Digital Works - news, ideas, good reads

Welcome back to Digital Works, the newsletter from Substrakt that's part of our programme of free talks, podcasts and other content, bringing arts, culture, museums and heritage professionals together to talk all things digital. I'm Katie Moffat, Director of Sector Strategy at Substrakt. Please get in touch if you have anything you'd like to share, or if you need any support with your digital projects. And if you find this newsletter useful, do forward to a friend or colleague.

the interior of an open plan office seen from above, there are people working at laptops or standing up talking and colour artwork on the walls

Latest Things

Our first Digital Works Conference is getting closer. It's being held in Leeds on 24th-25th April, day one will be focused on leadership, strategy, and new ideas and day two will be all about successful execution. We have some incredible speakers. Get your tickets here.

In other news....

X is launching video and audio calls for non subscribers. As the headlines asks, Did anyone want this?

You will all probably have seen the latest big AI news, as OpenAI launched Sora, an AI model that can create video from a line or two of text. There's no doubt, this is truly astonishing. However, commentator and expert Gary Marcus has written an interesting piece about how Sora (similar to other Generative Artificial Intelligence tools) has a tendency to hallucinate. The following quote is a particularly noteworthy point from his post, since as incredible as they are, GAI tools are certainly fallible, "The system is trying to approximate the world, but it just isn’t very good at that job. It uses arrangements of pixels to predict other arrangements of pixels, but it does not try to build an internal model of physics, and it does not try to build an internal model of cultural artifacts, either."

In other AI news the widely used ChatGPT temporarily went off the rails last week and starting speaking nonsense. And in a similar, but more costly, vein, Air Canada is paying the pricing for its customer service AI chatbot giving a user incorrect information.

Threads now has more than 130 million monthly active users.

Bloomberg Philanthropies is supporting the City of Kyiv to accelerate the digitisation of public services.

an AI generated image, purple background with a clear button that has the text How do large language models work written on it

Useful Things

The seemingly never ending lists of AI tools can be overwhelming. Which ones should you be experimenting with? Here is a very sensible answer to that question.

We know many arts organisations are still getting to grips with Google Analytics 4, In April Digital Culture Network is running a useful webinar about how to audit your GA4 account.

A couple of issues ago we shared some examples of AI organisational policies, to cover how an organisation uses AI (to cover ethical and legal issues). To consider when you're developing your own policy, you may find the BBC's AI Principles useful.

Not exclusively digital related but we share this because it is a helpful resource if you are redeveloping or refining your overall organsiational strategy - doing user research to inform your strategy.

a women with brown hair sitting down at a desk with a macbook in an office, behind her is a colourful illustration

Thought-provoking, Inspiring & Entertaining Things

Google Arts & Culture has a fun new adventure game, The Forever Labyrinth, which uses artworks from some of the Google Arts & Culture partner museums and galleries. Background to the project is here.

Anyone who has had to manage social media accounts, or any online communities, will know the difficulties of coming up with community rules that are not only ethically sound but also logical. No vehicles in the park is a short, though-provoking game about the difficulties of content moderation.

UK band Idles got a lot of negative comments about their deepfake video of Coldplay's original Yellow video.

YouTube's CEO wrote an open letter with some predictions for 2024. Within the post he notes that YouTube is now essentially no different to television & other streaming services.

Digital Works Podcast

A reminder that, in addition to our regular interview podcast, we now have a new short 'Bytes' episode, which will be released after every newsletter to discuss three of the most interesting stories in the newsletter. Have a listen and let us know what you think!

Creating immersive experiences - Samatha King, Vive Arts

How cultural organisations can unleash social media's potential - Haydn Corrodus

Crowdfunding, owning your niche, dealing with censorship and ignoring the trolls - Zoe Williams, Vagina Museum.

Getting to 1 million digital subscribers, creating meaningful metrics, and working with NT at Home - with George Montagu, FT Strategies.

What effective funding looks like and thinking differently about value and risk - with Fran Sanderson, Nesta.

The power of cultural leaders developing a 'digital imagination' - with Seb Chan, CEO and Director of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)

Running a successful digital project - with Fiona Morris, CEO and Creative Director of The Space.

Listen to all the episodes.

a woman wearing a black top, sitting at a table in an office, talking to 3 other people who have their back to the camera

Good Reads

Some of you may have come across Arc Search, an app that instead of displaying search results, reads pages and summarises them into a single web page. If a user does click through to any of the actual pages it blocks ads and cookies by default. While all of this is great from a user experience point of view, it has huge ramifications for the future of the internet.

Related is this excellent article on The Verge about the simple protocol, robots.txt, that has shaped our internet, and how AI scraping is changing everything, "For decades, the main focus of robots.txt was on search engines; you’d let them scrape your site and in exchange they’d promise to send people back to you. Now AI has changed the equation: companies around the web are using your site and its data to build massive sets of training data, in order to build models and products that may not acknowledge your existence at all."

And finally, a fascinating read about what happened when a fantasy fiction writer used AI to help them create their books.

See you soon

That's all for this issue, if you see anything interesting, surprising, fun, or useful, please do share it with us so we can include it in a future newsletter.

And if you're looking for help with a digital project or any kind of digital consultancy support, please do get in touch. Consultancy projects we are currently working on include a digital strategy for a global not-for-profit and a digital capacity review for an arts and culture organisation.

Until next time, stay safe.

Bye!