Associated Press

• Earlier that year, Earhart had flown as an observer on a Northwest Airways winter flight across the U.S., testing the possibilities of a “Northern Transcontinental” route.
• Meanwhile, the ecosystem of air travel has grown more elaborate, often leaving passengers squirming in their seats on the tarmac before or after flight.
• Coast-to-coast air travel is in a rut – but there are still efforts to improve this mode of transit.

Just another ordinary miracle

• Transcontinental air journeys are clearly different 90 years after Earhart’s record-breaking exploratory flights: Travelers now take such trips for granted, and often find them to be pure drudgery.
• In 2018, travel blogger Ravi Ghelani reviewed in minute detail a United Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey, to Seattle – roughly the same northern route that Earhart explored in 1933.
• But for Ghelani, seated in first class, it wasn’t the terrain or frigid temperatures that were the most cumbersome part of his adventure.

Little indignities multiply

• The high-risk adventure of air travel has been subdued, yet long flights today can paradoxically feel torturous.
• As philosopher Michael Marder puts it in his 2022 book “Philosophy for Passengers”: “When crew members wish passengers a ‘pleasant journey,’ I hear a dash of cruel irony in their words.
• Still, it’s worth noting that the majority of the human population has never boarded an airplane; flying cross-country remains a relatively exclusive experience.

2 futures of cross-country flight

• Where are the new frontiers for transcontinental flight today?
• One area of innovation is in a greener form of flight.
• Theirs is the high-flying equivalent of the Tesla electric sports car.” Solar Impulse was more recently reconfigured as a remotely piloted aircraft, with new experiments in long-distance solar flight underway.
• These are two starkly different visions of coast-to-coast flight, one a dystopian nightmare and the other a utopian dream.

• In the United States last week, the Authors Guild submitted an open letter to the chief executives of prominent AI companies, asking AI developers to obtain consent from, credit and fairly compensate authors.
• The letter was signed by more than 10,000 authors and their supporters, including James Patterson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen and Margaret Atwood.
• Unpacking these concerns often reveals as much about existing practices of writing and publishing as it does about the new technology.

How does AI work?

• Such models examine how text is constructed, and essentially calculate the statistical likelihood certain words will appear together.
• In other words, generative AI creates a purely structural, probabilistic understanding of language and uses that to guess a plausible response.
• If you can access writing in your browser, it’s safe to assume AI models are using it.
• In the world’s first copyright-related ChatGPT lawsuit, two US authors (Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay) are currently suing OpenAI, claiming their books were used to train the AI software without their consent.

Can AI generate ‘human’ writing?

• Browsing Amazon in July 2023, 984 books explicitly attribute ChatGPT, the best-known and most widely used generative AI, as an author.
• But can generative AI produce acceptably human creative writing?
• These articles, however, are procedural, fill-in-the-blanks style affairs: a kind of computational madlibs of exchange rates and share prices.
• Similarly, unlike the AP example, this work is “original” insomuch as it is a new, previously non-existent piece of creative text.
• Read more:
  Replacing news editors with AI is a worry for misinformation, bias and accountability

AI and ‘the bestseller code’

• The flurry of replies included authors such as Jennifer Brody, who managed to include AI protections in recent contract negotiations.
• Overwhelmingly, however, provisions regarding AI are not yet explicitly included in author contracts.
• At what point does a clause in an author contract regarding AI usage mean an author can’t use their own writing to generate new work?
• Publishers acquiring the right to use manuscripts to train generative AI is speculative.
• Some are suggesting AI will render the author disposable: publishers will be able to package and market any piece of AI-generated text.

What do we value?

• It’s that these are values are at the heart of reading and writing.
• Henry James wrote that the:
  deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.
• deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.

• HONG KONG SAR - Media OutReach - 25 July 2023 - Media OutReach Newswire , Asia’s first global newswire, has launched the next-generation SaaS integrated communications portal that offers three simple steps in press release submission, centralised post-release reports and a groundbreaking Press Release Distribution Campaign Intelligence Report that provides holistic insights of press release distribution campaign performance for the first time in the newswire industry.
• With proprietary technology at its core, the Press Release Distribution Campaign Intelligence Report gives PR professionals a full and complete view of press release campaign performance over customised period.
• As a newswire focused on providing solutions to the PR industry, Media OutReach Newswire’s intelligence report measures the performance of press release distribution by evaluating interactions between journalists and the press release.
• Penn Leung, Director at Creative Consulting Group, a PR consultancy which has partnered with Media OutReach Newswire since 2016, says the new intelligence service will transform how they plan and report the effectiveness of the press release distribution campaign to clients.

• The firm received the designation for its crisis communication work with Sea Tow, a premier leader of on-water assistance, and that company's response to September 2022's Hurricane Ian.
• Bulldog Reporter is a prestigious trade organization that accepts nominations for its annual awards across a number of competitive categories.
• Durée & Company's office is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, the boating capital of the world and an epicenter for marine companies.
• "It is a great honor to be selected as a winner of the 2023 Bulldog PR Awards," said Durée Ross, president and founder of Durée & Company.