Yes, I’m writing about Twitter again. (Or as I call it now, Xitter, pronounced Shitter. Thank you, James Fallows.) This time I’m poking my s’more fork into the dumpster fire that is that company’s new tagline, introduced abruptly and ill-advisedly last weekend. Read all about the inane “Blaze your glory!” [sic].
My previous Twitter-now-X story is here.
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How to tell when that nicely phrased but possibly bullshit-laden piece of prose has been generated by artificial intelligence rather than ordinary human intelligence? One possible solution, proposed by seven companies active in the AI space, is digital watermarking.
iStock photo of water with watermarks
According to a fact sheet released on July 21, the Biden Administration has secured voluntary commitments from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI “to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology” and to alert people to deepfakes.
“It's currently unclear how the watermark will work,” Ars Technica noted in an article about the development, “but it will likely be embedded in the content so that users can trace its origins to the AI tools used to generate it.”
You can read more about how the watermark might in fact work in Mark Liberman’s July 25 Language Log post, which, to be honest, strains my extremely modest technical comprehension. So let’s look instead at that word watermark, which branched away from its original aquatic meaning more than three centuries ago.
In design, a watermark is “a distinguishing mark or design impressed into a sheet of paper during manufacture, typically visible only when the sheet is held up to the light,” according to the OED, whose earliest citation for this sense is from 1708. This type of watermark was “probably so called because the watermark, being less opaque than the rest of the paper, had the appearance of having been produced by the action of water.”
Author’s note: Until I researched this post, I’d assumed that water was somehow involved in creating watermarks. I’d envisioned a die being pressed into a watery slurry as paper was being manufactured. But no!
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Lots of news about Twitter this month; if you don’t care or are already saturated, feel free to scroll down to my Twitterless content.
The bluf: Twitter’s dark overlord, Elon Musk, announced on Saturday, July 23, that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And lo, by the following day the Twitter logo and name—but not the word “tweet”—had disappeared from the platform, replaced by a grim, spindly “X,” Musk’s favorite letter. (In 2000, he wanted to rebrand PayPal as X. He was ousted as CEO, but bought back X.com and went on to found SpaceX, name the Tesla Model X, and sire a child named, alas, Æ A-Xii.)
It’s not quite the end of Twitter, but it sure ain’t what it used to be. I wrote for Medium about what I’ll miss—and am already missing—about Twitter, which I started using in 2008, a lifetime ago.
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When I Googled “Barbie movie” yesterday, my screen blushed pink, with the Google wordmark standing out in darker pink.
Thanks to the movie-based-on-a-doll that opened last weekend, pink is the unofficial color of the year. It’s there in the bubble-gum-hued capital B on the movie poster.
It’s even the title of Lizzo’s contribution to the soundtrack.
“When I wake up in my own pink world / I get up outta bed and wave to my homegirls…”
I haven’t yet seen the film, but I’ve read thousands of words about it—enough to know that pink is its “signature vibrant aesthetic,” as Scientific American put it. (SciAm was interested in the psychological angle. “If Barbie was exposed to a single color her whole life, she wouldn’t necessarily register the world as pink but would instead likely see it as gray or neutral,” the magazine reported.)
I did my own research into pink and came up with these findings:
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The first time I encountered the Brigid Alliance name, abut a month ago, I was half-listening to an NPR story about abortion resources, and I heard the name as “Bridge It.” Which made sense, I thought: The organization exists to cover the costs of travel, food, lodging, and childcare for women (aka “pregnant people”) seeking abortions in states where the procedure remains legal—to bridge the gap, in other words.
But no: It’s Brigid, one of the spellings of an ancient Irish personal name whose etymology translates to “the High One.” And there’s an interesting story behind that choice.
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