Hello June!

This is my favourite time of year and not only because I’ve just had my birthday. When the sun is out, which it was a lot in May, the colour of the blue sky and the green of the new leaves everywhere lifts the spirits like nothing else.

Equally, nothing quite dampens the spirit so much as a rainy June day, like the day on which I’m writing this. I’ve made soup to cheer everybody up.

In the past month I’ve helped organise an online celebration event for the Warm Welcome Campaign which we called Spring Forward, marking the move to British Summer Time and longer, lighter days. We’ve also had a Warm Welcome strategy day; we’re planning a major event for the ChurchWorks Commission, which is another project run by the Good Faith Foundation with the aim of bringing churches and government closer together; and we launched a Bristol Thriving Communities report which shows there are more than 420 church-led projects in the city supporting vulnerable people.

I’ve spent some of my own time helping wrap up communications for the Creative Cities Convention which was in Bradford in early May and which leaves a lasting legacy including a one-month internship at London-based TV production company Clapperboard Studios. You can read more about CCC 2025 here.

Looking ahead, I’ll be working with Winchester Cathedral to promote some projects they have coming up. But I do have capacity for more freelance work, so get in touch if you’d like support.

I went to see an outdoor production of The Marriage of Figaro at Arundells (Ted Heath’s old house) in Salisbury Cathedral close with one of my daughters. And I’m still sea swimming when I get the chance and regularly dipping in the river Nadder near my house. The river water in particular is still so cold! But blissful.

In other news

This brilliant Instagram post was brought to my attention by an arts and culture newsletter from the Audience Agency. They had such good intentions but the result is… not what they wanted.

This is old, but the same newsletter in early May, highlighted UNESCO research that shows Large Language Models (or AI to you and me) is producing gender bias, homophobia and racial stereotyping. How do we make the companies developing AI take account of and rectify these dangerous biases?

This is worrying for local journalism: local papers using police press releases to write up court cases, which is doing local court reporters out of a job and risks presenting only one side of a case.

This is interesting, about opting out from Meta’s AI training program on its social networks. From the end of May, Meta is using all of our likes, comments, posts and reactions on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to train its AI models. For the first time I considered coming off Facebook and Instagram… but I would miss being in touch with friends especially those I don’t get to see in the flesh and some of who I’ve known since I was at school.

I’ve been doing a CAST online course in understanding AI as part of my continuous professional development and this article is interesting about the dangers of AI: essentially don’t put sensitive information into an AI query that could get you into trouble if it became public, either by design (hacking) or accidentally. The example given was if a CEO was found to have queried ChatGPT (and thus OpenAI) with the term ‘how best to lay off an employee’.

That’s enough for this month. See you in July. And suddenly more than half the year is gone.