In this issue: AI & data rights / Killed by Google / Ecommerce livestream troubles / Prompt engineering isn’t conversation / Getty Images gen AI / Training gen AI on books / Newsletter communities / Twitter user base shrinking under Musk / More internet, not less / The types of LinkedIn people + 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.
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Today’s links:
“In order to combat the ability of AI to "undermine everything we care about," Lanier said engineers and technologists behind AI advancements need to "lose the ideology – you don't need to recreate the science fiction movies you grew up with." Then, there needs to be an acceptance that without people, there is no data. Lanier has written about and helped to define the concept of "data dignity," wherein people are not effectively forced to hand over their personal data in exchange for using internet platforms.”
“Killed By Google”
”The livestream e-commerce bubble has begun to deflate this year, with the saturated industry facing an economic downturn. Sick of dwindling salaries, longer working hours, and increasing competition to win over frugal Chinese consumers, livestream sellers are beginning to question their job prospects in the industry.”
”Prompt engineering… You're not talking to a human who understands language the way you do. Stop pretending you are.”
“Anyone looking for a beautiful photograph of a desert landscape can find many choices from Getty Images, the stock photography collection.
But say you’re instead looking for a wide angle shot of a “hot pink plastic saguaro cactus with large arms that stick out, surrounded by sand, in landscape at dawn.” Getty Images says you can now ask its artificial intelligence image-generator to make one on the spot.”
”This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. I wrote in The Atlantic about how the data set, known as “Books3,” was based on a collection of pirated ebooks, most of them published in the past 20 years. Since then, I’ve done a deep analysis of what’s actually in the data set, which is now at the center of several lawsuits brought against Meta by writers such as Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay, who claim that its use in training generative AI amounts to copyright infringement.”
“It may be ideal to see the size of your newsletter list trend up and up, but the same isn’t required for a successful community. Clouse, founder of Creator Science, caps his community, The Lab, at 200 people at any given time. We spoke in July; he said he’d reached his cap as of February with an 80-person waitlist. (Typically, one or two members cycle out of their annual membership per month.)”
”The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy.
My toxic trait is I can’t shake that naïve optimism of the early internet. Mistakes were made, a lot of things went sideways, and there have undeniably been a lot of pain and misery and bad things that came from the social era. The mistake now would be not to learn from them.”
”X — formerly Twitter — is shrinking meaningfully under Elon Musk, according to new data from mobile research firm Apptopia.
Since Musk bought the company in October 2022, it’s lost approximately 13% of its app’s daily active users. And its rebrand from Twitter to X accelerated the decline, per data that Big Technology is first publishing here. Meta’s Threads, meanwhile, isn’t taking advantage, with stagnant engagement and little meaningful migration from Twitter.”
”Content strategy is useful for all charities, no matter what area you focus on or sector you’re in. This includes fundraising, service delivery, campaigns, and anything else you can think of.”
”Many famous works of art have resulted from artisanal versions of such a process. Bernini turned Ovid’s description of Apollo chasing Daphne into a marble masterpiece that unfolds in four dimensions as you circle around it. Even the text of Dante’s Paradiso, filled with heavenly experiences that the poet himself claimed that his eyes “could not sustain,” has inspired artists from William Blake to Gustave Doré.
One key difference between the above examples and the outputs of generative AI models is the nature of their respective prompts. For Bernini, Blake, and Doré, the words of Ovid and Dante were the prompts that fired their imaginations. For models like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, the best prompts take a distinctly different form than classic literature.”
”TikTok is testing 15 minute video upload limit Previous maximum video length was 10 minutes.”
”With conservative assumptions, US television should lose 24% of inventory over the next four years. With assumptions outlined below, I estimate a reduction in available TV inventory in the United States including linear and connected TV of around 24% between 2023 and 2027, a -6.6% CAGR. All else held equal, this would have a positive effect on pricing that sellers of advertising experience, although because I expect spending to be down on a year over year basis every year going forward, average CPM increases might only rise more slightly, at least if averaged across all TV advertising formats and dayparts.”
The LinkedIn Effect