Searching for the Long Tail

Hello all. Welcome to Public Media Innovators Weekly! This week we’ve got some musings on video game distribution, a diatribe against the choices older people make in video games, some quick hits from Adobe Max, a new game from the NYT, and a return to the topic of deepfakes.

But First…

It was great to see so many of you at our “3rd Thursday” webinar last week about building public media-worthy experiences in Fortnite. You can see the transcript and the chat record on our PMI PLC events page. And the recording will be there as well, once it’s posted. In the meantime, our main guest for the event, Jason Cooper has generously agreed to field any follow-on queries from the webinar, and you can reach him at: jason@horizonvp.com

For November webinar, we’ll be hosting a conversation with our fellow NETA Peer Learning communities on how different disciplines within public media (Content, Marketing, Education, Outreach ad Engagement, and Cyber security) are using or reacting to the rise of generative AI in society. Look for more info and a registration link, next week.

Searching for the Long Tail

You may recall that last month the Nebraska Public Media Labs team launched our first video game, Civics Scribble. As the production team has been pouring over data and making small refinements to the user experience, I’ve thinking about the problems of discoverability and distribution. We designed the game to be ‘made in Nebraska, shared with the world.’ But getting it to the world is not any easier in the video game space than it is in social media (where at least you have an algorithm to feel like you’re…uh…gaming).

I was in the Indianapolis airport last week, where they have a little exhibit on Kurt Vonnegut in Terminal A. It reminded me of his “get a gang” advice for dealing with difficult times. Put another way, ‘we are stronger together.’ So, as we all start venturing into the arena general audience gaming, I think we need to look towards ways we can share games through each other’s organizations. I’m thinking a bit out loud here, but there’s a distribution model for games and I just haven’t cracked it yet.

Suffice to say, we are working on making Civics Scribble available to your stations’ websites. So, if you are interested in having a general audience, civics-oriented video game on your station’s website, please let me know.

Weakly Weekly

Lastly, I’m wrapping up a month of near non-stop travel with a visit to Lincoln, NE, as I type this. The travel has made it difficult to live up to the “weekly” in this newsletter’s title. But I expect to get back on cadence with some time off the road. Just one more trip this year, so if you’re going to APT’s Fall Marketplace in Cleveland, maybe I’ll see you there!

Okay, on to the links….

Focus…

Why Do Older People Waste Their Time Playing Dumb Phone Games? (Joel Stein - Wall Street Journal ($)) - I usually try to avoid sharing stories behind paywalls but this lifestyle essay is an exception. There are two points here I want to stress. First, when I talk with folks in the system about video games many latch onto the potential for games to woo younger audiences. And yes, that is a possibility. But this serves as evidence that older people want to play video games as well, and a public media strategy for games should have 'lifelong play' as one of its core values. The second point is that this game (which, I haven't played) sounds like more than a little bread & circus. What if public media could serve these audiences with something fun and engaging, but less ephemeral than the game upon which Stein focuses his get-off-my-lawn ire.

Learn…

AI-Driven Audio for Storytelling & Content Creation (Davar Ardalan - TulipAI) - Explore AI-driven audio for storytelling, content creation, and historical reenactments. Enhance sound quality and create multilingual, ethical, and culturally rich content with instructors with experience at NPR, Nat Geo, and Drexel University.

Think…

Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better (Dario Amodei) - Last week I offered up Sam Altman's current thoughts on why AI matters (and thoughts from Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, as well). Tis the season, I guess, as the head of Anthropic (makers of the Claude chatbot) weighs-in. Fair warning, this is a long read (I’m listening to it while I travel and it clocks in at 1 hour and 24 minutes in the ElevenRead app), but Amodei makes a conscious effort to avoid many of the pitfalls that come with these types of screeds.

Prompts are so last month; Welcome to the Controls Era (Andy Stout - Red Shark News) - Adobe Max was last week, and I'll more pieces with reactions next week, but this was one of the pieces that stood out to me.

Know…

Millions of People Are Using Abusive AI ‘Nudify’ Bots on Telegram (Matt Burgess - Wired) - Although I've been mentioning this issue during our panel at NETA and my talk for the PBS Producers Academy, we haven't had any articles about deepfakes here. So, time again to stress, the vast majority of deepfakes are targeting women and an act of violence against women.

Spitting Images: Tracking Deepfakes and Generative AI in Elections (Eric Rannestad Studio and Brooke Tanner - GMF Technology via Github) - Interesting rendering of data, though I'd say this is by no means comprehensive. —See also, Rest of the World's 2024 Elections AI Tracker

The New York Times is testing a new puzzle called Zorse (Marta Biino & Max Tani - Semafor) - Sadly, this one is only being tested on Canadians right now, but hopefully it will be coming to the US soon. But it does give me the chance to reinforce how possible it is to be a provider of high quality journalism and high-quality games. Games are a sector of the media ecosystem in which public media should also stake a claim.

‘This is a game changer’: Runway releases new AI facial expression motion capture feature Act-One (Carl Franzen - Venture Beat) - Interesting development here. Adobe has had similar tech for animation for a while, but Runway is leveling it up.

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning (Dan Milmo - The Guardian) - I'm sympathetic, but also think this is a solvable problem. It's also normal for a seismic shift in technology like this. Expect more letters like this is the coming months.

Gen AI: Friend or foe to creatives? An Adobe MAX interview (David Winter - Red Shark News) - Of course, one must consider the source, but here's a different take on the tension between the creative industries and generative AI from the piece above.

Meta Confirms Quest Pro 2 Candidate Cancelation & Ultralight Headset Work (David Heaney - UploadVR) - Do we care that much about Meta's R&D products. Not really. But we do care about Meta's R&D process. If you are thinking more about the product development cycle in public media (as I am these days), there are nuggets of interest in this short read. It's also worth thinking about their process relative to the NYT game development process (see above).

Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power Microsoft data centers (C Mandler - NPR) - This highlights the potential energy crunch that the tech industry could be facing, as it pursues the parallel goals of crypto currency and AI. Many have said that to truly realize the promise of these emerging technologies, we'll need way more energy production than we have capacity for currently. So, don't be surprised if nuclear power plants become talking points again. —Microsoft isn’t the only megacap tech company getting in to nuclear: New nuclear clean energy agreement with Kairos Power —And Google isn’t the only megacap tech company other than Microsoft either: Amazon signs agreements for innovative nuclear energy projects to address growing energy demands —See also, Matteo Wong’s piece in The Atlantic: For Now, There’s Only One Good Way to Power AI

Parents sue school in Massachusetts after son punished for using AI on paper (Julia Reinstein - ABC News) - And finally, set aside the discussion of whether the parents are bringing a gun to a knife fight here. This piece offers us an unintentional object lesson one why it's probably a good idea to have an AI policy in place at your organization.

Crypto is dominating corporate election spending (Brady Dale - Axios) - Crypto (and block chain/distributed ledger technology in general) has really fallen of the radar of mass media since it's meteoric cratering in 2022. But if you follow the money, it's clear there is a long game here and that this will be on our radars again in some fashion before the end of the decade.

And finally…

Can you spot the celebrity 'deepfakes' in a new ad warning against election disinfo? (Dan De Luce - NBC News) - And finally, can you?

Have a creative, productive week!