Content Aware media news: September 21, 2023

Publishing masterclasses, AI vs the unions, authors vs AI - all in Content Aware this week.

Published: 09:05, 22 September 2023

Publishing Masterclasses: thank you
A huge thank you to the very many who attended our Modern Media & Publishing Technology Masterclasses event in London this week, hosted by AWS at the Amazon HQ and in conjunction with front-end gurus Vercel.

The event was an equal mix of conference and conferring: world-class guest speakers shed light on complex topics such as micro front-ends (Luca Mezzalira), future-proofing your architecture (Philip Fitzsimons), ground-up overhauls of massive publishing operations (Andrew Macharg), and utilising front-end teams and tech better to speed product iteration (Ben Seymour), while between sessions delegates got plentiful time to mix and mingle with peers similarly expert in solving classic publishing problems.

Attendees also got a sneak-peak of an imminent GPP platform feature from our CEO Denis Haman which leverages the best of the trustworthy AI LLMs and tools to speed editorial workflows and manage image libraries in a way which publishers can actually benefit from. Contact us to know more.

We plan other such events in the future in locations worldwide, so keep an eye open for further dates and themes, or drop us a line to be kept in the loop.
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Superstar pens sharpened for OpenAI
George RR Martin and John Grisham have joined other prominent authors in joining an action to sue OpenAI in the US. Their filing doesn't mince words, saying that ChatGPT is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale” and calling out creators OpenAI for "flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights".
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Autocomplete disaster
Negative keywords associated by search autocomplete can damage your brand's reputation. How do you do the housekeeping to stop that happening?
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AI across the picket lines
Actors and writers in the US are already on strike over - amongst other things - the use of AI technologies in film and TV productions. Will journalists be next?
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Time running out to nominate for BJA
Got your entries in for the British Journalism Awards yet? Get a wriggle on if not: you have a week to enter for the event which takes place on Thursday 14th December 2023 in London. Last year saw 900 entrants and 500+ attendees of the journalistically star-studded event. It's the only major set of UK journalism awards which is open to all Print, Broadcast, and Online media.
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The digital town square is closed for redevelopment
Once Facebook and other platforms showed us that the "digital town square" often had a great deal of rotten fruit and even more rotten insults thrown across it, the idea of any civic virtue as a guiding principle in social media was dropped quicker than a radioactive watermelon.
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Corbidge comments on... can WordPress afford to alienate its massive community?
A stray tweet implying for-profit WordPress.com wasn't dealing fairly with community plugin developers points to an operational paradox at the heart of the popular system.
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Blocking crawl to be kind
Another round-up of which major sites are now blocking AI training crawlers, and which still aren't. Blockees continue to be in the minority, although their number grows by the week.
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Runway extensions
Some of the "legacy runways" publishers use to keep themselves in business are going to have to serve their purpose for a bit longer than ideal, to say the least.
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First bite of the Apple
Apple introduced the first Graphical User Interface into desktop computing. Such was the impact that some academics decided students' work was suffering as a result, and urged the superiority of the Command Line interface. Yes, they really did.
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