More from @JeremyLittau

Jeremy Littau

@JeremyLittau

Jun 5

1/ I want to share a story about how we used Google Glass in my class 10 years ago, what we learned, and why I have some skepticism (but not total skepticism) about tech you wear on your face ....

2/ I was an early Glass Explorer, ponied up $1500 of university seed funds to try it in my mutlimedia classes. I do this a lot in my classes, as some of you who've followed me here for a while already know. I come at these technologies with play in mind. ...

3/ We did several types of projects to envision use cases

• A daily picture, testing out the camera
• First-person video stories we called Glassumentaries. Like a tennis workout from first person POV

These first two worked well. The glassumentaries were really interesting!

Read 28 tweets

Jeremy Littau

@JeremyLittau

Mar 16

Short thread below. A really silly example of Bing search's chatbot and why I think it's a bit more useful for some things than ChatGPT:

2/x While I was driving yesterday, a podcast referenced the Justin Bieber / Hailey Bieber / Selena Gomez online feud as if we all know what it is. Which I decidedly do not. I don't follow celebrity news.

3/x This is something I just wouldn't care to google. But the reference on the pod was in comparison to something else in the news. So I asked Bing search and got this:

Read 12 tweets

Jeremy Littau

@JeremyLittau

Feb 17

https://twitter.com/Sulliview/status/1626631407282814996

In a perfect world, this would be the end of anyone's ability to trust the network. Journalism is a product built on trust, and you can't trust people saying one thing on camera and then expressing the opposite behind the scenes. Not a one-story problem. It's systemic.

https://twitter.com/Sulliview/status/1626631407282814996

One thing I've been thinking about is that as we've atomized news, it's been harder to create products and experiences that connect those atoms into a structure that enables memory and accountability.

Scroll-by format, the segment format has no memory. It invites lack of memory.

That is, to have accountability you have to be able to connect what someone says one night with last week/month/year. The fast-paced world of cable news and social consumption asks you to move on.

There are archives, yes. People connect dots, yes. But it's not front and center.

Read 7 tweets

Jeremy Littau

@JeremyLittau

Feb 17

First 20 minutes of this week's Hard Fork podcast, where Kevin Roose describes a disorienting conversation with Bing's chatbot, is WILD. But a good discussion humans anthropomorphizing tech, and whether it matters that we're wrong. nyti.ms/3S5kh6Z

Casey Newton made a point that works its way into my classes. Yes we could be wrong about sentience, but if an engineer at Google can misjudge LaMDA, how much more likely is it to happen with a less-aware public? The cultural effect is baked in regardless of the truth of it.

This isn't a shut-it-down argument, but a call for education about what the tech does, how it operates, and how we can better understand it. A chatbot seems so straightforward, but you have to dig to find it's generating based on predictions from consuming human source material.

Read 4 tweets

Jeremy Littau

@JeremyLittau

Jan 7

“CoLLeGe sTUdEnTs LaCk rESiLiENcE” always being thrown about by people who don’t work with actual college students every day. As if we didn’t watch them fight like hell through pandemic learning. Literally nothing asserted here is true.

I usually brush off nonsense like this but it is upsetting how much traction a take about college campus life gets when spouted by people who clearly aren’t immersed in campus life. Critiquing college from a distance is its own grift.

I at least get why B*ris and Sull*vans of the world call college students snowflakes. They profit from blowing it out of proportion for their newsletter readers who are baffled by Millennials/Z calling BS on the world they’re inheriting. But dumping on the youngers is a dead end.

Read 6 tweets