Friday Reading S14E11

A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

Last week a Friday Reading subscriber messaged me to suggest “the underlying theme for me, was this all adds evidence to the claim, that we just can’t have nice things like, the internet, train travel for all, and fallible human-created chatbots are ruining everything for all humans before our eyes”. I’m not sure this week’s selection of stories is going to help that impression – if anything, it rather reinforces it.

It is such a staple of sci-fi that it seems inevitable some sort of headworn camera/HUD combo will eventually capture the market. Not sure it will be Meta’s offering though, judging from this highly entertaining read from Elle Hunt:

“Not only do I feel creepy wearing them, but they also lead me to think like a creep. When I see a stranger walking her lookalike dog, and when I run into an ex for the first time in years, both times I have the fleeting thought: I wish I’d been recording. I’m perturbed by how quickly my initial discomfort passes and the glasses become second nature. Just having a covert camera makes me want to use it, the possibilities of the tech overriding my better judgment and even basic decency.”

Read more here: Elle Hunt, The Guardian – I wore Meta’s smartglasses for a month – and it left me feeling like a creep

You can now buy an AI version of your lost loved one. But should you?

“‘Deadbots,’ as these posthumous AI creations are known, promise to replace the dead, and the way they are remembered. This raises plenty of ethical issues, not least the extent to which turning deadbots into marketable products will rely on exploiting people in mourning. But perhaps the biggest question is how such a product might shift our experience of personal grief and collective memory. Is grief merely a painful human shortcoming that we haven’t learned to optimize our way out of yet, or does it have a purpose?”

Read more here: Charley Burlock, The Atlantic – The AI companies trying to make grief obsolete

Be warned – the details in this are almost unthinkable, but Kim Devins talks to Anna Moore about the murder of Bianca Devins (pictured above), whose dead and mutilated body became memeified on the darkest corners of the internet.

“Brutal, bloodied images of Bianca’s body were posted on various platforms, with more captions (‘Sorry fuckers, you’re going to have to find somebody else to orbit’). The killer spray-painted a message on the ground beside his parked car (‘May you never forget me’), called the police, stabbed himself in the neck, took selfies, made more posts. In the ambulance, he asked how many news channels were covering the story. ‘Everything he did was for maximum attention,’ says Devins”

Read more here: Anna Moore, The Guardian – Her daughter was murdered seven years ago. Why are images of the crime still on social media?

“Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.”

Read more here: Claire Woodcock, 404 Media – ‘Blockade’: The right is using AI content scanners to try to supercharge book banning

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

I was very active on the quiz front this week. First off, after MattGPT Goodwin came under some fire for the apparent use of AI in “his” book, I wrote this quiz about mangled quotations: Quotations quiz – can you spot what’s Shakespeare, Cantona or chatbot?

I also co-wrote with Dan Milmo this quiz looking at some of Apple’s hits, misses and milestones during the computer company’s five decades of history: Apple at 50 quiz – top sellers, turkeys and turtlenecks.

And of course no week is complete without the Guardian Thursday news quiz: daring dogs, delinquent capybaras and far too many bananas. Turner was this week’s guest canine.

An in-depth look for i-D magazine by Nicolaia Rips into – not to put too fine a point on it – are Gen Z fucking? It makes me glad my formative dating years were all strictly offline.

Also on a sex tip, Charlotte Jansen reviews a Dean Sameshima show of photographs of extreme queer LA sex clubs hidden in plain sight.

Not entirely sure it would suit me but Steph Pomphrey visited Svalbard in Norway to cold camp and sleep on ice at the edge of a steadily warming world. I believe god gave us houses for a reason.

Keith Stuart makes me feel sad I did not attend the Friday Live celebration of video game play and performance at the V&A, where, he says, players get to envisage games in a different way, placed between renaissance paintings and baroque silverware.

“Veteran event curator and game designer V Buckenham, who was involved in the evening’s Car Boot Casino installation – a collection of new card-based bluffing games – sees these spaces as a virtuous circle: players get to envisage games in a different way, while non-gamers may have their expectations about the medium challenged, and developers get a lot out of it too: ‘There’s an inherent excitement in running your stupid game about sausages next to a hand-carved mantelpiece that’s hundreds of years old. Or improvising algorave music and visuals under a Chihuly [sculpture].’”

Read more here: Keith Stuart, The Guardian – Pixels and paintings: video games return to the V&A

At the second attempt it looks like Eurovision is finally going to expand into Asia, with Bangkok hosting the inaugural, and slightly clumsily titled, Eurovision song contest Asia in November.

From the life comes at you fast files: the official Paul McCartney Reddit account appeared to have been temporarily banned from the Paul McCartney subreddit, which was how I found out Paul McCartney even had a Reddit presence.

I’ve written a lot already about the recently rediscovered missing episodes of Doctor Who – and now they have been published on iPlayer for everybody in the UK to enjoy, I have written my Guardian episode-by-episode recap of them.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:

·  Tuesday briefing: How to make sense of England’s local elections campaigns
·  Friday briefing: Why does your Easter egg feel smaller? Because it is

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.