💬 IBP Summer Party and AI Panel Debate - 17 July

AI in journalism & comms: how far is too far? A lively discussion chaired by @andismit.bsky.social‬. Panel: @paulbradshaw.bsky.social‬ @sophiasgaler.bsky.social‬ @mrkennycampbell.bsky.social‬ @bysianharrison.bsky.social‬
Register:

Bizarre thing happened to me yesterday that my teenage self would not believe. I was playing at the gig to celebrate the life of the genius that was Neil Innes. Whilst waiting backstage to go on, Michael Palin sang the lumberjack song to me, in German.

#OnThisDay 3 years ago, @cipr-global.bsky.social’s The AI & Big Data Readiness Report was lauched from our #AIinPR panel. Great research that demonstrated the huge potential of #AI & Big Data for #PR early on-lead by Prof Anne Gregory, Swati Virmani & @andismit.bsky.social cipr.co.uk/CIPR/CIPR/Le...

Interesting. But can we really replicate the behaviors of humans just by using AI agents plus their answers?

I think that's pushing the line of what can be simulated too far, while losing the central point that LLM are just very complex predictors the next word.

🚨 Big news today at the Institute

We are seeking a new lead author for the Digital News Report

Next year’s edition will be the last one led by Nic Newman, who launched the report in 2012. Here’s what the role requires and how to apply
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/reuters...

Back to #Community stuff y'all.
Here's a useful A-Z of Community glossary (free) I created www.michellegoodall.co.uk/insights/onl...
[fun fact: my 1980s vinyl record cases have this pattern]

The growth in this place feels extraordinary. Could be one of the big media stories of the year.

Elon can tweak the algo to promote the dickheads as much as he likes, but he can’t stop (and arguably, will accelerate) people leaving in droves because it’s just not a fun place to hang out anymore.

Network effects work both ways

Just listened to a 10 minute Notebook LLM podcast on my new series The Moderators based on the article I wrote for the BBC website.
It was conversational, if a bit slow, and it included everything I wrote plus a couple of extra bits.
Don't think I'm out of a job quite yet - but it's impressive

🗞️ More and more Times and Sunday Times journalists and staff are joining BlueSky.

We’ll be updating this starter kit as they do so, you should give them a follow

👇

The Lex Fridman interview (@lexfridman.bsky.social) with Amanda Askell at Anthropic yesterday was very interesting on many levels - I had a few thoughts on the back of it - but you’ll have to go off to LinkedIn to read it. Let me know what you think.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/naviga...

Also people are competitive. Data presented at a conference I was at recently showed a significant % of ppl using AI to be *personally* more effective - to get stuff done faster or better than colleagues - and not admitting as much publicly.

Morning, morning.

Thoughts after 24 hours: Twitter will be just fine.

We’ll instead have an ideological imbalance both here and there, with some (myself included) bouncing between, for now. Is Bluesky the ‘left’s’ Truth or can it become peak-era (pre-driven by ideology either way) Twitter?

Worth watching this social sorting that’s going on. The Twitter X-Odus isn’t the only thing spurring Bluesky’s growth by 700k users a week. Threads’ algorithm and user matching is pushing its users to try Bluesky too. Is Threads still growing by 1m a day? I bet it’s now more.

This place is buzzing! Hello if you’ve just joined and found me - I’m the BBC’s technology editor 👋

And new at number one.....

So this is where everyone is 😀