Species Awareness Index, Reddit, AI-Generated Content, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, May 5, 2023

NEW RESOURCES

Natural History Museum: Monitoring changes in Wikipedia pageviews could help save wildlife. ” Monitoring changes in how people view the natural world could prove invaluable in gaining support for tackling the biodiversity crisis. Many current metrics that monitor these changes are not published in real-time, often due to a lack of resources…. But now researchers have developed a new tool called the Species Awareness Index (SAI), which can track the real-time rate of change in online biodiversity awareness. The index looks at the monthly change in average daily page views for around 40,000 species across 10 of the most popular Wikipedia languages.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Reddit makes easier to share and view linked posts on social media sites. “Admitting that ‘we didn’t make it easy to’ share posts on other social media platforms, Reddit has announced that it’s rolling out new features to fix that issue. Those include an updated “shared link” preview for text posts shared via messaging services, new sharing for Instagram Stories, one-tap screenshot sharing and more.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: AI-written content isn’t the web’s future. It’s already here . “Generative AI tools have captured the world’s attention since ChatGPT’s November release. Yet a raft of online publishers have been using automated writing tools based on ChatGPT’s predecessors, GPT-2 and GPT-3, for years. That experience shows that a world in which AI creations mingle freely and sometimes imperceptibly with human work isn’t speculative; it’s flourishing in plain sight on Amazon product pages and in Google search results.”

The Tablet: Church Must Protect Its Huge Audiovisual Archives, Media Assets, Pope Says. “There is real ‘cultural urgency’ for the entire Catholic Church to preserve its audiovisual, documentary and other media archives and assets, Pope Francis said. Even recently created materials are ‘a fragile asset that require constant care,’ he wrote.”

College of the Holy Cross: Holy Cross Associate Professor: Poetry More Accessible Today Thanks to Technology. “Technology continues to change the way humans live, communicate and even write, the latter thanks to ChatGPT, the news-making artificial intelligence natural language processing tool. And while AI and technology advances like ChatGPT could appear as a threat to literature and its works, the opposite is true, according to poet Oliver de la Paz, associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross and poet laureate for the city of Worcester. Technology has led to the democratization of poetry’s accessibility, he said, not its demise, and should be embraced for the opportunities it affords artists to more broadly share their work.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: TikTok Tracked Users Who Watched Gay Content, Prompting Employee Complaints. “TikTok doesn’t ask users to disclose their sexual orientation, but it cataloged videos users watched under topics such as LGBT, short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the former employees said. The collection of information, which could be viewed by some employees through a dashboard, included a set of affiliated users who watched those videos, and their ID numbers, they said.”

Smart Cities Dive: Dallas ransomware attack causes critical service outages. “Dallas, the ninth-most populated city in the U.S., is responding and attempting to recover from a ransomware attack that shut down multiple critical systems, including websites for the police department and city hall. The city continues to receive and dispatch emergency 911 calls, and service from police and fire remain unaffected, Dallas said in a statement issued Wednesday night.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Notre Dame News: Companies hide negative news by issuing unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings, study shows . “To distract investors from bad news, companies strategically issue unrelated press releases on the same day they file negative news with the SEC via Form 8-K, according to a new study from the University of Notre Dame. Form 8-K is the report publicly traded companies must file with the SEC between quarterly reports to notify shareholders of any major events. Sometimes the news is positive, sometimes it’s negative.”

Nationwide Children’s: Survey: Half of Parents Believe Their Children’s Mental Health Suffered Due to Social Media during the Past Year. “According to a new national survey conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of The On Our Sleeves Movement For Children’s Mental Health, half (50%) of parents of children younger than 18 feel their child(ren)’s mental health has suffered during the past 12 months because of social media use.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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GPT’s reaction to this article:

The article discusses a new tool called the Species Awareness Index (SAI), which can track the real-time rate of change in online biodiversity awareness. This tool could prove invaluable in gaining support for tackling the biodiversity crisis. The article also talks about Reddit’s new features that make it easier to share and view linked posts on social media sites. It also highlights the use of AI-written content by online publishers and the need for the Catholic Church to preserve its audiovisual, documentary, and other media archives and assets. Additionally, the article discusses the issue of TikTok tracking users who watched gay content, causing employee complaints, and the recent ransomware attack on Dallas. Finally, it talks about a study from the University of Notre Dame that shows how companies strategically issue unrelated press releases on the same day they file negative news with the SEC via Form 8-K to distract investors from bad news. The article also highlights a new national survey that shows how half of parents believe their children’s mental health suffered due to social media during the past year.