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Lately, Ive been having what I call based-on-a-true story fatigue. I first used that admittedly inelegant phrase in March, when a mini-boom of shows about headlining scandals in relatively recent history premiered in the span of a month, with splashy premises that fizzled on arrival. Those shows Hulus The Dropout, Netflixs Inventing Anna, Showtimes Super Pumped, Apple TVs WeCrashed, Peacocks Joe v Carole varied in quality (The Dropout, on starring Amanda Seyfried as corporate fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, was the only one to transcend mere dramatization and balance entertainment and clarity) and were all weighted by an awkward, often tiresome relationship to truth.

Since then, the number of shows that double as Wikipedia rabbit holes have cascaded into a full true story boom. An incomplete list of shows released this spring that have turned headlines into scripted television: FX on Hulus Under the Banner of Heaven, Hulus The Girl from Plainville, Starzs Gaslit, Showtimes The First Lady, Hulus Pam & Tommy, HBOs Winning Time, Peacocks The Thing About Pam and HBOs The Staircase. Theres not one but two mini-series on the 1980 axe murder of Betty Gore by her friend Candy Montgomery Hulus Candy, which premiered this month and stars Jessica Biel as Montgomery, and an upcoming HBO series from Big Little Lies creator David E Kelley with Elizabeth Olsen.

Without exception, these reality-based shows boast decent production budgets and an embarrassment of riches: prestige casting, extensive costumes with occasional prosthetics, moody scores, the leeway to indulge in multiple timelines over several hours. Theyre almost all well-made, with solid, sometimes showy direction and remarkably committed performances. But they have mostly fallen flat there is, it turns out, a high bar for overcoming the distracting, basic tension of what really happened versus whats on screen, what the real people looked like versus what the actors are doing, and very few of these shows clear it. All spring, with every new release and announcement of yet another installment in the headline-to-series pipeline, Ive found myself asking: why more? And why do these shows, for the most part, pale in comparison to both speculative, unfettered fiction or the real thing?

The timing for this reality-based spring flood mostly boils down to Emmy nomination season the prestige TV version of Decembers Oscar bait and the fact that portraying a real-life figure, particularly a famous one or a tragic one or both, is reliable awards material. See: the success in 2016 of Ryan Murphys The People v OJ Simpson, which arguably heralded the scripted true crime boom (and interest in re-evaluating the 90s) from the connoisseur of the glamorous, celebrity-filled riff on reality. The majority of these spring shows could be classified as true crime some far more violent (Candys axe murder) than others (the theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lees sex tape) which seems like the natural evolution of the true crime documentary boom in the 2010s fueled by streaming platforms with money to burn and viewers to hook.

Though my reaction to real-life, and particularly true crime, stories of late has been generally please, no more, there are numerous good reasons to watch a ripped-from-the-headlines show. They can offer course corrections to outdated narratives, particularly for women (as in last years Impeachment: American Crime Story, made with the cooperation of Monica Lewinsky). The veneer of fiction can maneuver cultural knots too tight for real-life discourse or flesh out existing reporting, as in The Girl from Plainville, which uses daydream sequences to illustrate Michelle Carters capacity for self-delusion. Television offers room to complicate that non-fiction does not; the Under the Banner of Heaven creator Dustin Lance Black, for example, invents a fictional, pious Mormon detective (Andrew Garfields Jeb) who investigates a real double murder by fundamentalist Mormons in 1984 Utah. The investigations toll on his faith in goodness, in obedience, in the church illustrates the cognitive dissonance of religion and the tension of belief and intuition more than allegiance to the facts probably could.

Theres also something baseline compelling about watching an actor take on a known quantity who has not immediately Googled a role to see how the celebrity compares to photos or videos or even loose pop cultural memories of a different real person. That gap can be provocative, teasing out unknown dimensions of the person or layers of the persona; the best, such as Seyfrieds portrayal of Elizabeth Holmes, do both, melded with the ineffable charisma that makes for a crackling screen performance. But it can more often be a distraction, uncanny or unnerving. In almost all of these portrayals, the actor is more conventionally attractive symmetrical, smoothed, adjusted, whatever you want to call it than the real figure, another snag on ones attention. Jared Leto as WeWorks messianic founder Adam Neumann in WeCrashed, for example, nails the Israeli accent, but looks more like Jared Leto having a romp than the 6ft 5in founder.

All of these shows are also dogged by ethical questions of how much creative license to take with true stories, whose perspectives to soften or simplify or shade in, whose facts to privilege. How much responsibility should a show take in crafting the narrative that will almost surely, by the fact of wide availability and the compelling power of fiction, become the default one? (Who cares about the real story behind the early days of Facebook? In the public eye, The Social Network is the only record that matters.)

That, too, drags down a series. Take the recent controversy over Winning Time, the fourth wall-breaking, HBO drama about the Showtime-era Los Angeles Lakers that has drawn the ire of the actual Lakers. Last month, former player, coach and general manager Jerry West accused HBO and producer Adam McKay of character assassination for its depiction of West as a volatile, vindictive alcoholic; the legal letter demanded a retraction from HBO meaning the network would have to say its portrayal is false and threatened a legal case going up to the supreme court. (HBO responded in a statement that the series and its depictions are based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing.)

The real-life context can be messy, contested or just plain confusing; it can undercut a series from the jump. How do we view Pam & Tommy, a show sympathetic to Pamela Andersons traumatic invasion of privacy, when we know she didnt consent to it being revisited? (I couldnt keep watching.) The Girl from Plainville, based on the 2014 texting suicide case in Massachusetts is sensitive, well-made, and loaded with psychological nuance but struggles to overcome the queasy fact that its making watchable entertainment out of the deeply tragic union between two unwell teenagers.

The messiness of competing narratives, of who controls attention, is why The Staircase a meta series about death and an afterlife in media is one of the best of this genre. The limited series from Antonio Campos eschews the impulse to make sense of how a wealthy North Carolina business executive, Toni Collettes Kathy Peterson, died at the base of a staircase at home in 2001. Did she slip and fall? Did her husband Michael (an excellent Colin Firth) kill her? The series is less interested in certainty than sensational attentions ripple effects on a family, the sprawling interpretations of truth, and the construction of narrative; the French documentarians whose 2004 series chronicled Michael Petersons trial and served as a touchstone for many films to come after are characters in the series. The work of picking and choosing which information to include, which to set aside the work any true-story adapter must do becomes part of the story.

This unsettling collage of unanswerable questions is what sucked me in despite fatigue with all this semi-reality. Watching The Staircase is, like any other true crime show, a freighted experience there are Wikipedia searches to do, other reports to watch, long-form articles to read, comparisons to make, first-person testimonials to consider. The show is inconclusive enough curious and critical enough of true crimes attention magnet to make such context fun, an added bonus. But thats the exception. For much of this TV season, the scripted story feels like added weight on the real one.

Originally posted here:
Same old true story: why have TV shows turned into Wikipedia entries? - The Guardian

Here are some missing person cases that are creeping out Buzzfeed users.

Wikipedia links are underlined in the headlines.

One missing persons case that kept me disturbed for days is the Andrew Irvine case. He was a British mountaineer who climbed Mount Everest in 1924 with a fellow Brit, George Mallory, but they never made it back down.

Mallorys body was found 70 years later, but Irvines body was never found. Andrew Irvine is the most heart-wrenching Wikipedia rabbit hole Ive ever fallen into.

Maura Murrays disappearance still bothers me after watching a multi-part Oxygen series about it a couple years ago. I think what gets me is how little information there is to go on how can a person get into a car crash, then just disappear off the face of the Earth and leave barely any clues behind?

I still wonder whether she was murdered or maybe ran off and is living a different life somewhere. Murray was a 21-year-old nursing student who got into a car accident in upstate New Hampshire. The strange thing was, prior to disappearing, shed told professors that she would be taking a week off due to a death in the family. However, her family later told authorities that there had been no death.

He was seen entering a bar, but there was no security footage of him leaving when the night was over Like, HOW CAN THAT HAPPEN?!

Brian was a medical student in Ohio last seen going up an escalator to a popular campus bar, but the video never showed him leaving. Foul play has still not been ruled out.

My first ever missing persons case that triggered my love for true crime was the story of Amy Bradley. She went missing from her cruise ship in the 90s, and there were multiple sightings of her years afterward in different countries, but nobody ever helped her.

There was even a situation in 1999 where a US Navy man visited a brothel overseas and had a woman approach him, begging for help and telling him that her name was Amy Bradley and that she was being held hostage, but he didnt do anything about it for fear of anyone finding out where he was at the time.

Heather Elvis, who was a cosmetology student, mysteriously vanished after shed arrived home from a date. No one ever talks about her or her disappearance.

She went missing in 2013 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and a couple was recently charged with her kidnapping, but shes still never been found. That poor family will never get closure.

Emma Fillipoffs disappearance sent me down a rabbit hole for months. Lots of drama and red flags surrounding her story she disappeared outside of the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, after being seen talking to the police.

Her Wiki page will give you the chills, and if youre into documentaries, theres an episode about her disappearance on the Fifth Estates YouTube channel. If podcasts are more your thing, almost every true crime channel has covered her. I feel so bad for her family theyre still actively looking for her.

The McStay familys disappearance freaked me out. How they could vanish without a trace? I am glad (but in a very melancholy way) it was solved and their extended family got closure, though.

Joseph, his wife, Summer, and their sons, Gianni and Joseph Jr., disappeared from their home in Southern California in February 2010. Their bodies were found three years later in November 2013, over 100 miles north in Victorville, California.

A year later, a man named Charles Chase Merritt the fathers business partner was arrested, tried, and found guilty of brutally murdering the family. He was sentenced to death in January 2020.

The craziest one I know of is from Philly. Richard Petrone and Danielle Imbo were seen leaving the Abilene bar on South Street, and driving in Petrones Dodge Dakota heading back to Imbos house, and then not them or the truck were ever seen again. The rumor was a drug debt had something to do with it, and the lone person of interest killed himself in prison.

This one always stuck with me as someone who used to walk around Myrtle Beach as a teenager, alone, and we were the same age. She was just leaving her hotel and disappeared.

Years later, a prison inmate had told authorities that Drexel had been abducted and killed, but it still hasnt been solved.

The disappearance of Natalee Holloway always gets me. She was a few years older than me when she disappeared, so it felt like something like that can happen to me or someone I know.

Even when I went to Aruba on vacation as an adult (26 years old) with my boyfriend, my parents worried the whole time.

Read more:
10 Wikipedia Pages About Missing People That Are Really Creepy - Twisted Sifter

Molly White has been making stands on principle since her early teens. Now her scrutiny of crypto is earning her national acclaim.

The Washington Post recently profiled White as the cryptocurrency worlds biggest critic. Via her website, Web3 is Going Just Great, White investigates and exposes scams and other questionable practices in the opaque and largely unregulated industry.

Molly White is a gem of Northeastern University, a Northeastern student posted on Reddit, a social media aggregation website, in response to the Post story.

It feels important to me to make information available to people, especially when other groups are trying to present a very different and I think unrealistic story, says White, a 2016 Northeastern graduate in computer science. Especially with crypto, I see a lot of real people being hurt by itpeople who dont have the money that they can lose who were sold the dream of financial freedom, or a ticket out of having to work two jobs, and then getting put in even more desperate situations.

Cryptocurrencies, which can be circulated digitally without government oversight, are vulnerable to volatile price swings as well as unreliable (and sometimes predatory) traders. White devotes her site to web3the blockchain foundation for cryptocurrenciesin recognition that everyday people are being exploited by outlandish investment schemes.

It feels like, as someone who is able and willing to do the research, that I have an obligation to do it, she says.

Born and raised in Maine, White was drawn to Northeastern by the promise of co-ops. She participated in two of them at HubSpot in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leading to six years of full-time employment as a software engineer before she left the company last month.

She began developing an online presence in her early teens as an editor and writer at Wikipediafirst about music, and later in praise of women scientists.

I discovered that anyone could edit Wikipedia when I was 13, White says. I have this sort of weird brain: I really enjoy documenting and archiving and collecting information. And I also have always been very passionate about free and open knowledge and access to information. I became a pretty active editor in high school and then continued to do it through college and afterwards.

After the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, Whites focus shifted to the alt-right, which exposed her to online vitriol and prepared her for the blowback that she has endured more recently from the crypto industry. She says she experienced online harassment as a result.

Its unpleasant sometimes, she says. Theres also a gender aspecteven before I started to edit in those topic areasof being a visible woman on the internet with opinions that tended to draw a fair amount of attacks. So I wish it was different.

She has found that those attacks have strengthened her resolve.

Im a very stubborn person by nature, she says. Being harassed online, or targeted in some ways, tends to make me angry that its happening, but also more determined to stick with it. I do what I can to minimize it and to protect myself and my family, but it feels important to continue doing what Im doingeven more so when there are people who try to stop it.

Her resilience is a family trait of which she is proud.

It was not a surprise to my family to have another stubborn daughter, White says, laughing.

White sees her efforts as part of a larger movement.

How can we move the web in a better direction? she asks. I think a lot of people look at me and think shes a crypto critic, she wants to stop crypto, she wants to tamp [innovation] down.

But White says she shares a lot of the same goals as some of the people who are working in the web3 spacefreedoms that include access to information and online communities around shared goals.

I worry that crypto and web3 are moving us in the opposite directionof limiting access to information and to communities, and financializing a lot of the interactions that we have online, she says. My goal is to open the web and make it a better place. Thats really the drive more than the hope to stop crypto.

Soon, she says, she will renew her less-famous career as a software engineer because writing software is my favorite thing.

But shell continue to watch over the crypto industry on behalf of those who are being exploited by it.

I just try to keep doing what I feel is impactful and helpful, White says. I imagine that will continue to be the goal, regardless of what shape it takes at any given point.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

See the rest here:
'Gem of Northeastern,' Molly White Takes on Crypto - News @ Northeastern - Northeastern University

An artificial intelligence program has developed its own language and no one can understand it.

OpenAI is anartificial intelligencesystems developer their programs are fantastic examples of super-computing but there are quirks.

DALLE-E2 isOpenAIs latest AI system it can generate realistic or artistic images from user-entered text descriptions.

DALLE-E2 represents a milestone in machine learning OpenAIs site says the program learned the relationship between images and the text used to describe them.

A DALLE-E2 demonstration includesinteractive keywordsfor visiting users to play with and generate images toggling different keywords will result in different images, styles, and subjects.

But the system has one strange behavior itswritingits own language of random arrangements of letters, and researchers dont know why.

Giannis Daras, a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Texas, published aTwitter threaddetailing DALLE-E2s unexplained new language.

Daras told DALLE-E2 to create an image of farmers talking about vegetables and the program did so, but the farmers speech read vicootes some unknown AI word.

Darasfedvicootes back into the DALLE-E2 system and got back pictures of vegetables.

We then feed the words: Apoploe vesrreaitars and we get birds. Daras wrote on Twitter.

It seems that the farmers are talking about birds, messing with their vegetables!

Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update.

Daras and a co-author have written apaperon DALLE-E2s hidden vocabulary.

They acknowledge that telling DALLE-E2 to generate images of words the command an image of the word airplane is Daras example normally results in DALLE-E2 spitting out gibberish text.

When plugged back into DALLE-E2, that gibberish text will result in images of airplanes which says something about the way DALLE-E2 talks to and thinks of itself.

Some AI researchers argued that DALLE-E2s gibberish text is random noise.

Hopefully, we dont come to find the DALLE-E2s second language was a security flaw that needed patching after its too late.

This article originally appeared onThe Sunand was reproduced here with permission.

Read this article:
Artificial intelligence spotted inventing its own creepy language - New York Post

Welcome to the age of blended workforces, where intelligent machines and humans combine to accelerate business success.

Human Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Why Finding The Right Balance Is Key To Success

In short, now that we have increasingly capable robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of taking on tasks that were previously the sole domain of humans its easier than ever for organizations to leverage intelligent machines. But this leaves employers with some major questions to answer: how do we find the right balance between intelligent machines and human intelligence? What roles should be given over to machines? And which roles are best suited to humans?

The first step: Understanding what machines can do

Particularly in traditional companies, business leaders often arent up to speed on the sheer range of tasks that todays AIs and intelligent robots can take on. (In fact, I spend a lot of time educating executives in this area.) This knowledge is key to finding the right balance between humans and machines in your organization.

Some of the things AIs and AI-enabled robots can do are pretty mind-blowing. For example, AIs can now read, write, see, speak and even understand emotions. While this sounds impressive, AIs are, for the most part, taking one type of input (be it visual data, written data, or whatever) and generating a particular output, as programmed. Once you understand this basic input-to-output idea, theres potential to automate all sorts of tasks that follow this same model, such as scanning security videos for suspicious behavior, moderating content online, answering simple customer inquiries, entering data, and maintaining bookkeeping records, and so on.

As Stanford professor Andrew NG puts it, If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future. In other words, human jobs that are built on some sort of input-to-output scenario are very likely to be automated in the future.

So what will happen to human workers?

In light of this incoming wave of automation, the work of humans will be affected in three key ways:

Displacement of human jobs. According to the World Economic Forums Future of Jobs Report 2020, 85 million jobs may be displaced by automation by 2025 truly a staggering figure. Naturally, this creates a lot of fear around automation. But while many jobs will be displaced, its important to note that even more jobs will be augmented or created because of technology adoption. Which brings us to

Augmentation of human jobs. Here, many jobs will be changed in some way by automation. According to the WEF, by 2025, the time spent on current tasks at work by humans and machines will be equal. This means employers must find the perfect balance between those tasks done by humans and those done by machines. To put it another way, we need to ensure the work given to machines is best suited to machines, and the work given to humans is best suited to humans (so humans dont end up feeling like machines).

Addition of new human jobs. Finally, new jobs will arise that previously did not exist. While the WEF estimates that 85 million jobs may be displaced, it also estimates that 97 million new roles may emerge roles that are better adapted to the new division of labor between humans and machines. These new human roles are likely to rely on a slightly different set of skills and capabilities, compared to those skills that have traditionally been prioritized in the past.

All this means employers have a responsibility to equip their workforces with the skills needed for the fourth industrial revolution. What sort of skills are we talking about? Well, with machines taking on more of the easily automated input-to-output work, its the inherently human skills that will become more and more valuable in the workplace. Things like empathy, creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, communication, and complex decision making, to name just a few.

Responsible automation in practice

Stitch Fix is a fashion subscription box that uses AI to pick out clothes that customers will love. But the company doesnt just rely on AI to do this; its the perfect blend of AI and human stylists that makes the service so impressive.

At Stitch Fix, machines do the initial work of crunching through enormous amounts of data and evaluating the likelihood of a customer loving a particular style, based on the customers information, preferences and previous choices. Then a human stylist finalizes the selection and writes a personal note advising the client on how to style the items.

For me, this is a fantastic example of getting the best out of both machines and humans, and its something many organizations could learn from. This perfect symbiosis between intelligent machines and capable humans is referred to by automation pioneers Faethm as responsible automation. Faethm is on a mission to ensure automation is done in a way that doesnt leave humans behind, and the companys approach involves breaking jobs down into task fractions to see what can and cant be automated. Done this way, automation at least according to Faethm doesnt have to result in job losses. Instead, humans transition to more rewarding tasks.

The key takeaway here is that organizations must start to identify the tasks that are better suited to machines so that those tasks can be automated, leaving humans to do the more complex, rewarding work. And on top of this, employers must equip their workforces with the skills that will be essential for success in the 21st century.

To stay on top of the latest business and tech trends, subscribe to my newsletter and check out my books, Business Trends in Practice: The 25+ Trends That are Redefining Organizations, which has just won the Business Book of the Year 2022 award, and my new book Future Skills: The 20 skills and competencies everyone needs to succeed in a digital world. And of course, you can follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube and explore my website for more content.

Originally posted here:
Human Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Why Finding The Right Balance Is Key To Success - Forbes