[HN Gopher] Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news ar...
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Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
Author : asnyder
Score : 77 points
Date : 2023-07-20 12:37 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I'd love to hear somebody try to explain how this won't
| negatively impact the labor market for journalists.
|
| My guess is that the argument will be that the "tools will simply
| help augment rather than replace the writer."
|
| We know, however, that some small segment of implementations will
| actually in fact, cause someone to be fired or replaced, and
| things will get slightly worse for the consumer.
|
| An alternative explanation will be "well The writing wasn't very
| good anyway, it was all a regurgitation of the same thing over
| and over anyways", so "nothing of value has been lost."
|
| I'd love to hear people saying hey maybe let's not do this in
| order to maintain a human system run by humans for the benefit of
| humans and that includes paying humans for labor (when you could
| actually get equivalent labor from a machine) because it's
| important to keep humans alive and creating communities and
| supporting each other.
| visarga wrote:
| Not worried about low quality text from AI. Soon enough it will
| be hard to find a human who writes better than a
| human+AI+plugins team. And an AI+plugins system will be better
| than average human.
|
| We need to have AI monitor the news and rate their level of
| factuality by consistency analysis and reputation scoring.
| Journalists in the loop, working with AI to find
| disinformation. Then we can feel safer about propaganda-LLMs,
| they are inevitable.
| holoduke wrote:
| Good journalism is also a formvof activism. Not sure if that
| exists in AI writers.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Which would sadly make AI writing more attractive to the
| C-suite rather than less. It would produce writing to match
| their current preference.
| atlantic wrote:
| You mean, bad journalism is a form of activism. Good
| journalism aims at objectivity, and allows readers to form
| their own opinions.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This has already been said, though you seemingly didn't like
| it. A journalist is not the same thing as a writer. They
| develop ideas, conduct investigations, interview subjects and
| witnesses, travel to locations, check and verify the work of
| other journalists by calling sources to see if they're told the
| same thing the second time. They maintain relationships with
| sources.
|
| Let's imagine that, currently, a journalist spends 50% of their
| time conducting investigations and 50% of their time sitting at
| a keyboard typing up their findings. The ideal hope for a
| technology like this is the future then consists of 90% of a
| journalist's time being spent conducting investigations and 10%
| telling a text generator to type up the findings for them and
| cleaning it up. Overall, more time spent investigating and
| following up should result in higher-quality, more interesting
| work.
|
| It may _appear_ to consumers at our end that the work of a
| journalist is just writing because the writing is all we see,
| but this is not the case.
| theknocker wrote:
| [dead]
| thumbuddy wrote:
| Anyone else looking at these things as propaganda machines that
| have zero liability? "Ewps da AI said to stage a coup again lul
| sorry we fix it 4 u mb"
| hervature wrote:
| > I'd love to hear people saying hey maybe let's not do this in
| order to maintain a human system run by humans for the benefit
| of humans and that includes paying humans for labor (when you
| could actually get equivalent labor from a machine) because
| it's important to keep humans alive and creating communities
| and supporting each other.
|
| You are aware that, prior to refrigeration, people would
| harvest ice from the Arctic? Honestly, I don't care they all
| lost their jobs if it means millions of people don't die during
| heat waves.
| sva_ wrote:
| > prior to refrigeration, people would harvest ice from the
| Arctic
|
| Umm, are you sure about that? Source?
| rirarobo wrote:
| Not necessarily from the artic, but it's true that ice
| harvest and trade was at one time in history a major
| industry.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
| baron816 wrote:
| There's a lot of work journalists _want_ to do, but just don 't
| have the capacity for because these types of articles take
| precedence. It could higher value, but riskier/time intensive
| work (ie investigative work). It's possible that news rooms
| will be able to generate more content like this and provide
| them that profit buffer to then allow their human journalists
| to go pursue more complex stories.
|
| I have no idea though. Predictions are hard to make, especially
| when they're about the future.
| _djo_ wrote:
| That would be true if newsrooms keep the same number of
| journalists on staff, so that they're freed to conduct more
| investigative work.
|
| Looking at the trend in global newsrooms and the way they've
| already been gutted in the name of dividends how likely do
| you think that's going to be?
|
| More like this will be used as an excuse to cut even more
| journalists and, worse, to run local and regional news
| without any journalists at all, with the few who remain being
| as under pressure and overworked as ever.
| echelon wrote:
| How many humans do you want employed as butter churners?
|
| I imagine that the new AI-enabled jobs are going to have so
| much more autonomy and that we'll see a switch from capital
| intensive businesses employing lots of people (eg. Hollywood
| studios) to lots of tiny indie houses with fewer than a dozen
| folks, building exactly what they want with freedom.
| dangerwill wrote:
| > How many humans do you want employed as butter churners?
|
| This gets said about every wave of technological driven job
| loss and it ignores that it is quite difficult for people to
| change careers in their mid life. Laid off auto workers in
| the 80s and 90s didn't switch to other manufacturing jobs or
| "learn to code". They fell down the ladder into service work
| and became destitute. And the difference with LLMs is that
| they threaten essentially every human not working in manual
| labour with the same fate.
|
| > I imagine that the new AI-enabled jobs are going to have so
| much more autonomy and that we'll see a switch from capital
| intensive businesses employing lots of people (eg. Hollywood
| studios) to lots of tiny indie houses with fewer than a dozen
| folks, building exactly what they want with freedom.
|
| I'm sorry but I can't reconcile this with my view of what is
| actually going on. The entire point of LLMs being introduced
| in the film industry is to remove humans from the equation to
| increase profit margins and avoid having to pay actor/writer
| residuals. That is where all of the investment money is
| going, not some utopia where the investment money is being
| split between AI studios churning out "content" and some
| small human, indie studios making "art".
|
| Also, one of the ways the indie film scene has survived is as
| a proving ground for up and coming actors/actresses (it being
| part of the career ladder for the acting profession provides
| a supply of actors/actresses despite low pay) who can then go
| on to more mainstream films and make their living. If we cede
| the mainstream to AI then that career progression breaks down
| and indie films become wholly personal passion projects by
| folks with enough money to have an extremely expensive hobby.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| A knock-on effect of non-retrainable workers being
| displaced is that they become convenient vectors for
| authoritarianism.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| > How many humans do you want employed as butter churners?
|
| More than exist today probably.
|
| We should not be regularly eliminating slightly less
| efficient processes that use human workers, for completely
| alienated processes that are worse, that use fewer workers.
|
| Self checkout is a perfect example of this. It's worse for
| everyone except for grocery store owners.
| solardev wrote:
| As a shopper, self checkout is _wonderful_. It 's so much
| faster and easier than waiting for a single cashier or two.
| Especially the ones with a scan gun, so you don't have to
| fight the stupid countertop scanner.
|
| As for lost jobs, should we really be propping up
| unnecessary jobs that really don't do much except poorly
| substituting a machine? Whether it's checkout or journalism
| or coding or politics... if a computer can do it better,
| why not let it and free up the human for other things?
|
| Technology leading to job losses and changes has been
| happening for a couple centuries now. It has real social
| impacts, but the answer can't just be "pretend it didn't
| happen and keep employing them". Maybe our economic and
| educational systems need to evolve to keep pace, rather
| than keeping people stuck in assembly line monotony just to
| keep them meaninglessly employed.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > As a shopper, self checkout is wonderful.
|
| Not everyone thinks so. I know quite a lot of people
| (including myself) who hate self-checkout.
|
| > As for lost jobs, should we really be propping up
| unnecessary jobs that really don't do much except poorly
| substituting a machine?
|
| No, but equally, should we be kicking people out on the
| street with no means to support themselves?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| >why not let it and free up the human for other things?
|
| Cause this has never been the majority outcome in the
| history of technology
|
| The outcome in 90%? of mechanization/automation is not
| upskilling - it's displacement.
|
| Work gets outsourced to cheaper labor areas or you're now
| a baby sitter instead of a tradesperson that is more
| easily replaced because you have few skills.
|
| All the "meritocracy" goes out the window when there's no
| need for human expertise - so everyone is the same
| faceless commodity that simply enforces the rules of
| whatever mechanical system they are now monitoring.
|
| At the end of the day, where once a person went to be a
| cashier for 8-10 hours a day having conversations and
| fixing problems and helping people - now you're on your
| own waiting for the one person who is running the self-
| checkout to come over and fix the weight error because
| you thought you typed in the UPC for a pear but you
| accidentally typed the UPC for a watermelon and the
| system required human assistance
|
| Everything is worse and you're doing someone else's labor
| and they now have fewer job options.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _you're doing someone else's labor_
|
| I'm doing my own labor. Personally I often don't want to
| have conversations while doing my grocery shopping,
| especially not the fake corporate kind. Having to have
| such conversations as an employee of a supermarket was a
| very unpleasant experience, lacking in dignity.
|
| You make a lot of good points, but others are extremely
| half baked.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Nothing half baked about it
|
| I have regular ongoing relationships with the employees
| at the Giant (Grocery store) near my house and know their
| names and who they are as people and they know me and my
| kids and it's great.
|
| To the extent where together, myself, Sandi (Night
| Manager), the Asst Manager and some of the staff all
| worked together to help get a wonderful man back on his
| feet that was struggling and begging and living outside
| nearby. (edit:In this case he was begging, and I sat and
| talked with him about his situation and getting him what
| he needed for that day. Then I recruited the staff to
| watch for him and I would leave a bag of food every week
| but they needed to give it to him, so that's what they
| did. He ended up moving in with family and I saw him
| again (at that same Giant) but instead he was shopping
| with his family and he told me that we all collectively
| saved his life.)
|
| So yes building community is important and you can do so
| with the individual people that work within these
| corporate systems to great effect and for the tangible
| and measurable benefit of human flourishing today right
| now.
|
| edit:I can't reply to comments on this for some reason
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You are assuming your interactions set the standard for
| everyone else. A story about how you helped someone is a
| nice anecdote, but it's not a good basis for
| extrapolation as you've been doing. I help people too, it
| does not follow that everyone can or should do things the
| way I do.
|
| The specifically half-baked thing is the idea that by
| doing something for yourself you're stealing someone
| else's labor opportunity. I bag my own groceries (at any
| checkout, self-serve or not), for 3 reasons: I want it
| done in a particular way, I don't like being waited on in
| general, and I get exercise from humping a heavy bag of
| groceries home in a backpack.
|
| By your logic I'm forcing the bagging assistant to move
| to another register and depriving autoworkers of their
| economic future. Your heart is definitely in the right
| place, but I don't want to be part of your church.
| solardev wrote:
| What is Giant? The bicycle company?
|
| Do you mean you and a few employees there just got
| together and started, what, a shared pot of money for
| emergencies? Can you please share more about how that
| happened (or maybe even a blog post)? I'd love to try
| something similar.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| See my edit above. It wouldn't let me reply for some
| reason.
|
| Basically, I just took it upon myself to help this guy
| but I needed the staff to help. Because I already knew
| them over years of interaction, it was an easy
| conversation/ask that they agreed to and we were
| successful in giving this guy a hand up. No govt or
| coercion or anything needed.
| echelon wrote:
| > > why not let it and free up the human for other
| things?
|
| > Cause this has never been the majority outcome in the
| history of technology
|
| Work isn't disappearing.
|
| The US has great employment numbers that have been stable
| except for a few systemic shocks. With globalization,
| more people worldwide have been employed and lifted out
| of poverty than ever before.
|
| Would you rather pull a random job out of a hat from
| today or fifty to a hundred years ago?
|
| Self-employment is also a rising labor trend. What's more
| fulfilling than being your own boss?
| solardev wrote:
| In years of using self checkout, I've required human
| assistance only a handful of times, maybe 3 or 4 minutes
| total over all the years. That's still a huge improvement
| over waiting for cashiers. Perhaps your experiences were
| different, but for me they are a godsend. That's not
| really the point though.
|
| About the jobs, yes, we are in agreement about the
| displacement. I'm saying we need better systems to deal
| with that displacement at the social/national level, not
| at the micro level of an individual job going away one at
| a time.
|
| There's just no way capitalist companies are going to
| keep unnecessary labor employed. Staff are a cost that
| eat away at profits. I'm not saying that's a nice way to
| think about it, but that's how they work, and unless we
| can directly tackle that part of the mindset (that humans
| are there just as an input to some owner's dollars out),
| we won't really solve the issue. Bandaiding them through
| forced employment laws won't really work as our companies
| just become less efficient and companies outsource. You
| can't really have a protected economy like that unless
| you're also willing to limit outsourcing (which I'd be
| for, but capitalists who control the government aren't).
|
| I would love to get paid a living wage doing something
| less brain-wracking than coding (like journalism or
| barista-ing). But our economic system doesn't make that
| easy, or even possible. It's going to get worse over time
| without deep structural change...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| >I'm saying we need better systems to deal with that
| displacement at the social/national level, not at the
| micro level of an individual job going away one at a time
|
| Why not both? You can decide whether you will support or
| boycott organizations and systems that actively pursue
| these things, while also lobbying and voting and building
| organizations that pursue mutual voluntary organization.
| Might mean you have to change your lifestyle though and
| most people don't want to do that.
|
| >Bandaiding them through forced employment laws won't
| really work as our companies just become less efficient
| and companies outsource. You can't really have a
| protected economy like that unless you're also willing to
| limit outsourcing (which I'd be for, but capitalists who
| control the government aren't).
|
| Literally nobody suggested this in this thread, me or
| otherwise.
|
| >There's just no way capitalist companies are going to
| keep unnecessary labor employed.
|
| I would challenge you to imagine some solutions that are
| neither capitalist nor governmental. If you can't think
| of anything beyond these two options then I suggest
| reading more about mutual-voluntary organization.
| solardev wrote:
| > Literally nobody suggested this in this thread, me or
| otherwise.
|
| Sorry I wasn't clear! I can see how that looks like a
| strawman... what I meant is that _I_ would like to see a
| more protectionist economy (by the government). Apologies
| for the unclear phrasing.
|
| > I would challenge you to imagine some solutions that
| are neither capitalist nor governmental. If you can't
| think of anything beyond these two options then I suggest
| reading more about mutual-voluntary organization.
|
| > Why not both? You can decide whether you will support
| or boycott organizations and systems that actively pursue
| these things, while also lobbying and voting and building
| organizations that pursue mutual voluntary organization.
| Might mean you have to change your lifestyle though and
| most people don't want to do that.
|
| I do try to support community organizations of various
| forms (State Farm, REI, 501s, ESOPs, food co-ops,
| solidarity economies, church-charities for disaster
| relief and homelessness, etc.).
|
| But I think there are some problems at scale that are
| uniquely suited for government-like entities with
| national policymaking reach, and technology-driven job
| displacement is one of them. I'm not enough of an
| anarchist to see a well-functioning government (which, to
| be clear, the USA does not have) as terribly different
| from other forms of democratic decision-making. Rather
| than having a bunch of small shadow governments parallel
| to the federal and state ones, I really wish we could
| transform those actual governments into something with
| more direct democracy, especially at the local levels.
| That may or may not happen in my lifetime, but I think
| that's a better long-term solution than a bunch of small
| scrappy NGOs and alt-societies popping in and out of
| existence, almost always with very limited reach and
| impact. Sometimes they feel more like performance theater
| than actual social forces. I think one can only witness
| so many Occupy-like uprisings before starting to
| seriously doubt their effectiveness.
|
| I believe it takes a certain economy of scale that only
| government (and huge multinational corps) have access to,
| that's needed to be truly transformative. Some unions
| have reskilling programs, for example, but it's not
| really enough to save an entire profession/industry.
|
| But... I would love to be proven wrong. Do you have any
| examples of non-governmental cooperative/democratic
| organizations that can effect large-scale socioeconomic
| change?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > How many humans do you want employed as butter churners?
|
| I think that's the wrong question. The better question is how
| can be ensure that people aren't just out of work and can
| still be able to afford to live?
| polski-g wrote:
| They shouldn't. They should go work in a different
| industry.
|
| The butter churners didn't just die, they became
| professionals doing something else.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| That's not the reality of real industrial displacements.
| Rust belt towns in the US and coal towns in Britain are
| miserable places - their populations didn't adapt when
| the industries that employed 90% percent of their working
| population disappeared, the quality of life in these
| areas just plummeted.
|
| People often adapt when big changes come to their
| industries. They don't adapt when their entire
| livelihoods disappear. LLMs look to have the potential to
| do this not just to a segment of one part of the economy
| in some regions, but to the entire knowledge economy the
| world over.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > They should go work in a different industry.
|
| This is more problematic than it seems, though. What if
| there isn't enough work in other industries to absorb the
| people? If AI works out as proponents want, this seems
| likely because lots of jobs, across a wide swath of
| industries, will be eliminated.
|
| There's also the issue that not everyone is suited for
| every kind of job.
| antegamisou wrote:
| > My guess is that the argument will be that the "tools will
| simply help augment rather than replace the writer."
|
| Yet they always end up augmenting the scammer, grifter and
| undermine those that want to remain articulate.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Journalism is a lot more than just turning press releases and
| such into articles. In fact, making it cheaper to churn those
| out will free up money for real journalism -- investigations,
| interviews, analysis, opinions.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| No, it won't.
|
| News media today are nothing more but a vehicle to bring
| attention to advertisement. The majority of people do not
| read lengthy articles anyway, only headlines. Investigative
| journalism is wildly expensive and not cost-effective given
| said objective.
|
| News media are anachronistic anyway. People are stuck in
| childish and dumbed down variants of "my parents told me so".
|
| What is necessary (and severely lacking) is _two-way_ (or
| rather, public) communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling
| people to form well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive
| constructive criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating
| self-reflection on a society-level.
| guilamu wrote:
| 'What is necessary (and severely lacking) is two-way
| communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling people to form
| well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive constructive
| criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating self-
| reflection on a society-level. '
|
| Can't agree more, but how? Any insight?
| Loquebantur wrote:
| One first needs to appreciate the many attempts failing
| at it. Reddit, Twitter, social media... They all were bad
| to begin with, but deliberately made worse still, to the
| point of not fulfilling their _raison d 'etre_ anymore.
|
| You need a functional format for group discussions
| (existed, killed off). You need functional standards for
| civil discussion (exist, see science, people somehow
| forgot). _And you need to realize, anonymity is anathema
| to having a civil sphere_ (You don 't need to give your
| real name, but for social self-regulation to work, an
| identity is necessary).
|
| AI quite possibly could help a great deal with this.
| Sensible automated (and consistently reasoned/reviewable)
| moderation of internet forums is wildly underexplored.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Investigative journalism, winding up in a newspaper, is
| indeed outdated. However, things like documentaries and
| videos and such are a modern way to use those skills
| Descon wrote:
| I think they're certainly a place for publicly funded and
| accountable news media like CBC or BBC News, where the
| profit motive isn't there by the nature of funding (Of
| course, this model has its own separate set of issues that
| it needs to overcome as well. But IMO it's a better base to
| build off)
| dahwolf wrote:
| Indeed, for example turning Tweets and Tiktok videos into
| articles.
| notatoad wrote:
| >well The writing wasn't very good anyway, it was all a
| regurgitation of the same thing over and over anyways
|
| well, yes. you clearly understand the problem, but stating it
| dismissively doesn't refute it.
|
| paying people to do minimal rewrites of press releases or wire
| service articles is not productive work. at all. people would
| be better served by reading the original source.
|
| a job that requires no skill and provides no benefit isn't
| really a job, it's just a selectively-applied welfare program,
| disproportionately provided to the people with the best
| connections. putting a stop to those sorts of "jobs" is not a
| bad thing.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| " it's just a selectively-applied welfare program,
| disproportionately provided to the people with the best
| connections. putting a stop to those sorts of "jobs" is not a
| bad thing."
|
| As long as you have somewhere else to put them...or else they
| will go on another type of welfare program where they don't
| have to do any work.
|
| That is the issue here...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Well, those people who wrote the 234th article about a lionesse
| potentially on the loose in Berlin today will definitely have a
| hard competing with AI...
| [deleted]
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Writers will be offered a one-time payment for their writing
| sample, which will be used by publishers, in perpetuity, to
| generate content in that style.
|
| No royalties.
|
| Also, no further employment.
|
| The shame of it is, this is actually slightly better than the
| current state of things, where no one who contributed writing
| to the training sets in any form is receiving compensation. But
| it is the same issue as one of the sticking points in the SAG-
| AFTRA strike.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Nobody gives a shit about style for news reporting, which is
| about fact gathering. AI-generated style imitation will hurt
| opinion columnists, but they're a complete waste of oxygen
| anyway.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The endgame of this is having to pay enormous sums up-front
| for training data of dubious value. Like if you dictated that
| all creativity had to be paid for purely through Kickstarter.
| srsQ wrote:
| [dead]
| tivert wrote:
| > I'd love to hear somebody try to explain how this won't
| negatively impact the labor market for journalists.
|
| According to the OP: "[t]he tool...can take in information --
| details of current events, for example -- and generate news
| content." IMHO, that's not really journalism _at all_ , which I
| would define as _gathering_ that information and _deciding_
| what bits are worthy of being reported (e.g. what 's new and
| interesting vs what's already well-known and understood).
|
| Honestly, this tool seems like another example of techies
| redefining the problem to what their program can do, instead of
| writing a tool to solve the problem. I would imagine that the
| "writing" part of a news article happens nearly automatically
| as a side effect of all the other activities a journalist has
| to do. Sort of like how the "writing a program" part of
| developing software will nearly automatically fall out of the
| task of writing a sufficiently precise specification. A tool
| that can translate such a specification into code is a
| nothingburger (despite its maker's inevitable hype about
| rendering software engineers obsolete), because that's not
| where the work is.
|
| > I'd love to hear people saying hey maybe let's not do this in
| order to maintain a human system run by humans for the benefit
| of humans and that includes paying humans for labor (when you
| could actually get equivalent labor from a machine) because
| it's important to keep humans alive and creating communities
| and supporting each other.
|
| I totally agree on this.
|
| I might be fruitful to develop an AI tasked with hunting down
| and exterminating software engineers and tech executives who
| seek develop AI to replace human labor. /s
| ecf wrote:
| Maybe a controversial opinion but the world needs news that
| contains no opinions, no fluff, no guesses at what that piece
| of news may hold for the future, no interpretation whatsoever.
| Basically I want journalists to not journal at all and just
| give the headline.
|
| If this requires AI, so be it. I will pay for it.
| davidguetta wrote:
| That doesn't matter in the end.
|
| 1/ Technology has always disrupted labor market so I mean
| that's not even a question this will happen.
|
| 2/ It's not that sad: I've worked in journaism and the reality
| is that 80% of news article are already most of the time a sad
| copypasta of a single main source of info such as reuters / AFP
| in france. Most of journalism is already noise.
|
| Maybe that will help recenter journalism on real investigative
| missions rather than this current low value state.
| paganel wrote:
| Unfortunately local news doesn't find its place in
| Reuters/AFP news dispatched, and so losing local news will
| basically mean an epistemic black hole when it comes to the
| stuff physically closest to us.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| >That doesn't matter in the end.
|
| Doesn't matter to who?
|
| I'm pretty sure it matters a lot to people working in a
| newsroom
| davidguetta wrote:
| Sure but once again so what ? Change is part of life
| pixl97 wrote:
| So is extinction, but I'd rather put that off till some
| time long after I'm gone.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| We know that change, specifically in employment status in
| America, can and often does mean the difference between
| life or death.
|
| So yes it's extremely important that employment changes
| not be thrust on people if we can at all avoid it as a
| society.
|
| You should care more about the plight of others.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Well you said newsroom, which is about news.
|
| How is the LLM getting the latest news? It doesn't (yet)
| really have eyes and ears etc.
|
| And news travels fast, or at least people would like it to.
|
| Also opinion pieces. I have 0 interest in the "opinion" of
| an LLM, but I am interested in the opinion of at least some
| human beings.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| As a journalist, I hate writing. I like hunting down facts and
| details, the actual writing part is miserable and boring.
| There's constant sweating over how much context to include so
| that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the
| important stuff. I've never used an LLM to write anything, but
| I have seriously considered doing a dense infodump and telling
| it to ask me up to 5 contextual questions before spitting out a
| report.
|
| Editing other people's stuff is even worse, because many
| writers aren't burdened by editorial concerns and don't bother
| to put in the effort to make their story coherent and
| interesting in the first draft. Also the money is terrible
| unless you are lucky enough to work in a corporate newsroom.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > There's constant sweating over how much context to include
| so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying
| the important stuff
|
| Won't help you when you have to edit the AI output because...
|
| > Editing other people's stuff is even worse, because many
| writers aren't burdened by editorial concerns and don't
| bother to put in the effort to make their story coherent and
| interesting
|
| So in the end, what do you gain?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| ChatGPT writes better and takes feedback better than many
| real people. I would rather fine-tune and LLM on my won
| writing and a collection of source documents. That way I
| could focus on information-gathering, write an extremely
| terse summary of what I consider to be the key points, and
| save myself many hours of misery writing boilerplate.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Sometimes there is value to having someone else write the
| first draft that you can then edit.
|
| Personally I think this is going to put a lot of
| journalists out of work. Many of them aren't investigative
| journalists and do mostly write, and their days are
| numbered.
| shoubidouwah wrote:
| I think there's a difference between the concept of journalism
| and content creation / copywriting. Both come from the same
| school programs in a way, but while the latter is pretty
| trivially replaced by AI, the former is a combination of
| curiosity, multi-step investigation, physical ferreting of
| information and sensations, and emotionally charged writing to
| get a point across in a way that is recognizable as art when
| well done. Journalism is safe from AI for now, but was not safe
| from cost-cutting and (infotainementization?) cultural
| debasement.
|
| A potential upside is: lowering the marginal cost of page
| filling drivel so much in conjunction with declining
| advertisement revenue, the whole industry collapses in on
| itself, taking opinion pieces with it. The baseline for getting
| out of journalism school would be "write better than an AI",
| and the reporter jobs themselves become high status / high
| difficulty again.
|
| A potential downside is: nothing written ever matters again,
| all information is a rehashed AP cutting with prompt
| engineering, and AP / Reuters become a set of controlled
| bottlenecks.
|
| The scary thing is: this will be decided by whether the paying
| customer wants to be informed, or feel the warm glow of
| confirmation bias?
| tivert wrote:
| > the whole industry collapses in on itself, taking opinion
| pieces with it.
|
| That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Opinion
| pieces will be the last to go, after everything of value has
| been destroyed.
|
| And honestly, not all opinion pieces are bad. Most are crap
| partisan hackery and outrage-bait, but some are very valuable
| (e.g. those unconnected with ideological bickering, those
| struggling to explain a point of view to hostile audiences,
| those "swimming against the tide," etc.).
| htrp wrote:
| > Opinion pieces will be the last to go, after everything
| of value has been destroyed.
|
| Wouldn't opinion pieces be the first to go?
|
| We're already in a world where most opinion pieces are part
| of carefully orchestrated PR campaigns (sometimes even
| wholly ghostwritten) meant to drive policy discussion in
| one way or another. If you can AI write this and ascribe it
| to a reputable source, why wouldn't the industry adopt this
| as standard?
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Wouldn't opinion pieces be the first to go?
|
| No because people are interested in the opinions of
| influencers.
| tivert wrote:
| > Wouldn't opinion pieces be the first to go?
|
| No, because they're _relatively cheap_ to produce.
| Everyone has an opinion and many people compelled to
| share and argue about them.
|
| The hard, expensive thing is gathering facts, doing deep
| investigation, or cultivating relationships so the facts
| come to you. That's why the intersection between blogs
| and journalists has always been opinion and punditry,
| since no one has the time to do anything else when they
| have a day job.
|
| > We're already in a world where most opinion pieces are
| part of carefully orchestrated PR campaigns (sometimes
| even wholly ghostwritten) meant to drive policy
| discussion in one way or another. If you can AI write
| this and ascribe it to a reputable source, why wouldn't
| the industry adopt this as standard?
|
| Isn't that an argument _for_ the idea that "opinion
| pieces will be the last to go"?
| skepticATX wrote:
| There isn't enough information to make that call. If it's
| perfect then sure, it'd impact things.
|
| Essentially what we know is that Google (with a financial
| incentive to make exaggerated claims) has demoed something to
| media execs (with little to no background required to
| critically evaluate these claims).
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I'd agree with this, but...
|
| I think it's safe to say the intention of every party here
| seems to be aligned with the notable exclusion of an actual
| writer
|
| Writers and journalists aren't quoted in the article and I
| see no reference to them being included in the product pitch
| (article only discusses executives being given demos)
|
| So in terms of incentive alignment, the person being impacted
| seems to be the least involved.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Real journalists investigate and discover facts and create new
| content: "news". But many people working as "journalists" just
| re-write what other people have reported. The first category
| can never be replaced by a machine, because the machine can
| only repeat material it has been fed, or make up lies. The
| second category should be replaced by machines.
|
| There's unlimited ventures for investigation for anybody who
| wants to be a journalist, but it takes much more work than
| rewrites. I read a lot of newspapers, and the news part consist
| of about 50% rewrites from other sources, 40% mindlessly
| repeating press releases from companies and government, and at
| most 10% investigating and actually reporting new knowledge.
| Even without machines we already have enough tech that re-
| writes shouldn't be needed.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| So then you just chose to respond with my final example:
|
| " An alternative explanation will be "well The writing wasn't
| very good anyway, it was all a regurgitation of the same
| thing over and over anyways", so "nothing of value has been
| lost.""
|
| In fact something has been lost, which is a human being is
| now less able to feed themselves and their family and take a
| vacation and create something valuable.
|
| The fact that you and others don't care about that outcome is
| the problem.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If a person is a journalist, then that person has the
| capacity to conduct investigations, make interviews and
| such things that an AI can never do. If the person is only
| able to make re-writes, then he or she is not a journalist.
| If the AI is good at making rewrites, that will free up
| time for journalists to focus on making more quality
| reporting.
| solardev wrote:
| We're probably not very far away from an AI being able to
| email and make calls and do those interviews. Or create a
| Zoom avatar for itself.
|
| Is it going to produce Pulutzwr-winning articles right
| off the bat? Probably not. But I could easily see it
| replacing the more mundane everyday articles, especially
| when it's just regurgitating some press release or new
| study or product launch.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| There's a whole other dynamic when a person interviews
| another person that AI can't replace. I don't see it as
| feasible. Every interview is voluntary, you can't force
| anybody to be interviewed by an AI and most subjects
| would decline. Those who accepted to be interviewed by an
| AI would be seen as people basically interviewing
| themselves.
|
| "when it's just regurgitating some press release or new
| study or product launch."
|
| Maybe news media should start moving away from this
| model? They can link to the press release and be done
| with it. The valuable thing they do is their own
| reporting and investigating.
| solardev wrote:
| I doubt the AI would voluntarily self identify as such,
| unless we force it to. Some of the interviewees may never
| know the difference.
|
| But yeah agreed, wish papers just republished wire
| stories or press releases and spent what little staff
| they still have on original (ideally local) reporting.
| goodgoblin wrote:
| b/c the 'writing' part is at the end of the process of
| gathering the news.
| NVHacker wrote:
| In summary: under the pretext of showcasing a writing assistant /
| tool, Google scares the (s... out of) newspaper companies by
| showing them an AI that can write news articles all by itself.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Or, it's Google firing a shot across the bow of newspaper
| companies that think Google should pay to use their content.
|
| Google's modus operandi has always been to automate people out
| of the equation. This lets Google have its own news operation,
| without paying for all those pesky journalists.
|
| I wonder if the AI will eventually write stories about any of
| the bad things that Google does, or just the good things.
| dogman144 wrote:
| There are interesting angles to this. Newsrooms started shifting
| journalists over to contractors a while back because of risk from
| libel lawsuits, even if defendable. Gawker and Peter Thiel
| started this trend.
|
| This contractor shift paired with the revenue pressure from the
| internet's impact has made journalism a real tough industry.
|
| I wonder how LLMs writing news would impact the contractor/libel
| situation. I could see it freeing up resources to then pay w2
| journalists worth protecting for bigger stories. Or maybe LLMs
| writing the controversial stories and seeing who gets sued in
| that situation.
| choas wrote:
| just wondering if this AI is aware of that Google will sunset the
| AI within the next two years, and if it will then write its own
| farewell article
| civilized wrote:
| America's most prestigious news organization is reporting that an
| AI can write news articles, with no evidence other than Google's
| say-so.
|
| We seem to be reaching peak generative AI hype.
| morkalork wrote:
| I guess this is Google's way of telling media companies in Canada
| / Australia how they feel about link taxes. I wonder where they
| got their training data though..
| summerlight wrote:
| Sounds like a ChatGPT trained for journalist use cases? I don't
| think the goal is to auto populate people's feed with some
| generative contents. Google probably doesn't want to be legally
| liable with all those machine generated articles...
| Philorandroid wrote:
| Soon, journalists the world over will be in contest with a
| purpose-built machine for the fakest and least-grounded (but
| most-believable-sounding) content.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > a purpose-built machine for the fakest and least-grounded
| (but most-believable-sounding) content
|
| truthiness.ai
|
| edit: wow, it's actually registered.
| jononomo wrote:
| I suppose all a news writer has to do now is tell the AI what
| happened and then then the AI can tell everyone else what
| happened.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Is good quality journalism really that bad to invest in?
|
| These days I have to scroll through a lot of fillers in
| articles just to get into the real story.
| esafak wrote:
| So... have one AI to generate the article and another to
| condense it back to the summary it was created from :)
| akomtu wrote:
| In reality: an AI bot watches the stream of twits, picks those
| that fit its narrative (preprompt) and tells the users what to
| think.
| pengaru wrote:
| I look forward to the "hallucinations" defense in explaining away
| the rampant fake news and market manipulation of our future
| automated news sources...
| efields wrote:
| > Some executives who saw Google's pitch described it as
| unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential
| matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort
| that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.
|
| Google engineers: I'm I so out of touch?
|
| [ beat ]
|
| Ge: No, surely it is the users who are wrong.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Good, this will cause media to rethink their relationship with
| Google.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Here is the template to write a news article...
|
| State some facts as reported by others (never link to supporting
| documents only summarize them)
|
| Quote from expert or eyewitness on why this is important
|
| Quote from other expert why this might not be important (optional
| as this might make the story not truly news worthy)
|
| State that confusing aspects of the story are "unclear"
|
| Fill the rest of the story from articles on the same subject even
| if not related (link to your publication only)
| darth_avocado wrote:
| You forgot the part where you cover all of this up with ads
| that actively block you from reading any of it.
| joshka wrote:
| Make sure to state the names of anyone you've reached out for
| comment that haven't gotten back to you.
| leet_thow wrote:
| Also, never forget to mention at least once, advocates,
| activists, experts and lawmakers.
| junon wrote:
| Also don't name the expert. It's forbidden.
| rickette wrote:
| Painfully accurate
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| Brendinooo wrote:
| > The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can
| take in information -- details of current events, for example --
| and generate news content, the people said, speaking on the
| condition of anonymity to discuss the product.
|
| Doesn't this already exist in some form? I remember headlines
| from a few years ago about how stuff like wire reports about
| sports games could be generated from a box score.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| The Simpsons called it the DJ 3000[0], complete with the
| executive threatening to replace people with it. It's not
| exactly a novel idea.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_VwP8yf5TI
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Of course not, but I thought it was already more than just an
| idea.
| basitmakine wrote:
| I manage a network of news websites. We've played with few and
| currently using WordAssistant.org/news-ai. I wonder how will it
| compare to existing tools.
| catsarebetter wrote:
| Ironic when they shadow ban AI articles. I've written articles
| using 90% AI, ranked the same day for keywords, then they've
| disappeared the next day.
| [deleted]
| cboswel1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| I built a simple and ugly website that generates AI news based on
| updates from frameworks and libraries, and content that is
| trending on reddit/HN using the OpenAI API. Yes, it has ads.
|
| Some things that I've learned so far:
|
| - The AI is too gullible. If I ask it to write a short summary of
| an article, if the source article is trying to shill a product or
| service, the AI will replicate the salesman discourse. I tried
| adjusting the prompt to see if I could make it more critical of
| content that it is analyzing (by telling it ahead of time that
| the post might be trying to push a product/service).
|
| - Costs are ludricously low. It costs like 1 cent per 15
| articles.
|
| - My next experiment will be with local news. I'm building some
| feeds with public information from my town (the town's hall
| official news, the legislators weekly meeting notes, weather
| reports, waze, etc), and based on that make it generate news
| items. The thing about it is that its sources will be (nearly)
| primary - it will not copy content from other journalists (apart
| from the official prefecture news, which I will need to tell the
| AI that will be biased towards the current administration). When
| analyzing the local records, it might be able to catch shady
| stuff that regular journalists would not notice. Imagine feeding
| some buying orders from the town and asking the AI ("is something
| illegal going on here" or "are any of these items overpriced?")
|
| - I see a risk/opportunity for infinite content generation.
| Example: generate 50 headlines for articles about the
| Kardashians. The next day, ask for more and provide the last 200
| headlines, to make sure that no repetitions occur. It would flood
| search engines with almost random content. I think that something
| like that could be useful to fill "holes" in wikipedia, though.
|
| The site that I built is https://dev-radar.com/
| neom wrote:
| https://archive.is/x09Z5
| jmount wrote:
| As a (formerly?) information retrieval company, isn't this
| shitting where one eats? They don't exactly need more irrelevant
| material to sort out.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Google has been shitting where they eat ever since they decided
| to put the answers to questions in the SERP itself instead of
| just offering search links.
| thecleaner wrote:
| This is so cool. As somebody else also pointed out, journalism is
| all about the data collection. Say what you will about WikiLeaks,
| one of the things I liked about them was the whole data dump
| thingy. I prefer the idea of "Here's the data, make up your mind"
| efields wrote:
| Surely data can never be biased. Most sources of data are
| honorable. This approach is flawless.
|
| (extremely, heavily italicized and bolded: /s)
|
| [edit: typo]
| yummypaint wrote:
| People seem to be confusing composition with journalism.
| Journalism is what happens before an article is composed, and
| this system does nothing resembling original research or fact
| finding.
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