Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books | The Great Social Media–News Collapse | How The HeyDude Guy Became A Billionaire Selling Ugly Shoes | The new normal in U.S. schools is unsustainable–and inaction could cost $28 trillion

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Why Generative AI Won't Disrupt Books - WIRED    In the early weeks of 2023, as worry about ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools was ratcheting up dramatically in the public conversation, a tweet passed through the many interlocking corners of Book Twitter. "Imagine if every Book is converted into an Animated Book and made 10x more engaging," it read. "AI will do this. Huge opportunity here to disrupt Kindle and Audible." The tweet's author, Gaurav Munjal, cofounded Unacademy, which bills itself as "India's largest learning platform"—and within the edtech context, where digitally animated books can be effective teaching tools, his suggestion might read a certain way. But to a broader audience, the sweeping proclamation that AI will make "every" book "10x more engaging" seemed absurd, a solution in search of a problem, and one predicated on the idea that people who choose to read narrative prose (instead of, say, watching a film or playing a game) were somehow bored or not engaged with their unanimated tomes. As those who shared the tweet observed, it seems like a lot of book industry "disruptors" just don't like reading. Munjal is one of many tech entrepreneurs to ping the book world's radar—and raise its collective hackles—in recent months. Many were hawking AI "solutions" they promised would transform the act of writing, the most derided among them Sudowrite's Story Engine (dubbed in a relatively ambivalent review by The Verge's Adi Robertson as "the AI novel-writing tool everyone hates"). Story Engine raised frustrations by treating writers as an afterthought and, by its very existence, suggesting that the problems it was trying to bypass weren't integral to the act of writing itself. Continued here The Great Social Media–News Collapse - The Atlantic    Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has learned that news is a messy, expensive, low-margin business—the kind that, if you’re not careful, can turn a milquetoast CEO into an international villain and get you dragged in front of Congress. No surprise, then, that Big Tech has decided it’s done with the enterprise altogether. After the 2016 election, news became a bug rather than a feature, a burdensome responsibility of truth arbitration that no executive particularly wanted to deal with. Slowly, and then not so slowly, companies divested from news. Facebook reduced its visibility in users’ feeds. Both Meta and Google restricted the distribution of news content in Canada. Meta’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, noted that its newest social network, Threads, wouldn’t go out of its way to amplify news content. Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, apparently as part of a reactionary political project against the press, and made a number of decisions that resulted in its replacement, X, being flooded with garbage. As The New York Times declared recently, “The major online platforms are breaking up with news.” This is correct, but the narrative is missing something. Journalists tend to fixate on how our work is or isn’t distributed. Doing so allows us to believe that algorithms and shortsighted, mercurial tech executives are fully to blame when our work isn’t consumed. Fair enough: Platforms, especially Facebook, have encouraged news organizations to redefine their publishing strategies in the past, including through disastrous pivots to video, only to change directions with an algorithm update or the falsification of key metrics. They’ve also allowed their platforms to be used for dangerous propaganda that crowds out legitimate information. But there is also a less convenient and perhaps more existential side to tech’s divestiture of news. It’s not just the platforms: Readers are breaking up with traditional news, too. Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium How The HeyDude Guy Became A Billionaire Selling Ugly Shoes - Forbes    Two years ago, Brown’s Shoe Fit Co.’s desperation to stock enough HeyDude shoes to meet the demand reached frenzied levels. The buyers for the 73-store Midwestern chain would get a status report in the morning and try to place a large order. “We would get one-fourth or one-half of what we put in for,” says Adam Smith, senior manager for Brown’s and a former store manager in Jacksonville, Illinois. “The whole nation was trying to get them.” HeyDude founder Alessandro Rosano, an Italian entrepreneur living in Hong Kong, had tried his hand at other businesses before. But with HeyDude, which makes comfortable slip-on loafers with a so-ugly-they’re-cute look, he hit the jackpot. With minimal investment and almost no marketing, revenue took off, reaching $581 million in 2021, with net profit of $175 million. That December, Rosano agreed to sell the brand to Crocs, the $6.2 billion (market cap) firm whose own ugly-cute rubber clogs are a worldwide phenomenon, for $2.5 billion in cash and stock. With that deal, Rosano became a billionaire, worth $1.4 billion by Forbes estimates. His business partner and American distributor Daniele Guidi also made a fortune, worth some $650 million after tax by Forbes estimates, after bringing in $787 million in cash from the deal, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Continued here The new normal in U.S. schools is unsustainable–and inaction could cost $28 trillion - Fortune    More than three years after the pandemic closed schools across the country, the public consciousness has largely moved on, but our education system remains buffeted by urgent needs, shifting priorities, conflicting funding mandates, and deep political divisions. The new normal is anything but normal. Learning loss, poor student mental health, teacher shortages, and the rapid pace of technological change are powerful forces that will shape the education sector for years to come. Stanford University economist Eric Hanushek estimates the lasting societal costs of the pandemic’s effects on students could amount to more than $28 trillion over the rest of this century. The White House recently called for an all-hands-on-deck approach to fighting learning loss while the nation nervously awaits this year’s NAEP scores which last year were the lowest in two decades in reading and math. Continued here

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