Friday Reading S14E08

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 I’ve read 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.

The pope has come out against priests using artificial intelligence to write their sermons, but in this opinion piece Margaret Sullivan suggests that journalists may have to learn to live with it.

At Columbia University’s journalism school, a research fellow and I explored the question of how America’s newsrooms were responding to AI. Trying to determine that was like nailing jello to a wall, because the practices – and the thinking about them – were changing at such a rapid pace. Standards-and-practices editors were thoughtfully putting out guidelines to journalists only to find that the technology was outpacing their rulemaking. Publishers and business-side people may have one idea, and old-school journalists quite another. But there’s no denying the impact of AI or its omnipresence.

Read more here: Margaret Sullivan, the Guardian – From scripts to sermons: is AI going to be writing everything soon?

Tom Hewitson wrote on what he learned teaching thousands of people how to use AI and this quote stood out for me:

The biggest predictor of success isn’t technical ability. It’s whether someone treats AI as a skill to be learned rather than a magic box that either works or doesn’t. The people best at using it are the ones who experiment daily and reflect on how to get better results next time. The goal is to get the machines to work for us, not to think for us – that means using it in a proactive, critical and engaged way.

Read more here: Tom Hewitson, the Guardian – I’ve taught thousands of people how to use AI – here’s what I’ve learned

I found producing today’s First Edition about the 30th anniversary of the shooting at Dunblane primary school deeply moving, which is exactly why chatbots helping researchers plot deadly attacks, wishing them ‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’ is so disheartening. These products have really been released into the wild without safeguards, haven’t they?

Meanwhile over at Amazon:

More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions.

Read more here: Varsha Bansal, the Guardian – Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work

I’ve added “regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me” to the opening blurb of Friday Reading because that is what I am trying to do, re-introduce a bit of the slow internet to my world. Polly Hudson sums up why here: I clicked on an Instagram post about a happy dog – and opened a hellish portal:

The lengthy caption on Fido’s joyful, tail-waggy photo unfortunately revealed that he’d just crossed the rainbow bridge. This information was not delivered succinctly, though, meaning I lingered long enough to inform Mark Zuckerberg that this was very much my jam.

Photos of happy couples began to pop up, people I didn’t know or even recognise, which made me curious as to why I was being shown them. Again and again, like a lab rat in an experiment failing to cotton on despite the electric shocks, I read the accompanying words, only to discover one of them was announcing the sad passing of the other.

Read more here: Polly Hudson, the Guardian – I clicked on an Instagram post about a happy dog – and opened a hellish portal

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: snarky memoirs, stylish spaniels and a debut to forget.

Wriggly worm of knowledge and the carp of ignorance illustration: Anaïs Mims.

Guest animal: the random cat that keeps stalking the Thursday quiz and following it home.

The lovely Film is Fabulous folks published this interview with legendary BBC archivist Sue Malden who was the first person to start attempting to locate and catalogue Doctor Who episodes, and the person who first realised so many were missing from the archives.

That interview felt very deliberately timed as only a couple of days later HOLY MOLY THEY FOUND TWO LOST DR WHO EPISODES – both from the early part of William Hartnell story The Daleks’ Master Plan, which I’ve barely ever even read a synopsis of, so it will be like having a brand new story for me when they land on iPlayer next month.

The vast number of overseas human remains held by UK museums is a shameful legacy of colonialism, with many items kept in ways that are sacrilegious, according to MPs and archaeologists.

“We want to at least be able to give them their names back,” says Interpol’s Susan Hitchin, in this harrowing read about the team identifying Europe’s forgotten female murder victims.

I’m inventing a world full of made-up people, who change and shape-shift and disappear and are sometimes reborn; who say stupid things, and then better things, and then lines of pure genius I can’t believe I wrote, and then nothing because they get cut.

Writer Cassie Werber has a new Substack – Fierce Seasons – which she says will feature “thoughts on writing … what makes me happy—like reading, books, and swimming — and what makes me angry or sad.”

For Monocle, Rory Jones and Annelise Maynard have a delightful amble visiting 10 of London’s loveliest book shops with gorgeous accompanying photos.

Have a nostalgic wander through some of the hits and misses of Apple‘s product line over the years with this Chris Stokel-Walker list. Oh iPod, I miss you.

Alexis Petridis is rather underwhelmed by the UK’s Eurovision entry. Judge for yourself by watching the video here: LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER: Eins, Zwei, Drei

I mean, you obviously would have imagined that Diane Morgan’s music taste was impeccable. Here she namechecks The Container Drivers by the Fall as a key tune in her honest playlist.

Nicolaia Rips interviews Grace Ives, whose latest single – Stupid Bitches – has been an earworm for me.

Epic Soundtracks used to be a customer at Reckless Records when I worked there before his untimely death. Michael Hann interviews surviving Swell Maps original Jowe Head about the “serious fun” of being in the very obscure but hugely influential band.

My beloved veteran art-pop brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks are as eloquent as ever in this interview with Forbes magazine as they prepare to do live shows in Japan and the UK supporting their 26th(!) studio album.

I mentioned last week that Keza MacDonald’s favourable review of Poktopia and the prospect of getting Pokémon LeafGreen had finally nudged me into getting a Nintendo Switch 2. Sadly, Nintendo have screwed up the transaction and delivery, and joyously are currently experiencing “technical issues” with their support system which appear to boil down to “customers cannot phone us or email us”. That seems a bit of a rum do for a digital entertainment company in the year of our lord 2026.

I was sorry to see Martin Ling departing from Leyton Orient. He has been our director of football since the club was rescued from cunto that Italian guy in 2017, and taken us to two promotions and two (inevitably) losing appearances at Wembley in the FA Trophy and League One play-off finals. A top man, who also led the club to a promotion as manager back in the day, and has been very open and honest about his mental health struggles. I wish him all the best. It has been a torrid last few months at the club but he will always be a legend. Here is Martin Ling talking about mental health in 2019, in the wake of the tragic sudden loss of Justin Edinburgh.

How I look at it is I have some wires loose in my head and some mornings I have to put them back together a little bit. When I used to say I was strong it would be to deflect people away from really getting into me. Suppress, suppress, suppress. Then I had a mental breakdown. Now I am happy for people to talk about me or to me. I know I can cope. I know I can be there for the people who matter to me.

Then I went to see Leyton Orient away on a Tuesday night and remembered why I love away games on a Tuesday night as we won 2-1.

Iran will, under Fifa’s statutes, face disciplinary action if they withdraw unilaterally, with possible sanctions including a ban from future tournaments.

This is frankly fucked up in response to Iran’s sports minister says football team will not play at 2026 World Cup – imagine Ukraine being punished for pulling out if they had qualified but it was being hosted in Russia?

In scenes that commentators will tell you that nobody wants to see – but which everybody very much enjoys seeing – this is a video of one of the craziest, longest mass brawls I’ve ever seen in a football match. Cruzeiro and Atlético Mineiro eventually picked up 23 red cards between them for this dust-up.

“A Tottenham relegation may just rank as the single most spectacular failure in the history of English football,” writes Jonathan Liew in this excoriation of how the club has been run. It would also, it must be said, be really fucking funny.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:
·  Monday briefing: How are Iranians abroad grappling with loss and uncertainty from afar?
·  Tuesday briefing: Inside the increasingly heated debate about who can – and can’t – vote in the UK
·  Wednesday briefing: From missing billions to nonexistent datacentres, inside Britain’s AI drive
·  Friday briefing: The legacy of the Dunblane massacre, 30 years on

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.