4 Press releases and popular magazines
One of the more common sources of information you will see regularly are press releases from commercial companies, often picked up in the popular press. This information can be very helpful in keeping up to date with what products or services are being launched, but it is important to remember that a company has a product to sell. This can lead to them ensuring any information has a positive spin put on it, or that negative aspects are underplayed.
One way of keeping up to date with commercial developments is to subscribe to the news coming from specific companies. For example, OpenAI is a world-leading generative AI company, with a YouTube channel that you can subscribe to, allowing you to keep up with the innovations they are developing.
However, maintaining an interest in all the individual commercial companies producing GenAI tools would be incredibly time-consuming. A different approach would be to keep an eye on commercial trade shows. For example, CES (formerly the Consumer Electronics Show) is an excellent place to explore what companies are developing for consumers. It is worth remembering that at these events, companies will be presenting the best interpretation of their innovations, which may not exactly match with how those innovations will work once they are commercialised.
Often mainstream news providers will send reporters to these events and provide analysis of the exhibitions. For example, this BBC report from CES 2024 discusses whether the hype of AI is leading to nonsense products.
Organisations like Association for Computing Machinery have great resources and there are a host of online technology magazines – such as ArsTechnica, WIRED, and techRadar – that produce articles by journalists who have some technical expertise. Substack and LinkedIn have lots of content, people and organisations you can follow who are writing about AI and law, as well as organisations like Thomson Reuters who provide reports and insights on how AI is impacting the profession and the legal it insider who inform on GenAI, AI and data analytics.
AI everywhere
Watch this 14-minute video recorded in 2023 which talks about the possibility of using AI everywhere.
Consider the following points as you watch the video:
- Why has this information been published?
- What is the evidence to support this?
- Is there a different interpretation of the evidence?
- What am I not being told?
- What are the implications of this?
- Does the source of the information have any vested interests or biases?
You might find it useful to do an Internet search about the company Humane and the speaker, cofounder Imran Chaudhri concentrating on more recent events.
Make some notes in the box below.
Discussion
Do you think this is good AI? Is this a Ted Talk about the future of AI or is this about promoting the development of a product and an organisation. Having considered the questions above you might want to read this article The Humane AI, the year's biggest AI flop, has a silver lining | Laptop Mag
3 Sources of information
