• FIR #312: The Social Media Press Release Redux

Everything old is new again, the saying goes. Despite touting the idea of a press release as a destination being a new idea, it actually dates back about 15 years—and retains all of its value. Neville and Shel explore the idea of defeating paywalls with destination press releases in this monthly long-form episode of “For Immediate Release.” Also in this episode:

• Follow-ups to stories about Artificial Intelligence (AI) interns and facial recognition used for nefarious purposes.
• The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer—and whether Edelman can claim to be trust experts
• A roundup of news and commentary about ChatGPT
• A decline in Mastodon users
• Dan York’s Tech Report, which looks at some Twitter changes, good news for Mastodon users, a Mastodon instance for Medium users, Getty’s lawsuit targeting the generative AI image tool Stable Diffusion, Wikipedia’s new look-and-feel, and WordPress’s upcoming 20th birthday.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 23.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat each Thursday at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request the credentials in our Facebook group, or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

• Codeword hires the agency world’s first ‘AI interns’
• Judge blasts James Dolan’s facial recognition bans from MSG: ‘Stupidest thing ever’
• New York Lawmakers Protest Madison Square Garden Over Facial Recognition Controversy
• Lawyers Barred by Madison Square Garden Found a Way Back In
• How press releases can break through paywalled news
• 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer
• The world’s biggest PR firm claims to be an expert on trust – but is it?
• Recruitment team unwittingly recommends ChatGPT for job interview
• Microsoft Plans to Build OpenAI, ChatGPT Features Into All Products
• Opinion | How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy
• Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach
• Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.
• You’ll Be Seeing ChatGPT’s Influence Everywhere This Year
• For PR, Is ChatGPT An Asset Or Threat?
• People are already trying to get ChatGPT to write malware
• Teachers Are Absolutely Loving The Student Who Made A Tool That Shows If Your Essay Was Written By AI
• ChatGPT-4, the Fined Tuned Version of ChatGPT-3, Might Prompt a Major Shift
• An AI writing tool generates a layoff letter as bad as a real company would write! (Should we worry?)
• CEOs at Davos are using ChatGPT to write work emails
• AI and the future of work: 5 experts on what ChatGPT, DALL-E and other AI tools mean for artists and knowledge workers
• Search & Performance Marketing Daily: Portland Shop Uses ChatGPT To Tell Family Stories On A Startup Budget
• ChatGPT and generative AI are the talk of this year’s Davos forum
• Chatbots belong in our classrooms
• ChatGPT will force school exams out of the dark ages
• Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around
• Mastodon Users Have Started Fleeing the Platform
• Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around
• The decentralized technology inside Mastodon
• Mastodon Users (account that displays number of accounts)

Links from Dan York’s Report

•  You can pin a List and then swipe to it in the Twitter app
• The next Twitter update will remember which view you are in and come back to that
• Twitter’s new developer terms ban third-party clients
• Twitterrific: End of an Era
• Buffer adds Mastodon to its social media management platform
• Medium Embraces Mastodon
• Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content
• Wikipedia Gets a Fresh New Look: First Desktop Update in a Decade Puts Usability at the Forefront
• Highlight: Exploring Wikipedia’s new user experience (UX) - danyork324 on Twitch
• WordPress turns 20 in 2023