DataDownload: Deepfake melodies & QAnon sinkholes
DataDownload: Deepfake melodies & QAnon sinkholes A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser
Today — we’re thinking about tech. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” said Arthur C. Clark. And it seems like there’s a good deal of magic going on.
OpenAI is singing — amazing and a bit creepy. The QR Code is back, as touchless commerce takes hold. The Guardian writes about our “collective delusion” — as social media turns remarkably anti-social. Target is using an algorithm to schedule workers, and that’s not going well. Slate is using podcast data — in ways that may surprise you.
But also, some artistic work that’s refreshing. The Queens Gambit makes chess into a nail-biting drama. and Levar Burton is reading for adults on a podcast that is sure to calm your nerves.
If the pandemic is getting on your nerves, you’re not alone. MIT and Harvard researchers are measuring the pandemic’s impact on mental health.
So, stay chill — as it gets chilly. And stay safe in these mask-wearing times.
Steve
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org
Steven Rosenbaum
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read ‘It’s the Screams of the Damned!’ the Eerie AI World of Deepfake Music
Listen to a few AI song samples from OpenAI’s Jukebox project and you might come to the conclusion that fully-generated songs have a long way to go before they crawl out of the uncanny valley. But Jukebox is still technically impressive, despite the unnerving quality of its output: “[It] breaks down an audio signal into a set of lexemes of music — a dictionary if you like — at three different layers of time, giving you a set of core fragments that is sufficient to reconstruct the music that was fed in,” says electronic musician, researcher, and academic Matthew Yee-King. Jukebox can then rearrange these fragments into complete “songs”.
But less ambitious software, which focuses on particular elements or use cases such as machine-generated sounds, human-AI collaboration, or customizable compositions for media, is gaining traction. Just this Friday, Shutterstock acquired startup Amper Music, which uses AI to generate melodies based on mood, BPM, and instrumental presets. With hundreds of millions of images and tens of millions of videos, it’s not difficult to see why an original melody generator would snugly fit the company’s business model.
But there’s a legal conundrum here too. Rupert Skellett, head of legal at Beggars Group, “one of the world’s largest, most influential independent label groups,” says there are two separate copyrights with music: “One in the music notation and the lyrics… and a separate one in the sound recording, which is what labels are concerned with. And… [if they’ve created a simulacrum using AI] you’d have no legal action against them in terms of copyright with regards to the sound recording.”
6 min read
Read more How the Pandemic Finally Ushered in the Golden Age of the QR Code
In 1994, DENSO Corporation engineer Hara Masahiro invented the Quick Response, or QR code, before his division was split off into subsidiary Denso Wave. Curiously, Denso Wave received a prestigious award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers last month. So why is an invention that hasn’t been popular in the West for decades, and that’s a quarter-century old, garnering so much attention? For one, you don’t have to touch it, and this has been crucial during the pandemic: “Over the summer, the British government released a contact-tracing app using the technology to keep track of attendees at potential super-spreader events, and later this year, CVS will roll out touchless payment using QR codes at 8,000 of its stores.”
While largely dismissed before 2020 in the West, QR codes have been ubiqutous in Asia: “In China, consumers buy everything, from street-cart jianbing to Swarovski crystals, using quick response-enabled payments. In recent years, QR codes have accounted for a full third of mobile transactions there to the tune of a trillion dollars in overall sales.” Lastly, the tech is more accessible on modern smartphones: Apple’s iOS camera app supports QR code scanning, and on Android 9 and above, Google Lens allows people to scan QR codes.
4 min read
Read More Tech+Media Facebook, QAnon and the World’s Slackening Grip on Reality
QAnon spawned from the dregs of 4chan, with deep roots in pizzagate. A 4chan user with the handle “Q Clearance Patriot” started sharing tidbits of intel around Trump’s counterattack on a malicious, hidden government. But it’s morphed into something much more sinister than an anonymous poster posing as a government insider:
“One fan-produced map of all the ‘revelations’ linked to the group includes references to Julius Caesar, Atlantis and the pharaohs of Egypt in one corner, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and 5G in another, the knights of Malta in a third, and the Fukushima meltdown in a fourth — all tied together with a generous helping of antisemitism, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to hatred of George Soros. QAnon isn’t one conspiracy theory any more: it’s all of them at once.”
Disturbingly, the “collective delusion,” as BuzzFeed now calls it, has metastasized due to social media: “one in four people in Britain now agree with some of the basic conspiracies it has promulgated.” A fifth claim the virus was released as part of a “depopulation plan.” The Guardian’s excellent deep dive explores Facebook’s role in what one fact-checker called the “perfect storm for misinformation,” and the anguish experienced by families with QAnon-obsessed loved ones (r/QAnonCasualties contains some heartbreaking stories).
27 min read Read More Who Am I to Decide When Algorithms Should Make Important Decisions?
Back in July, gig workers at Target-owned grocery delivery app Shipt staged a strike against the company’s algorithm-based compensation and scheduling update. Since the system went live in September, workers have said they were getting lower pay and having to navigate more complicated, unpredictable schedules. The theme isn’t new. Gig app leaders have learned little from the negative aspects of algorithmic management.
AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith Whittaker says we shouldn’t be surprised when those subjected to an algorithmically-driven system are all but ignored. Companies are “beholden to the incentives of those who create them,” as Shipt’s chief communications officer Molly Snyder herself pointed out: “We believe the model we rolled out is the right one for the company.” Whittaker stresses that the issue is tied to the tech industry’s “extraordinary concentration,” and that the people pushing these updates are “poorly positioned to make these types of decisions.”
5 min read Read More ‘We Seized on Podcasts’: How Slate Used Audio as the Foundation of Its First-Party Data Strategy
Back in July, The NY Times senior director of ad platforms Sasha Heroy sat down with Digiday to expand on the Times’ move to first-party data for ad targeting (“ a year ahead of Google’s cut off for third-party cookie use within Chrome”). The publication has already built 45 proprietary audience segments, split into a handful of categories: age, income, business, demographics, and interest.
Now, Slate has started pushing Slate Select, an ad targeting product that lets advertisers reach the publisher’s podcast and site audience via first-party data. “Slate Select’s targeting relies on a mixture of information. In addition to regular reader and listener surveys, Slate gathers data about what its audience consumes on its site, using IBM’s Watson technology to analyze the contents of Slate’s articles and podcasts. That information allows advertisers to target different segments of readers based on a number of basic factors, ranging from their occupation to whether they have children.”
3 min read
Read More What We’re Watching The Queen’s Gambit
The Queen’s Gambit is a seven-episode miniseries that follows orphaned chess prodigy Beth Harmon as she rises in the male-dominated world of competitive chess. Why now? It’s hard to say, but finding a binge-able drama that was captivating and not about current events was amazingly refreshing. The mid-century modern fashion and furniture alone makes it worth watching. But Taylor-Joy’s performance as Beth is remarkable and captivating. Read more here — or just stream away.
Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: The Best Short Fiction, Handpicked by the Best Voice in Podcasting
Introducing Levar Burton Reads: “In every episode, host LeVar Burton (Roots, Reading Rainbow, Star Trek) invites you to take a break from your daily life, and dive into a great story. LeVar’s narration blends with gorgeous soundscapes to bring stories by Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury and more to life.”
Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: The Business of Disinformation
Date: November 17, 2PM-3:30PM EST
At the NYU Data Future Lab’s 90-Minute Tech series, hear from leading experts and innovators in the disinformation field about the state of the market, the business case for fighting disinformation, and the new solutions they’re building. Register Here.
Virtual Event: Intuition and Product Creation by Uber Director of Product
Date: November 16, 11PM EST
Ingrid Bernaudin, Director of Product at Uber, will talk about intuition and product creation, what it’s like to work in this dynamic role and how to get your foot in the door. Register Here. A Deeper Look Using Machine Learning to Track the Pandemic’s Impact on Mental Health
MIT and Harvard researchers say they are able to measure the impact the pandemic has had on mental health… with help from 800k Reddit posts (though we question how stable even “normal” posts are on Reddit). The team noticed that from January to April this year — when the first wave of the pandemic struck — clusters around suicidality and loneliness emerged, “and the amount of posts in these clusters more than doubled during the pandemic as compared to the same months of the preceding year.” The team analyzed 15 subreddits devoted to mental illness, measuring the frequency of words associated with topics like anxiety, death, isolation, and substance abuse, grouping together semantically similar posts.
“The researchers found that while people in most of the support groups began posting about Covid-19 in March, the group devoted to health anxiety started much earlier, in January. However, as the pandemic progressed, the other mental health groups began to closely resemble the health anxiety group, in terms of the language that was most often used. At the same time, the group devoted to personal finance showed the most negative semantic change from January to April 2020, and significantly increased the use of words related to economic stress and negative sentiment.” You can read the study here.
6 min read
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