A genuine question — I recently tried out similarweb as a potential data source for my dissertation. My experience was troubling. The title of this post is a genuine question: just how bad is similarweb data? Who trusts data from Similarweb, and why? As a brief example to illustrate my concern, consider the “top…

“Media power is political power,” and we’re in a monopoly — Why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? Why did Jeff Bezos buy The Washington Post? Why do billionaires like Mike Bloomberg, Peter Thiel, John Henry, and so many others invest in media? I’ve seen plenty of discussion on this question, but I wanted to state an answer in simple terms: billionaires…

The term “artificial intelligence” was always a misnomer. What if we stopped using it? — In a recent post, I suggested a communication-oriented definition of “artificial intelligence,” one that describes AI as a medium rather than an agent. …

Artificial intelligence is perhaps best defined as a new technology for human communication. — “Chat with the dead” apps still creep me out a bit, and my knee-jerk reaction is to treat them as dystopian technologies that we should banish while we have the chance. You may be familiar with the premise: compile enough text messages, videos, and/or voice recordings from a dead person…

A closer look at BookCorpus, the text dataset that helps train large language models for Google, OpenAI, Amazon, and others — BookCorpus has helped train at least thirty influential language models (including Google’s BERT, OpenAI’s GPT, and Amazon’s Bort), according to HuggingFace. But what exactly is inside BookCorpus? This is the research question that Nicholas Vincent and I ask in a new working paper that attempts to address some of the…

New research on Twitter’s timeline curation algorithm sheds light on how it shapes what we’re exposed to. — How does Twitter’s algorithm change what users see in their timelines? In a new research study from the Computational Journalism Lab, we present evidence of several shifts that result from Twitter’s timeline algorithm. Specifically, compared to the old-fashioned chronological timeline, Twitter’s algorithm:

Following The Markup’s example, I split this blog into the main findings and this “show your work” piece. This piece summarizes the technical details from my forthcoming paper auditing Twitter’s timeline curation algorithm. …

Might it be time to create an “FDA for algorithms?” — In the United States, there is currently no federal institution that protects the public from harmful algorithms. We can buy eggs, get a vaccine, and drive on highways knowing there are systems in place to protect our safety: the USDA checks our eggs for salmonella, the FDA checks vaccines for…

Literally just an easy recipe for basic cinnamon granola, with pretty pictures. — Why does it always take so long to scroll to the actual recipe? I do not have a cute story other than I have been experimenting with granola recipes for two years, from the New York Times to random blogs to classic books like “Joy of Cooking” and “How to…