Status-Q

Many, many years ago, I asked a friend of mine at Microsoft what he was working on, if he was able to tell me.  I’ve always remembered his response.  “I’m part of my company’s obsessive need to always try and play catch-up with Google.”

Well, the FT reported today that Google will soon be launching ‘Bard’, their competitor to ChatGPT, and no doubt many column inches will be written about their relative merits in the next few months.   Microsoft has invested heavily in ChatGPT and is planning to incorporate its output into the Bing search engine.  Perhaps, for once, they may have done a bit of leapfrogging?  

I doubt they’ll hold any advantage for very long: Google have a lot of very smart and very expensive researchers at DeepMind to draw upon, not to mention elsewhere in the company.  But there’s clearly a race on: if people really do want to get responses to their search queries in paragraph format, or even in essay format, then the novelty value might persuade large numbers who have never even tried Bing to give it a go, and perhaps stick with it.  That could make a significant difference.  (It may also spell the death knell for smaller search operations like DuckDuckGo who don’t have access to the same scale of resources.)

If such technologies do indeed become a key part of search results, then two questions immediately come to mind for me.

The first is the general question of attribution.  Google search is currently a way of finding out not so much what Google says, but what other people say… as prioritised by Google.  But you get back a series of citations of other websites, so you know where the answers come from. Even when people ask Google questions of opinion such as “Is the new Doctor Who any good?” — as, to my astonishment, they apparently do rather a lot! — the snippets that they get back are clearly attributed.

What, however, will happen when they ask such questions and get back a paragraph of human-sounding text that has been completely artificially generated?  How will they be able to judge its trustworthiness?  

I suppose one could make an argument that a bot which is gathering knowledge from the whole web may be better able to assess the wisdom of the crowd than one that returns just a subset of others’ individual opinions.  But it may be very hard to understand the origins of any responses given.  And I suspect people will start asking it more important questions. “My husband has done X, Y and Z. Should I divorce him?”

Perhaps each response will come with extensive footnotes and a bibliography.  That would make academics a bit happier, at least!

The second thought that occurred to me is related, and it made me think of my first ever trip to California back in the early 90s.

My hosts kindly took me to see a college football game at the Stanford Cardinals’ Stadium.  For those unfamilar with the scale of American college sports, I should perhaps mention that the old stadium had a seating capacity substantially larger than the current one, which only seats 50,000.  I remember getting very sunburned knees from sitting on the bleachers in the Californian sunshine. Anyway, as the one and only large football-y event I’ve ever attended on either side of the Atlantic, it was an enjoyable and educational experience, followed by a barbecue afterwards on the campus. 

It was also, though, a memorable introduction to the way commercialism was woven into everyday life in America.  The announcer, narrating the game, would say things like “That was an amazing play from Weinberger, and Stanford fans will also want to know about the amazing deals available at Smith’s Lincoln dealership in Menlo Park.”  It was seamless, the same tone of voice, even part of the same sentence as the official commentary. I had come from a country where you had to switch TV channels to get commercials at all, and ads were carefully segregated, in all media, so you couldn’t mistake them from real reporting.  I was shocked.

How, I wonder, will product-placement be incorporated into the chat-style results of future search engines?   And will we be able to tell?  Sponsors could pay to add a very small weighting to the inputs of the ML model that made it very slightly more likely to suggest cruise holidays than hotels, or to bring about very small shifts in political emphases.  Few individuals would ever be able to detect this had happened to them, but what’s the power of a small shift in tone of voice on a particular subject when applied across hundreds of millions of people?

Update: Since my writing of this over breakfast this morning, Microsoft have announced that the new version of Bing incorporating some of the ChatGPT technology is now live! Here’s the BBC’s initial take on it, and you can try it out at bing.com. You may not get access to it very promptly unless you (a) have a Microsoft account and (b) install Microsoft plugins on your browser. And so the fun starts…

ChatGPT is a fun way to procrastinate. Here’s a recent experiment when I was meant to be doing something more important:

I think these are rather better than some earlier proposals?

For those who haven’t been following all the fun activity on Twitter recently, the platform has been going through, shall we say, some challenges!  

For example, Elon Musk, the advocate of complete freedom of speech, has been blocking the accounts of people who even referred to a system that tracked the location of his private jet, despite the fact that it’s based on publicly-available data. He’s particularly got a grudge against journalists, which is ironic since they’re generally the ones who are the most fond of Twitter.

But the latest move is even more amusing.  Musk is clearly concerned about the very significant exodus of Twitter users to platforms such as Mastodon (which is causing mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal to publish How to use Mastodon articles).

In the last few days, people started to notice that any attempts to post a tweet containing a link to a Mastodon account have been blocked. So you can’t directly say on Twitter, ‘In future you can find me on Mastodon here….’, at least not with a link as well.   I had to employ some technical tricks to bypass their checks in one of my test Tweets!  Others have done similar things – Ben Gracewood suggests that you can just make a QR code of your Mastodon link and post that…

Well, Twitter has now published a new official policy on the ‘Promotion of alternative social platforms’ from which the following are excerpts:

We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter.

At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:

Prohibited platforms:

• Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
• 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

People have pointed out that Twitter is quite happy to promote itself, and Twitter content, on its Facebook page, which does rather smack of hypocrisy.  And of course, you can happily link to Twitter content from Mastodon and almost any other system on the net.

So I was delighted to discover that back in June, one of Elon’s tweets contained the following:

It’s great fun watching this — a good pre-Christmas drama worthy of a future movie, no doubt.  In the past, I’ve been willing to smile at most of Musk’s eccentricities and cut him a lot of slack, partly because he has still, in my opinion, managed to do more than any man living to combat climate change.  But there is a certain feeling of Greek tragedy to the last few weeks.

Still, it’s could be easy to read too much into this. Mastodon is growing fast – I think the last figure I saw was over 8M users, but Twitter’s millions are considerably more numerous.  While it’s no longer a hip place to be, it’s not going away any time soon (unless it goes suddenly bankrupt!)    My account there is now approaching 15 years old, and I still have it, though I can certainly imagine that I might not have one by this time next year.

And I wouldn’t have any withdrawal symptoms if it went away.  At the start of the Covid lockdown, I was concerned that I might end up spending too much time on social media, so I used Apple’s ScreenTime facility to limit my combined viewing of Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn on all my devices to a total of 15 mins per day. (I don’t do TikTok, and I deleted my Facebook account years ago after my 2017 New Year’s Resolution was to be Facebook-free and I found life got better as a result, so they were the services that mattered.)  I still have that limit in place, though at present it doesn’t include my new Mastodon apps!

I wonder what 2023 will hold for the world of social media.  Blogs, email and RSS feeds, of course, will continue to operate quite happily, and they at least will certainly still be here as next Christmas approaches.

Update, a couple of hours later:

Wow – interesting things now happening on Elon’s Twitter feed….

The poll has 11 hours to run. Now, it may be largely symbolic, because if he stopped running it, but continued owning it… I wonder, if he stepped down, whether the share price would rise enough for him to be able to sell it within too great a loss?

Anyway, I’m left with the difficult voting choice: if Musk stays, we might end up with a world without Twitter, which I think would probably be a better place.
On the other hand, we’d probably still have a Twitter, but it would be his kind of Twitter, which would be worse…

In general, I think a reversion to the old Twitter would be the best, so I voted for his departure in that hope. There’s something to be said for the devil you know.

The devil being Twitter, in this case. I guess that needs clarification…

Spotted this on Twitter. It’s five years old, but I think it’s great!

And I liked the comment below it by Kevin Leroux:

Marty! You’ve got to get Joseph and Mary to kiss at the Bethlehem Ball tonight or it’s all ruined!

Paul Graham is a writer I’ve long admired.

I remember hearing him speak at one of Tim O’Reilly’s original ‘Foo Camps’ in California, and, in that small group setting, he told us about some research he’d been doing, and was drawing some interesting conclusions – but he had stopped because he realised he’d never be able to publish it.

If it were true, it would have general interest, but he discovered (late in the process) that it would also apply disproportionately to certain ethnic groups and would therefore probably be branded as racist, even though he had had no knowledge of the connection with ethnicity when he started researching it. So he stopped working on it, and turned his mind to other things.

I wonder if he had this in mind when he wrote this excellent essay on the modern concept of heresy.

“A heresy”, he says, “is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that makes some people feel not merely that you’re mistaken, but that you should be punished.”

Here’s an excerpt:

For example, when someone calls a statement “x-ist,” they’re also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That’s one of the reasons they’re used: to end a discussion.

If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they’re admitting to banning the truth. That’s obvious enough that I’d guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it’s easy to show that they’re mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.

The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn’t work that way. The same statement can’t be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.

It’s nicely written, and he very carefully avoids mentioning any specific examples of modern ‘heresies’, because, “I want this essay to work in the future, not just now.”

Worth reading and considering carefully.

Thanks to John Naughton for the link.

I came across a pleasing but unusual usage of a common English word today:

“Mother was urgent that the marriage should take place soon.”

This is a somewhat archaic but perfectly valid sentence. If somebody urges something, they are urgent about it, in the same way that someone who hesitates is hesitant.

But you’ll have to have a pretty good dictionary to find references to that usage; my Concise OED only hints at it, and you have to go to a more substantial version, such as the Shorter OED, to get an actual example of it being used that way.

I know that one of the reasons you read Status-Q is to appear more erudite at evening parties, so I thought you might wish to impress your friends by adopting this turn of phrase.

It came, by the way, from Agatha Christie’s autobiography, which I’ve long considered to be one of her best books. Recommended.

Someone on Mastodon pointed out a useful thing today:

One mile per gallon is exactly the same thing as one furlong per pint.

So if anyone quotes their fuel consumption in furlongs-per-pint, you’ll now know what it means. Pleasingly, this works even in America.

Once you’ve impressed your friends at the pub with that one, you can point out that one mile per gallon is about 3 leagues per firkin.

I like the instructions on a French device I’ve just bought:

1. How to put the battery?

1) Turn the lid of battery’s room counterclockwisely and remove it.
…

If counterclockwisely isn’t a word, I think it should be.