizing how Hollywood thinks about moviemaking.”
“On our review, the bulk of the A.V. Club's AI-generated articles appear to be copied directly from IMDb. Not "based on," but copied verbatim. Don't believe it? Take a look at the A.V. Club Bot's synopsis of 2003's "Young Adam," in its list of movies with NC-17 ratings […] Then compare that to IMDB’s description […] Every single word is exactly the same.”
“Amazon.com on Tuesday will unveil its new Manhattan office at the former Lord & Taylor flagship department store, a transformation that highlights how complex office conversions can be. Turning a Fifth Avenue department store that is more than a century old into a modern office came with plenty of challenges. Amazon had to add bathrooms, kitchens, new elevators and stairs wide enough for a rush of office workers. And then there is the lack of daylight.”
“X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be attempting to limit its users’ access to The New York Times.
Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC.”
“A group of U.S. authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, has sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, accusing the Microsoft-backed program of misusing their writing to train its popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPT.
Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman said in their lawsuit on Friday that OpenAI copied their works without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts.”
“It turns out that Threads’ recently introduced keyword-searching abilities won’t work for all topics. The app is currently blocking searches for a number of “potentially sensitive” words, including “vaccines,” “covid,” and other variations of words that have previously been linked to misinformation on Meta’s platform.”
“Also, Google's helpful content update removed the "written by people" part from its documentation - hello AI”
“The Cultural Tutor: From McDonalds to the most famous writer on Twitter. The man started writing online ~15 months ago, and has ascended to 1.5 million Twitter followers. Until now, he's been anonymous. Never showed his face. This is a masterclass in how to write for the Internet, source reading material, and build a writing habit.”
“George Blackman is a YouTube scriptwriter who’s been hired by YouTubers like Ali Abdaal, Mike Shake, and Ed from Film Booth to write videos for them. Scripting is one of the most important parts of the video-making process that you may be overlooking – and George says it can make or break your video. So in this episode, you’ll learn •How a great video starts •The 4-hat writing process to make better videos •Tips for finding and hiring a scriptwriter •And how to craft the perfect Call to Action to end your videos.”
