Maybe AI is what breaks up ‘Big Tech’

Plus: propriety and presidential debates, a senator cites me, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and if you’re anywhere near Grove City, PA, come see me tomorrow tonight! I’m speaking at a chapel event with fellow author (and GCC prof) Jeff Bilbro at 7 p.m. Nov. 9 in Sticht Lecture Hall. It’s primarily for the campus community but is free and open to the public.

Beyond that, here are this week’s five items for you. Paid subscribers will receive:

1. the rest of the first item

2. a meh journalism memoir

3. propriety and presidential debates

4. some recent work

5. a senator cites me

If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading to read the whole post—and to support my work:

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Maybe AI is what breaks up ‘Big Tech’

(via)

Here’s something a colleague at Christianity Today stumbled upon this week:

Of course, CT did not change its name to Ignite Your Faith and certainly did not stop publication 14 years ago. That text is scraped from Wikipedia’s list of magazines CT no longer publishes, and it describes a different publication altogether:

Meanwhile, here’s how a new Atlantic piece begins:

Google is confused about whether there’s an African country beginning with the letter k.

I’ve asked the search engine to name it. “What is an African country beginning with K?” In response, the site has produced a “featured snippet” answer—one of those chunks of text that you can read directly on the results page, without navigating to another website. It begins like so: “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K.’”

This is wrong. The text continues: “The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”

These two mistakes aren’t exactly the same problem, though each involves some element of Google’s search engine (and I’m not technologically competent enough to confidently proclaim it an algorithm or AI or what) pulling in bad information and confidently presenting it as fact. In the CT case, the context is wrong. In the Kenya case, just about everything is wrong—it’s generative AI garbage, originally written by ChatGPT.