[HN Gopher] CNET Has Been Quietly Publishing AI-Written Articles...
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CNET Has Been Quietly Publishing AI-Written Articles for Months
Author : herbertl
Score : 136 points
Date : 2023-01-13 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| Decabytes wrote:
| I believe that writing on the internet is about to become more
| public and personal if you want people to follow and trust you.
| While we have been able to get away with being able to write semi
| anonymously and still be successful there will now always be a
| question about whether the words were generated by an AI.
|
| It's kind of like the deal with the More Plates More Dates
| YouTube Channel, and the Matt Does Fitness guy. Matt has an
| amazing physique, but because of that people thought he was on
| steroids. He paid MPMD to randomly drug test him over the course
| of six months like WADA (world anti-doping agency) to prove he
| was natural. He had to do this because steroids exist in the
| world.
|
| Same thing with writing. Using perfect grammar and a more formal
| sentence structure will probably cause people to think you are a
| robot. But writing about your life, your hobby projects and what
| you are doing with them will show people that you are a real
| person
| tjchear wrote:
| That makes sense to me, but I wonder if that's gonna launch a
| writing arms race between genuine writers and AI researchers.
| mwexler wrote:
| The AP has been doing this for years. Play by play for sports
| teams and summaries of earnings reports have been "ai-written"
| and shared out with nary a peep.
|
| See, for example, https://automatedinsights.com/customer-
| stories/associated-pr...
|
| The fact that we just noticed appears to be driving the angst,
| not that it's suddenly here. Because it was here all along.
| beilabs wrote:
| It's one thing doing this for sport; but guarantee AP don't do
| this for editorial stories.
|
| source: shared an office with them
| junesix wrote:
| It's only gotten attention because it's "ChatGPT". If it was
| any other vendor, this would have slipped by without a blip.
| erenyeager wrote:
| Personally I love ChatGPT and think this should be implemented in
| schools in the future for writing courses. Many times people have
| concepts they wish to express but are not so proficient in what
| is the cultural "prestige" writing. I think it is much more
| important to creatively combine concepts and apply them, compared
| to the nitty-gritty of fine writing.
|
| Also, I feel the rise of Chat GPT will result in more value for
| verified human-written or human-supervised content. I will much
| prefer hearing an organic, person's personal experience in
| another country, for example, as a verification for things that
| actually happened, compared to a fictitious AI generated story.
| Now combine a verified human + AI assistance, you have a reliable
| narrator and good content.
|
| The hardest hit will probably be to the anonymous writers and
| commenters, who cannot provide verification of being actual
| sources, and will be washed in the storm of AI content.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > Many times people have concepts they wish to express but are
| not so proficient in what is the cultural "prestige" writing.
|
| Many times people are bad at writing, I agree. I see what you
| mean, but if you have a concept and cannot express it, do you
| really "have" a concept. It is like knowing mathematics and
| being unable to solve any exercises.
| marban wrote:
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/cnet-is-experimenting-with-an-ai-a...
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| There is an awful lot of content published on the internet that
| is highly predictable, which is to say, ripe to be generated by
| large language models. But that stuff is already so low bandwidth
| in new or useful information that I wonder "who cares" if it's
| now not only predictable, but literally predicted? It was already
| there just to generate page one search results, and it does, and
| it will continue to do so.
|
| Which raises the interesting question of how self-referential and
| useless search results go, if they are primarily great big
| generative, predictive models feeding huge indexing models for
| the purpose of predictively generating the right additional
| content intended to snag an actual human neuron (that is, to
| select advertisements)? Once the whole thing is computers talking
| to computers hoping some gullible living person is watching, it
| becomes indistinguishable from bitcoin mining - a kind of viral,
| self-referential internet onanism.
| matt_s wrote:
| > indistinguishable from bitcoin mining
|
| In a way its ad-money mining via SEO/engineered content to get
| high page views/CPM. The issue with this comparison to crypto
| mining is that the surface area of low-quality content
| prevailing means their ad campaigns are likely going to be less
| effective because humans reading the low-quality content just
| aren't going to stay long enough and/or will avoid the content.
| I can imagine the ad companies shifting to other types of
| content like video, then the AI generated content doesn't bring
| ad-revenue.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| I agree, the comparison is inexact, and I expect that
| advertisers will have to change strategies. My use of the
| word "indistinguishable" overstates the comparison. I should
| have said "not entirely unlike."
| matt_s wrote:
| Oh I wasn't being pedantic about wordings. You are right on
| target that this is a computer automated revenue stream.
| Crypto miners have had to change strategies too I assume,
| buying bigger iron or whatever.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| -- there is this guy on youtube - simon whistler - has a bunch of
| channels - he basically reads wikipedia articles in an exciting
| british accent - some of the paid text to speech stuff getting so
| good - been thinking - should just text to speech wiki articles
| with some tweaking so they read like a script - or just copy
| paste a wiki article to GTP3 and ask it to rewrite it as a script
| - coupled with video diffusion - upload them and see what happens
| - but the whole thing feels very gross to me - so not done it --
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Simon Whistler is a parasitic knob. I own and operate a website
| where I have been researching and writing original non-fiction
| content for almost 20 years, and Simon used to do paid voice
| work for me, narrating my writings for podcasts and audio
| books. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up, but one day I
| discovered that he had quietly started making videos for a site
| that was systematically borderline plagiarizing my writings.
| Then he started multiple other YouTube channels where he
| covered the same topics he had recorded for my site, often with
| striking similarities.
|
| To date there are well over 100 of his videos that appear to be
| "inspired" by my content. For example:
|
| Me, 2008: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-
| diabolical-... Simon, 2021:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP4RQ783lk
|
| Me, 2005: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-man-who-was-a-
| dwarf-and-... Simon, 2019:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpdMolMlDzw
|
| The list goes on and on. I've been writing online long enough
| that I've been poached and plagiarized six ways from Sunday,
| but no one else has come close to leeching so long and
| systematically as this unoriginal, abject freeloader. Simon
| Whistler is downright seaward.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| -- sorry for calling you wikipedia - great work!! - per my
| original post - maybe you can use new ML tech to beat simon
| at his own game =) --
| aliqot wrote:
| This is less of a testament for AI and more of a testament of how
| far gone CNET is.
| ohashi wrote:
| CNET has been publishing garbage content for a while now. Look no
| further than their 'reviews.' I work with web hosting reviews and
| look at what they disclaim "While we didn't test the services, we
| did carefully examine each service's offerings and ranked them
| according to essential web hosting features." (source:
| https://archive.ph/UtlsB )
|
| They are writing reviews with no experience? lol.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Reviewing web hosts based on comparing feature checklists? Oh
| dear.
|
| For those who aren't aware, feature checklists for web hosting
| services are 90% bullshit. Not that they aren't true, but the
| items that get checked off are often trivial nonsense which are
| implicitly available from any commodity hosting provider like
| "control panel", "access logs", or "password protected
| directories".
|
| The real differentiators are usually things which don't show up
| in marketing materials, like "is the support team halfway
| competent" or "how badly does this provider try to nickel and
| dime you". Which is why you need to actually work with the
| provider to give them a meaningful review.
| deeel wrote:
| Bankrate.com has also been using
| AI.https://twitter.com/tonythill/status/1612860930085294080
|
| This will be interesting to see over time how Google responds
| which it looks like they somewhat have regarding Bankrate:
| https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-content-guidelines-ba...
| jameshart wrote:
| There's genuine loss of value going on if we fall into the trap
| of language-generated SEO - but it's more subtle than just 'the
| internet will be full of crap'
|
| The thing is that webpages don't 'exist' in the way most people
| mentally kind of think of them - as 'documents on the file system
| of some computer'. And google is not an index over all those
| 'documents'.
|
| How search actually works is Google bots go out to a bunch of
| servers and ask them 'hey, what kind of documents can you make?',
| and the servers respond with dynamically generated lists of links
| to those 'documents', and google it requests them, and the server
| makes them and sends them to google, which indexes them so that
| later when someone searches the internet, google can send them to
| the same link, and the server can make the document again for
| them.
|
| In an internet that works like this, using an LLM to generate
| documents that google indexes is a waste of everyone's time.
|
| This turns google into an index of the output of various LLM
| prompts that someone has run that they think someone might later
| search for.
|
| This wastes everybody's time.
|
| An LLM outputted summary of every earnings report of every
| company doesn't need to be pregenerated - we can make that later,
| at the time the customer asks the query 'what was in the earnings
| report of Foocorp in Q4 2013?'
|
| This breaks the 'document-centric' conceit of search; and that
| might not be a bad thing.
| elecush wrote:
| everything accurate but it is only a "waste of some peoples'
| time" while others profit with their SEO-friendly garbledy-gook
| harshalizee wrote:
| It's even worse than that. Sites like MarketWatch auto
| generates pages for each ticker at the end of trading day to
| tell you if a stock went up or down and in comparison to
| broader market.
|
| Just take a look at a random stock in apple stocks, the news
| section is just filled with this garbage.
| distortionfield wrote:
| > Google requests a set of documents that turn out to be LLM
| generated > Other prompts using Google data make more content
| for Google to crawl and request > Lather, rinse, repeat
|
| AI contamination is already starting. There's no way that
| content written by an LLM hasn't already been used to train an
| LLM.
| jameshart wrote:
| I'm not talking about LLM feedback loops (that is a problem
| but a different one. Honestly LLMs slurping up low effort
| _human produced_ SEO docs is just as bad.)
|
| This issue is more about the value of search finding
| 'documents' when 'documents' are thin layers of low-value-add
| LLM cruft over raw factual data.
|
| The facts are what you're searching for; search indexing has
| always involved trying to figure out the underlying
| informational content of a document; LLM prettification is
| just adding obfuscation over that data that search indexers
| then have to try to remove.
|
| There has to be a more efficient way for a website to say 'we
| have all the earnings data for every US public company'
| without them having to dress that up in LLM prettification
| that google's language model can index.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Interesting point, but there's a lot of use cases where chat
| bots still need some novel data, like your "earnings report of
| Foocorp in Q4 2013" example. So maybe we end up with [smaller]
| sites of raw data for bots to digest when someone wants a
| readable form of it.
|
| Frankly that might be better then everything being wrapped up
| in prose.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| We've reached the point where trees are only falling in the
| forest because Google is around to hear them.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Since then, the news site has published 73 AI-generated
| articles, but the outlet says on its website that a team of
| editors is involved in the content "from ideation to publication.
| Ensuring that the information we publish and the recommendations
| we make are accurate, credible, and helpful to you is a defining
| responsibility for what we do."
|
| This is the thing that actually scares me, because I don't
| believe them when they say they have editors scrutinizing
| everything the AI writes. They may give it a glance, but I would
| bet any amount of money that they don't rigorously check
| everything. And as time goes on, they're going to spend fewer and
| fewer resources on editorial, I guarantee it. My basis for saying
| this is that editorial has already been deeply cut -- forget
| rewrites, forget fact checking, it feels like half these articles
| have outright typos that never get caught. I'm not sure anyone
| but the author closely reads an article before it goes into
| publication, and if the author is an AI...
|
| They aren't going to staff up on editorial if AI can generate
| content, they will just spend $0 on writers, and as little as
| they can get away with on editors, approaching $0.
| wintorez wrote:
| We're entering a strange time in the history of written media.
| Most articles will be written by the AI, and the AI will be
| trained by the articles that was written by AI. I wouldn't be
| surprised to see a badge similar to "Organic" to be created for
| any written content, to certify that it was written by a human.
| itisit wrote:
| CNET is unrecognizable to me these days. Practically all of
| CNET's great editors have long since left the company. It's just
| a once trusted brand slapped on top of ad-optimized time-relevant
| trash. Prime fodder for the "More articles like this" junk
| recommendations the likes of which ZergNet and OutBrain serve up.
| bombcar wrote:
| The quality of the average "news" article has been in decline for
| years. We demand too much news and too quickly, production hasn't
| been keeping up.
|
| Many pieces are now just regurgitating twitter posts anyway.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| And we demand that news be free of charge.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| "Many pieces are now just regurgitating twitter posts anyway"
|
| What is funny is that this is exactly that and to make things
| worse, this article from gizmodo is just regurgitating an
| article from https://futurism.com/the-byte/cnet-publishing-
| articles-by-ai that is regurgitating a twitter thread which is
| more informative because it includes information on how the
| person found it in the first place
| https://twitter.com/GaelBreton/status/1613110185995771905
|
| Now we are on, hacker news, talking about a gizmodo article,
| based on a futurism article, based on a twitter thread.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| With the responses written by chatgpt.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| 5looking wrote:
| It's not demand but that media really wants to tell you what's
| true.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I think the problem is that recently, the quality of pages
| linked from search results has _increased_. There seem to be a
| lot of people out there who are algorithmically generating
| product reviews and comparisons, especially.
|
| In years past, I think it was much easier to discern such low-
| value content. But lately I find that it's not immediately
| obvious, and I waste time in drawing that conclusion and moving
| on.
|
| So my search strategy, at least for the kinds of things most
| susceptible, is to shift from "open-ended with exceptions" to
| "only trust sites whose names I recognize".
|
| Sad to see that I should consider moving CNet from the good
| column to the bad.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I think the problem is that recently, the quality of pages
| linked from search results has increased. There seem to be a
| lot of people out there who are algorithmically generating
| product reviews and comparisons, especially.
|
| > In years past, I think it was much easier to discern such
| low-value content. But lately I find that it's not
| immediately obvious, and I waste time in drawing that
| conclusion and moving on.
|
| I know what you mean, but I wouldn't describe that as an
| increase in "quality."
|
| > So my search strategy, at least for the kinds of things
| most susceptible, is to shift from "open-ended with
| exceptions" to "only trust sites whose names I recognize".
|
| IMHO, one interesting thing "AI" might do, is finally kill
| the open, free-to-access Web, returning things to something
| like the 90s, where if you wanted to know something, you had
| to buy a newspaper, magazine, or book published by an
| institution. It would do it by filling the web with low value
| stuff that's too hard to detect.
|
| DALL-E/Stable Diffusion are already killing the appeal of
| certain styles of fantastic art, due to overexposure and
| mediocrity.
|
| I look forward to the day when Wikipedia is overrun with
| "AI"-generated vandalism that's difficult to detect, but
| designed to corrupt it according to various agendas. They
| could even include generated citations to documents that
| sound like they could support the vandalistic claims (because
| few actually go through the trouble of verifying those).
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Well, if your goal is information does the provenance being
| a machine matter? Quality here I assume means more detailed
| and better written with more nuance. For most of my
| knowledge seeking searches I don't care much who wrote it
| and more whether I gain the knowledge I seek
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Well, if your goal is information does the provenance
| being a machine matter?
|
| My goal is _good_ information, but these technologies
| (especially currently) mainly enable bad /mediocre
| information _at scale_.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I've been using it for a while and while I get bad
| information at times it's generally pretty decent and
| much easier to get through traditional IR methods,
| especially now that they're just advertising and SEO
| wastelands. I find combining the output of chatgpt with
| some searches yields a much better and faster result in
| learning for me. I fully anticipate that we will see
| similar systems tied to IR and semantic reasoning systems
| soon - the problems are too obvious but so are the
| solutions, and it's not like we don't have amazing tech
| in the areas chatgpt fails in that can be adapted to
| constrain and inform the output.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It has the sheen of knowledge, but assume these
| instructions to GPT:
|
| _" write a glowing review of product X, assuming you are
| an Y using it in your line of work as Z"_
|
| the output will look better than _printf( "Template blah
| %s with %s and %s is really good, check out our website
| %s, use coupon code %s");_
|
| but it's not necessarily better.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| True. But it's also not necessarily the only use for the
| tech. But if you're point is scammers will be scammers, I
| agree.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| I'd say roughly 70% of the articles Google pushes to my Android's
| 'news feed' is clearly AI generated garbage designed to maximize
| SEO. It's absurd. This has been going on for more than a year.
|
| It's usually pretty obvious because you'll read something and
| some form of uncanny valley starts to creep in where you're like
| "no sane person writes like this."
| LarryMullins wrote:
| If old media plays their cards right, the proliferation of AI-
| generated content may prove a blessing in disguise for them. If
| they take firm stances against publishing AI-generated content,
| then paying old media for the news may become the best way to
| reliably get real content written by humans.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Yeah I've had similar thoughts about this. The areas where AI
| can't really compete (probably ever) is in reporting / photo
| journalism.
|
| We'll always need someone to be on the scene to capture the
| events / investigate the stories, and I don't think the world
| is dystopian enough to start manufacturing AI news drones.
|
| Efforts will be put in place to filter out the garbage AI
| content with human made, real world reporting.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| It's funny to me that there is such a strong emotional response
| to progress in AI (e.g., ChatGPT). It really seems like it stems
| from a strong biological desire to maintain the feeling that
| "humans are special" even if no one will state that outright.
| Banning generated art or text comes across as a last ditch hurdle
| on the way to the inevitable. I think it's better just to embrace
| this head-on and address any problems early before they become a
| bigger problem in the future (bias, factual correctness, etc.)
| This stuff really has the potential to improve society; let's not
| unnecessarily cripple it out of some misplaced sense of human
| uniqueness.
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| Maybe that is a reason for some people's negative reactions,
| but on the other hand there seems to be a lot of unwarranted
| enthusiasm from another crowd, who seem to think that Friend
| Computer will soon usher in an utopian age.
|
| What currently exists is far from a human-level AGI, and it's
| not likely that just making a few tweaks would even get closer
| to that goal. The model doesn't in any sense understand what it
| is writing, it generates text that is optimized for _appearing_
| as if there is intelligence behind it, as long as you don 't
| read too closely.
|
| And while we don't have to fear a godlike superintelligence
| turning us into paperclips yet, there are a lot of potential
| negative consequences to this kind of limited AI, and very
| little of value to society. We don't need more efficient ways
| to generate bullshit or propaganda.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| This has nothing to do with biology vs computer. It's simply
| the fear to lose your place; getting replaced by the cheaper
| poorer solution even. It could be AI, it could be the younger
| worker fresh from college, or someone from another country.
| Those who have to lose, will fear.
| omnicognate wrote:
| I'd suggest having a bit more respect for the people you
| disagree with.
|
| People are raising quite specific concerns about this
| technology and its potential impacts, and are doing so in a
| world that has been coping with the unintended consequences of
| new technologies since the industrial revolution. You may
| perfectly validly disagree with their concerns, but to ascribe
| them to an emotional need for humans to be "special" doesn't
| contribute to the debate. It's just incredibly condescending.
|
| You could do worse than to avoid making arguments of the form
| "your points are so wrong you can only possibly be making them
| out of spite/jealousy/insecurity/other" in all debates on
| principle.
| ram4jesus wrote:
| I don't want to live in a world where I'm tricked into reading
| things that were not directly created by other humans; I don't
| want to consume AI-generated or AI-infused content. Day by day,
| we're getting siloed by technology alienating us from the
| essential things that make us humans, like having meaningful
| interactions with others.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| It depends. Purely factual things, like reporting on the
| markets and a majority of objective news could be AI-assisted.
| Opinion pieces and reporting on subjective material (or trying
| to shape narratives), that's a whole different game and a topic
| that society is not ready to even begin tackling yet.
|
| There is no interaction to be had in the consumption of most
| material online, and any perceived interaction is surface-level
| as best.
| b3morales wrote:
| Factual reporting always has background, though. The bottom
| 1/2 to 2/3 of the article will be descriptive context, like
| what $SUBJECT did in a previous similar situation. I don't
| think the current AIs are up to the task of figuring out
| which accessory bits of information are most pertinent, and
| in what order.
| cpersona wrote:
| I feel the same way, but I was struggling to understand why.
| Could you explain why you would not want to read content
| generated by AI? If you're reading an article from CNET, it's
| probably for the information value and so therefore should be
| no different from that perspective. Are you looking for
| opinions or other color as well that the AI won't be able to
| provide?
| politician wrote:
| The problem with consuming AI generated content for the human
| reader in 2023, is that the content is more likely to be in
| the uncanny valley and requires the reader to exercise
| extreme vigilance to triple-check priors, facts and
| conclusions. There is no human author that can be held
| accountable for lies or misrepresentations of facts. There is
| only the language model immune to cancellation on Twitter.
|
| When the content on the other end is written by a sapient
| human (or, eventually, an AGI), as much vigilance is not
| needed. Vigilance is always necessary, but the level required
| for parsing the output of language models is much higher.
|
| This requirement is why publishers like CNET quietly mislead
| their audience and do not clearly mark each submission as AI
| generated. If it were not an abomination and an abuse of the
| reader to the gain of the publisher, then they would proudly
| claim to be doing it.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| -- for me it feel like the final nail in the coffin - in this
| area - i think - the race to the bottom removed ability of
| human to say what they want - be provocative - inspiring -
| forward thinking - now even the people who are supposed to
| thoughtfully give word view - journalist + reporters - seem
| to be at: what a camp wants to hear - not what they want to
| say - feel like AI generated is maybe the final straw in
| this? - hard to explain but feels bad --
| nottorp wrote:
| The thing is, ChatGPT can't generate text like a writer would.
| It can generate a lot of text like a minimum wage "copywriter"
| would though.
|
| Were you reading that stuff before "AI"? Why?
| chasingthewind wrote:
| Several years ago I realized that the answer to "why" for me
| was that I found it entertaining to read a lot of "news".
| When I examined this however I decided that for me it was
| largely a waste of time. The fact is a lot of what web sites
| (and print journalism before it) publish has never been more
| than entertainment thinly disguised as something important. I
| still scan the news sites every day to look for things that
| might actually be important information that I feel I should
| be aware, but otherwise I read a LOT less "news" than I used
| to.
| maegul wrote:
| I totally hear you.
|
| The interesting thing about this moment in AI, it seems, it's
| not how good the AIs are, but how bad the lower end of human
| work and ability is relative to the AI.
|
| In this case, how much SEO-farm rubbish content has been put
| out by salary-slave-humans and is it really better than being
| tricked into reading AI content?
|
| Two evils I know. But maybe there are deeper issues than the
| met existence of decent non-general-AIs ...?
| educaysean wrote:
| We've been reading articles edited by grammarly for many years
| on various websites all without realizing that we're consuming
| "AI-edited" content. I doubt AI-generated content will feel
| much different.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I would be more surprised if journalism isn't some form of
| computer generated garbage checked for a minimum level of sanity
| by an editor who couldn't care less.
| anonymousab wrote:
| That is more of an indictment of CNET's average article quality
| than anything else.
| bool3max wrote:
| And nobody noticed because nobody reads CNN.
| yrgulation wrote:
| [dead]
| jerf wrote:
| "ChatGPT, he says, doesn't have the ability to describe the
| feelings seen on a player's face when they win the World Cup,"
|
| Oh piffle. My wife and I roll our eyes and mock the sports
| reporters when they run down to the field and ask the question
| "How does it feel to have won the $CHAMPIONSHIP?" "Oh man,
| it's... it's just so incredible, you know, you work all your life
| to reach this height and... here I am... it's just... _sniffle_
| it 's really amazing. I have a really great team and I'd like to
| say HI MOM and... just.. oh man..." "We'll let you go join the
| celebration. There you have it, $OTHER_ANNOUNCER."
|
| (Our favorite is: "Hey, $COACH, what do you plan to do to win
| this game?" "Well, you know, that's a good question, and we've
| got a plan we're going to execute to, you know, go out there and
| play strong, we're gonna try to, you know, score points and, uh,
| prevent the other team from scoring points. We're pretty
| confident that if we can execute that plan we're going to win."
| In fairness, sometimes the answer is better than that. But a lot
| of the times, if you think about what they just said, that's what
| it amounts to without any particular loss. After all, even if
| they have a good answer, they're not terribly interested in
| giving it to you before the game....)
|
| I mean, I get it, I'm not so cold hearted as to not understand
| why they ask the question. It just doesn't happen to speak to us.
| But I would rate it more on the easy-mode side of sports writing,
| way easier than, say, being accurate about statistics or being
| correct about what strategy a team needs to pursue against
| another team for victory or what strategy they're going to
| pursue.
|
| Extremely, _extremely_ stereotyped responses. Can 't hardly be
| wrong, it's not like saying "excitedly" instead of
| "energetically" is going to be the difference between accurate
| and inaccurate. Easy mode for a transformer architecture.
| tyre wrote:
| You might enjoy "How Tracy Austin Broke my Heart"[0] by David
| Foster Wallace. He reads her (young tennis phenom)
| autobiography and it's filled with this type of language.
|
| He wonders if, in order to be a top tier athlete, they almost
| have to think this way. Simple, repeatable mantras drilled into
| their conscious and subconscious. Too much thinking would throw
| them off.
|
| [0]: https://bpb-
| us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/7/59784/fil...
| feintruled wrote:
| Funny observation! Soccer is even worse than this (in England
| at least, Italian players for example can seem very
| philosophical but it might be a side-effect of getting it
| through translation), with the added twist that you have to get
| your tenses all wrong for some reason.
|
| "So I was sat there waiting for the cross, and it comes over me
| head and I just hits it and bang it's in the back of the net"
|
| I think ChatGPT could easily replace commentators too. Of a
| missed shot - "He'll want to have got that on target!" - Oh he
| will? Such insight!
| paradygm wrote:
| When I explain to people what I love about baseball, it's that
| I know what is supposed to happen. It's when what isn't
| supposed to happen happens that makes it exciting. It's the
| same with these questions. We know the question but it's the
| response s, in particular from younger players (like collegiate
| athletes), that make the questions still worth asking and
| journalistically relevant, even if sometimes they come off as
| rehearsed.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| They obviously didn't ask chatgpt to act like a sports
| announcer. And, given the expressions on the players faces, as
| you point out, is completely predictable and has been described
| a million times with a high rate of consistency, I would expect
| it could completely and reliably describe the feelings seen on
| a players face when they win the World Cup.
| nindalf wrote:
| Sometimes sports interviews can be memorable like
|
| - I'm just here so I won't get fined.
|
| - It's only game, why you heff to be mad?
|
| - They had us in the first half, not gonna lie.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Practice?!
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| [dead]
| thunderbong wrote:
| First time I'm seeing the word 'piffle' being used outside of
| literature!
| benmanns wrote:
| GPT-3 Prompt:
|
| A broadcast from the Super Bowl:
|
| Reporter: "How does it feel to have won the Super Bowl?"
|
| Star quarterback:
|
| Completion:
|
| "It feels amazing. We worked so hard all season and to finally
| have won the championship is truly a dream come true. I'm so
| proud of my teammates and coaches for their dedication and hard
| work. It's been a long journey and I'm so grateful for this
| victory."
| jerf wrote:
| Heh, the only reason GPT-3 doesn't sound like my quote is no
| news reporter would be so crass as to directly transcribe a
| player like that. Which means this is correct for GPT-3 as
| well, in this context.
|
| (I was in a Zoom chat yesterday with the transcription on and
| I noticed it was doing the same thing. It was aware of the
| "ums" and "uhs" and sometimes those phonemes would be in the
| original transcription, resulting in the wrong words/phrases,
| but once the transcription stabilized they are edited out for
| the most part.)
| dctoedt wrote:
| Obligatory reference to _Bull Durham_ :
|
| Crash: "You're gonna have to learn your cliches. You're gonna
| have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're
| your friends. Write this down: We gotta play it one day at a
| time. ...."
|
| Nuke a.k.a. Meat: "That's pretty boring."
|
| Crash: "Of _course_ it 's boring, that's the point. Write it
| down."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v1m4JKH3AM
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Those boring canned responses (your sendup is absolutely
| hilarious by the way) are why I've always enjoyed Kimi
| Raikkonen's deadpan responses
|
| Interviewer: "The most exciting moment during the race
| weekend?"
|
| Kimi Raikkonen: "I think so it's the race start, always."
|
| Interviewer: "The most boring?"
|
| Kimi Raikkonen: "Now."
| blitzar wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPLetR8TPW8
|
| Interviewer: "Kimi, you missed the presentation by Pele at
| the front of the grid."
|
| Kimi Raikkonen: "I was having a shit."
| nottorp wrote:
| Let me guess, they sound exactly like the first page of google
| results on any term before ChatGPT. "Helpful" articles that all
| tell you the same generic useless stuff.
|
| Except now they're not on 3000 sites, they're on 3000 sites plus
| CNET.
| nottorp wrote:
| Ok, new lows, replying to myself:
|
| https://www.minitool.com/backup-tips/crucial-bx500-vs-mx500....
|
| Is this ChatGPT written or minimum wage copywriter written?
| Does it matter? It doesn't help me in the least and it's the
| first result for "crucial bx500 vs mx500".
| feintruled wrote:
| And of course we must ask 'cui bono?' for this atrocity and
| the answer soon comes with the button for the free download
| of the minitool disk clone tool. Prime SEO work.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yep. And it was a genuine search, I'm messing with an old
| macbook white that only has (finnicky) sata, i've been told
| the bx and mx will definitely work with it and I was trying
| to decide which one to get. I did find my answer, but at
| the end of the first search results page on a ... reddit
| thread. This was duckduckgo btw.
|
| Edit: seriously, doesn't it sound exactly like ChatGPT
| articles?
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