[HN Gopher] AI slop is already invading Oregon's local journalism
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AI slop is already invading Oregon's local journalism
Author : pseudolus
Score : 170 points
Date : 2024-12-10 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.opb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.opb.org)
| binarymax wrote:
| I more or less expect this to be how things are on the internet
| these days. Very little authenticity, all just a scam for clicks
| and ad revenue. I don't even bother with content marketing
| anymore because there's no point. It's just a sad sad future we
| fell into due to everything being about clicks and gaming the
| system.
| robtaylor wrote:
| To those, like throwaway on this thread, who say " Give it 5
| years and this "AI slop" will write better than your best trained
| journalist. Get over it."
|
| How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or
| bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy?
|
| AI can hoover all that up and rewrite and expand, but surely
| there will be a need to have boots-on-the-ground?
|
| If so, who pays?
|
| I am already seeing AI giants using local media copy in output
| with $0 paid for the knowledge and information.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Microphone / camera / speaker in meeting?
|
| I'm sympathetic to the way you're looking at this, but imho the
| end state will be similar to most other automating
| technologies.
|
| The simplest, lowest-effort work will be automated (sitting and
| transcribing), and humans will reapply themselves to (more
| productively) do higher-level tasks.
|
| I'm sure a local beat reporter would be thrilled if they could
| get notes from all the meetings yesterday.
| axus wrote:
| And asking questions? Will the AI have hallways
| conversations, historical context and relationships with
| previous office-holders that inform the questions?
|
| A reporter is supposed to care about accuracy, an AI only
| cares about generating words that make sense and fit the
| page. I can see why the owners align with the AI more than
| the reporter.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| We're living in an unfortunate time when people have been
| trained so thoroughly to hate institutions that they've
| lost basic understanding of how those institutions work.
| And how they still serve us, despite their flaws. The
| institutions have become nothing more than abstractions
| that can be rhetorically written off and replaced by either
| outsiders from the establishment, or in this case
| algorithms.
| bluGill wrote:
| don't forget the people who try to exploit the
| institution for their own gain. Thus ensuring
| institutions are bogged down in bureaucracy to prevent
| that.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Why not?
|
| I'm not sure SOTA is at the most insightful questions yet,
| but those are rarely the ones that get answered at
| briefings anyway.
|
| Point being that it's not "human-or" but "human-and".
|
| A local reporter who spends their night reading summaries
| of the day's meetings, diving into the raw recordings where
| needed, and then writing prompts for tomorrow's agents
| doesn't sound like a terrible future.
|
| As the quip about local journalism goes: a lot of it is
| sitting around at meeting #324, to pick up the one
| interesting tidbit.
|
| With local news having been apple-cored revenue-wise by
| social media, that's now generally just not being done
| outside of major metros.
|
| So I'd welcome anything that promotes more transparency and
| local reporting!
| braza wrote:
| Transcribing is almost at the end of the journalistic
| process. The hard part is getting the facts (correctly),
| checking and cross-checking, calling sources, trying to get
| back channels, in many cases have boots on the ground, and
| then summarize all those things and put them all together
| before editorialization.
| throwaway122024 wrote:
| These problems are trivial when considering that we're already
| living in a sci-fi timeline where this technology was largely
| considered impossible 10 years ago. You're asking how it's
| going to know to ask the right questions, and to whom, when
| getting a system to ask questions in a general sense was the
| hard part. If you can't imagine humanity overcoming this
| hurdle, you lack in imagination.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| There isn't a hurdle here. These problems are fundamental to
| the technology.
|
| If you told me 20 years ago that you could, by connecting a
| nuclear power plant to a virtually infinite number of GPUs,
| produce a machine capable of predicting the next token in a
| sequence, I'dve believed you, but also would have said that
| it would be an astoundingly huge waste of resources to use to
| get to that result.
|
| People seem to ascribe some magic here that isn't happening,
| because they're surprised by the results.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > People seem to ascribe some magic here that isn't
| happening, because they're surprised by the results.
|
| I believe this is the result of drinking the kool-aid. At
| this point though, I'm really confused on how AI has any
| jobs left to do because blockchain was going to solve all
| the problems.
| equestria wrote:
| I don't think it's a useful way to frame it. Model training
| is very compute-intensive. Generation isn't. You can run it
| on locally on consumer hardware. It's just not very
| monetizable, so we're converging on a black-box "in the
| cloud" approach.
|
| If we're focusing on energy consumption, using an LLM to
| generate a newspaper article probably uses less energy than
| a living journalist would use. The morning commute alone is
| probably "worth" a dozen articles.
|
| The problem is different. First, that journalist is still
| alive and consuming resources, just out of a job. Second,
| because you now have a very cheap way to generate an
| infinite number of articles, and there are commercial
| incentives to do so, the "dead internet theory" has a good
| chance of coming true.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| A major failing in futurism is not accounting for both
| quality and cost scaling, especially supra-linear.
|
| If you'd told someone with one of the first automobiles
| that they'd eventually be massively personally-owned, have
| access the majority of countries via paved road networks,
| and be refillable along the way, they'd have laughed at
| you.
|
| And yet, that's what we've all lived in.
|
| It happened because automobiles were massively useful.
|
| It's difficult to imagine a scenario where basic-level
| cognition doesn't also scale, because a lot of the mental
| tasks we do every day are dumb and low-value.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Nearly every example of futurism I've seen in my 40+
| years of looking at future technology has been people
| _over_ accounting for scaling rather than ignoring it.
|
| For example they see a prototype and then assume in 10
| years everyone will have one.
|
| Or they look at a proof of concept and don't realise that
| that last 10% of refinement actually takes 90% of the
| effort.
|
| What people usually miss is that scaling _is_ the
| problem, not the solution. Prototypes are easy in
| comparison.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The quip that stuck in my head (Kurzweil?) is that
| adoption is based on utility over existing practice.
|
| Hence why cell phone took off (verse land lines) but
| flying cars didn't (verse ground cars).
|
| Adding basic level creativity to automation seems like
| the former.
|
| It's not going to change everything overnight, but it is
| going to impact everything into a new normal.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| "sci-fi timeline" :rollseyes. Sonny, I had autocomplete > 10
| years ago!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I am not joking when I say that the autocomplete on the
| Microsoft HD Zune in 2010 is the single best autocorrect
| implementation that I have EVER experienced. You could half
| pay attention to a conversation, hit the right QUARTER of
| the keyboard with your giant thumb, and it would ALWAYS
| guess right. It was literally magic, in a way that no
| technology I have experienced has compared to.
|
| Meanwhile, my modern "AI" based Google keyboard autocorrect
| can't even handle the average case where only the first
| letter of the word was a mistake. It will only suggest
| corrections (and then auto-choose those corrections based
| on rules that change monthly it seems) that use the same
| first letter that I accidentally hit.
|
| Also, my mother had a dirt cheap LG flip-phone in 1998
| that, after 10 minutes of training, could dial any number
| and even dial any of your contacts by name with your voice.
|
| In the mid-2000s, Microsoft had a BUILT IN function to
| Windows XP for dictation. You can see it do poorly in a
| demo, which is funny, but in actual use, without any
| cheating or prompting or massive compute resources, it
| correctly understood you 80% of the time. The state of the
| art in the industry could do much better than that without
| "AI" at the time, and cost a pretty penny for people with
| disabilities mostly. However, that dictation API is STILL
| IN WINDOWS, Microsoft just kinda hides it because they want
| you to use the Azure based one. It is super simple, with a
| powerful yet understandable API, available to any
| application that runs on Windows (like, say, games) and
| completely free to use. More importantly, if you have ANY
| knowledge about the expected use case for your app, you can
| feed the dictation engine an easy to generate "grammar"
| about the structure of commands, and it's accuracy can jump
| up to near perfection. When I played with it, I was able to
| build a voice controlled app with a single page of code and
| like an afternoon that easily turned my voice into text. It
| was literally harder to control the legacy Win32 APIs to
| inject input into queues for my use case: Voice controlled
| game input.
| arp242 wrote:
| > How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials
| or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based
| copy?
|
| It can't. And the notion that it will be able to "in five
| years" is completely without any basis. It's possible, I
| suppose, but anyone who claims this with great certainty is not
| a serious person.
| codemac wrote:
| Demand disappeared for good local reporting, long before any
| LLM. Even NYT & WSJ struggle with their subscriptions, and
| they have a huge addressable market.
|
| The "slop" is just a reflection of this bottom feeding
| attempt to get some tiny bit of ad revenue. Using an LLM or a
| "pay per article" contracting fleet looks very similar.
|
| Most local publications don't pay many if any full time
| journalists either way. I struggle to find great journalism
| on any local level around me - and discovery is difficult
| when anything reasonably good is usually a substack behind a
| paywall. But even then, they aren't pushing on local issues
| in person. None are going to the Mayor's press conference and
| directly asking them questions.
| gs17 wrote:
| > It's possible, I suppose
|
| I'm imagining Atlas running around city hall with a little
| reporter hat on.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| Those people have no self-reflection and in 5 years when their
| claims haven't come true they'll have already moved onto
| whatever the latest hyped up thing is. Just like how we still
| don't have mass driverless cars, and just like how Bitcoin
| didn't take over the world, just like how LLMs aren't going to
| take all our jobs. I bet there's a good alignment between
| people making outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for
| those other things too, for how they were "right around the
| corner".
|
| Ironically, an actually good use case of LLMs would be to scan
| peoples HN posts and compile a rating of how many hyped up
| topics they shilled for in the past, so that we know who to
| just kind of ignore when they're hyping up something new, as
| they don't have a good track record.
| hkt wrote:
| Let's make that happen!
| wnevets wrote:
| > I bet there's a good alignment between people making
| outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for those other
| things too, for how they were "right around the corner".
|
| I'm still waiting for NFT's to take over the video gaming
| space, its just around the corner!
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Video games? What's that? We're all supposed to be using
| NFTs in the metaverse at this point.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Isn't that Microsoft's plan with _Game Pass_ and buying
| the whole western game industry? You 'll have a choice
| between _Axie Infinity_ or _Nikke: Goddess of Victory_.
| Animats wrote:
| > Nikke: Goddess of Victory.
|
| Oh, that's funny. The Goddess of Victory is _Nike_.[1]
| But the game people are probably scared of the shoe
| company that uses the same name.
|
| There was also the famous Nike anti-aircraft missile,
| once deployed around major American cities.[2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_(mythology)
|
| [2] https://nikemissile.org/
| 3a2d29 wrote:
| I remember a post on Blind where someone was passionately
| arguing that if we put house ownership on the blockchain,
| 2008 wouldn't have happened because a big part of it was
| not knowing who owned what homes.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Gaming is actually a pretty reasonable use case for NFT's,
| or blockchain generally. At it's core, an NFT is a digital
| asset with verifiable ownership. Many, many games have the
| concept of owning digital assets; the fact that they're not
| on a blockchain is an implementation detail. All the hype
| around monkey-ape pictures and microtransactions was
| offputting to a lot of gamers, making the whole thing come
| off like a big cash-grab (which it mostly was), but from a
| purely technological standpoint, blockchain might not be a
| terrible solution for games with transferable digital
| assets.
| wnevets wrote:
| its gonna happen its just around the corner!
| throw646577 wrote:
| It's like tapping HN on the knee with a reflex hammer,
| isn't it?
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Most people are tired of 400gb of cosmetics. They want
| less but higher quality. The NFT people also lied through
| their teeth about how NFTs work.
| LargeWu wrote:
| So, the use case I'm thinking of is more along the lines
| of non-cosmetic assets. Take FIFA Ultimate Team, for
| example. The way it works currently is that each player
| in the game has one or more "cards", or sets of stats.
| Special versions come out all the time which have
| significant impact on gameplay.
|
| FIFA has an in-game market where you can buy/sell/trade
| cards, for in-game scrip. Want to sell your special
| Killian Mbappe card you just pulled? Congrats, you can
| get 1,000,000 FifaCoins, not redeemable for real money.
| Of course, you can _certainly_ buy FifaCoins for real
| money.
|
| A blockchain implementation could potentially allow
| people to sell that card directly to somebody else, for
| real money (or more specifically, crypto tokens that can
| be redeemed for real money). Would you rather have
| 1,000,000 FifaCoins, or $100?
|
| Whether or not this is desirable to games is a different
| question, but the game is already essentially pay-to-win,
| so it's not like it would ruin the game from that
| perspective. It already has microtransactions. The main
| reason you probably won't be seeing this is because it
| would cut the publisher (EA) out of the loop, which is
| very, very lucrative for them.
| nemomarx wrote:
| if EA wanted to set it up so you could sell them for real
| money, with ea taking a cut, I think they could. of
| course they don't really want to let you do that, but
| even putting aside banking steam let's you sell cards for
| steam wallet money (which goes back to valve) and let's
| you buy cheap games for "free".
|
| it's never really seemed like a limitation that needs a
| technical back end to fix it, it needs people to want to
| set it up.
| awkward wrote:
| The best example of this is probably the Diablo 3 real
| money auction house. It was a launch feature of the game
| that would allow items to be sold for real money or in
| game gold.
|
| It was removed about eighteen months in, because it made
| the metagame significantly less fun. Switching from a
| localized rarity table with some light trading to an
| efficient global market meant that finding anything less
| than best in class equipment (bounded to level) was a
| disappointment compared to what could be bought on the
| market, and had to be to avoid flooding market supply.
|
| Getting rid of the market and implementing more generous
| local loot algorithms probably gave the game at least 5
| years more life.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Thanks for the history lesson. I think this is a much
| more compelling argument than "blockchain dumb".
| gs17 wrote:
| > the fact that they're not on a blockchain is an
| implementation detail.
|
| For a good reason. The blockchain doesn't add much over a
| database. Players being able to sell their items? Steam
| does that without a blockchain, albeit not for real
| money. Being able to take items between games? Almost no
| devs (or players) really want that. But blockchain
| _would_ add difficulty changing things if there 's a bug
| with the items (or not, but you lose the "security" it's
| supposed to add).
| LargeWu wrote:
| If you invested hundreds of hours into a game and
| accumulated a significant pile of rare items with in-game
| utility, and then decided you were done with the game,
| would you rather a) have the option to sell them for real
| money or b) have the option to sell them for in-game
| currency (which you will never use) or c) not have any
| marketplace options?
| duskwuff wrote:
| c). I play games to have fun, not to make money. And I'd
| rather not play games where success is determined by how
| willing you are to open your wallet.
| nerdjon wrote:
| You're talking about a closed system for a single game
| though, what exactly does a blockchain actually give you
| in that example?
|
| All 3 of those are possible with a traditional database.
|
| Even if they wanted to provide a system for sharing those
| assets and other marketplaces being able to built on top
| of it, a blockchain still doesn't actually provide any
| benefits.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| A lot of them intentionally are not supposed to be sold
| for real value because in many jurisdictions, combining
| that with lootbox or drop mechanics would immediately
| make the game subject to gambling regulations.
|
| Game dev companies don't want that, they want to keep
| selling you stuff. See: games like the Sims
| gs17 wrote:
| I'd rather not have the marketplace, honestly, and I'm
| someone who got more than I paid from TF2. Trading items
| for items isn't so bad (maybe), but we don't need to make
| things even more pay-to-win.
|
| Games should be about having fun, not second jobs, unless
| you're playing a simulator where your fun is doing the
| job.
| cogman10 wrote:
| A real-world market attached to a game would be the
| fastest way imaginable to suck all the fun out of a game.
|
| I don't want to play games where 90% of the players are
| using the game to try and beat capitalism somehow. There
| are 100 reasons why this'd destroy gameplay.
|
| * The majority of players would be concentrated on the
| highest value grind tasks.
|
| * Scams would be rampant. They are already rampant in
| games without this mechanic. Now imagine how bad they'd
| be if your items had actual monetary value hooked up to
| them.
|
| * Gang like behavior is pretty much guaranteed to emerge.
| So, it wouldn't be just one player grinding like crazy,
| but groups of players dedicated to making the game
| miserable for anyone grinding on their turf.
|
| * It would encourage actual real-world problems/crime.
| Now instead of being able to meet up with people and talk
| about the game, you run the risk of being mugged or
| stalked for game currency.
|
| Just a really terrible idea.
|
| And these things I'm talking about aren't imaginary.
| There're already more than a few articles about games
| like EVE Online and WoW where the marketplace of those
| games has led to the problems I listed.
|
| EVE's "Real life threats" policy didn't show up because
| it wasn't a problem [1]
|
| [1] https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/856270680092...
| gs17 wrote:
| > Gang like behavior is pretty much guaranteed to emerge.
|
| For example, one of the times it happened to RuneScape
| (which also has constant scammers too!): https://www.redd
| it.com/r/2007scape/comments/imnp0g/every_sin...
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Blockchain helps none of those things in the slightest.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Steam doesn't let you bequeath your account or anything
| in it and can ban you from your account at any time with
| no recourse.
|
| If my game licenses were on the Blockchain I could give
| them to my kids when I die.
|
| Feels weird explaining this on HN.
| gs17 wrote:
| The discussion was more about in-game items than game
| licenses, but that falls under "almost no devs really
| want that". Devs _want_ to be able to ban problem players
| from their games. Devs _want_ (or at least would prefer)
| you to have to buy a new copy of a game instead of a
| cheap used one. It would be nice if we could transfer the
| licenses, but the developers don 't want that.
|
| And it also doesn't _require_ blockchain. Valve not
| allowing it isn 't a technological limitation, it's a
| policy. The system can't stop you from leaving a sheet of
| paper with your username and password on it, but Steam
| can ban you if they somehow find out.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Feels weird explaining this on HN.
|
| Go ahead and explain how the tech of a Blockchain
| prevents Valve from doing what it wants with the game
| licenses it sells.
| nucleardog wrote:
| How do you enforce the blockchain on Valve?
|
| If they go into the Steam server code and add:
| if username = 'dingnuts': return 403
|
| How do you get your games back?
|
| (Hint: You don't.)
|
| So now you're back to "a database hosted at Valve" with
| extra steps.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| And how do you enforce that Valve implements and respects
| the blockchain? You can't, and if you do you can just
| force them to respect a traditional database.
|
| Feels weird explaining this on HN.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For a while my son was playing this game
|
| https://krunker.io/
|
| which has rather good trading mechanics in the game (for
| non-NFT objects) and has a total of 20 or so NFT objects
| in the game. A handful of players own most of them, for
| instance there is only one type of watch you can wear in
| the game and there are only five of those and four of
| those belong to the same person. My son did see someone
| wearing a watch.
|
| You can't say the NFT ruined the game for other players
| but you also can't say it is a success, I wouldn't say
| that until you have broad participation in ownership and
| trading.
| wnevets wrote:
| > For a good reason. The blockchain doesn't add much over
| a database.
|
| The people doing all of the hyping up not understanding
| the tech is why I find all of this so amusing.
|
| > Steam does that without a blockchain, albeit not for
| real money.
|
| FYI you can buy in game items for real money on their
| market [1]
|
| [1] https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/AWP%20
| %7C%20A...
| vohk wrote:
| From a purely technological standpoint, a boring database
| does everything an NFT could for transferable digital
| assets.
|
| This is the classic "solution looking for a problem" you
| see so often with NFTs and blockchain generally. The
| proposed problems (in this case verifiable and
| transferable ownership) already have mature, satisfactory
| solutions.
|
| NFTs don't benefit consumers (because the tangible value
| exists in a centralized server somewhere anyway) and they
| don't benefit publishers (who can already implement those
| features if they cared to). They benefit people that want
| to get rich speculating on NFTs.
| simonw wrote:
| Blockchain is a terrible solution for games with
| transferable digital assets.
|
| How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing
| their inventory management system like that?
|
| What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be
| completely over-powered and want to change or remove it?
|
| (Amusingly enough the original inspiration for Ethereum
| was that Vitalik Buterin hated that his warlock got
| nerfed: https://www.polygon.com/22709126/ethereum-
| creator-world-of-w... )
| gs17 wrote:
| > What if they release an in-game item that turns out to
| be completely over-powered and want to change or remove
| it?
|
| I'm not sure how/if real "crypto games" do it, but it
| wouldn't be impossible to have a list of "invalid" items
| the smart contract references that can't be used unless
| you use a second contract the developer set up to
| exchange them for the nerfed version. And I guess that
| could enable community-created formats with their own
| banlists (if the game is actually decentralized enough
| for that to be possible).
|
| But then we've had to do a lot of extra work for a messy
| version of what we can already do with a normal database!
| LargeWu wrote:
| Depending on the use case, you don't need to store the
| entire implementation of the item on chain, just a
| reference to it. All the implementation could still be
| stored game-side. You could also apply nerfs/buffs over
| the top of an item at runtime.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing
| their inventory management system like that?
|
| Why should I care about how a third party in the
| transaction feels?
|
| > What if they release an in-game item that turns out to
| be completely over-powered and want to change or remove
| it?
|
| Then they can do that. A token being associated with a
| wallet is orthogonal to an item being rendered or used in
| a game.
| smitelli wrote:
| Can't I just enjoy playing a game for however many hours
| without having to buy shit?
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| There is no use case for NFTs at all. The "verifiable
| ownership" is pointless when you could just use a
| traditional database, as every individual game has to
| respect the blockchain - they could just respect the
| database instead, and not use the power consumption of
| Belgium to do it.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Pppphhh we don't make video games anymore. We just get the
| latest LLM to boil a lake so we can aimlessly wander an
| incoherent fever-dream! It's the future of gaming!!1!
| Zambyte wrote:
| NFTs have been popular in videogames for over a decade.
| They're just almost always using a centralized network
| (see: the Steam community market).
| wnevets wrote:
| > They're just almost always using a centralized network
| (see: the Steam community market).
|
| That doesn't sound like a NFT to me.
|
| "A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital
| identifier that is recorded on a blockchain" [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
| throw646577 wrote:
| > I bet there's a good alignment between people making
| outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for those other
| things too, for how they were "right around the corner".
|
| Have you ever played the "scroll back far enough" game on
| e.g. Twitter?
|
| So many guys (it is always guys) with .ai in their posts used
| to have .eth in their posts. They used to be all-in on NFTs.
|
| Grifters gonna grift. Salesmen are much more likely to
| believe sales pitches, etc.
|
| I would also add that "Get over it!" is a reliable tell for
| an awful person. It means "I do not wish to be confronted
| with even the smallest, most unarguable negative consequences
| of the position I have enthusiastically bought into".
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's easy to say ${new_thing} is going to take off (takes a
| while to be disproven), it's even easier to say ${new_thing}
| _isn't_ going to take off (takes a while to be disproven and
| most things don't take off), but it's hardest to actually
| have a clue when you're talking about something which changes
| life forever (like the internet), a curiosity [for now] (like
| Google Glass), or just a scam from the ground up (pick a
| scammy cryptocoin) immediately when you see it.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The Internet is "just" the third Network. Both its
| predecessors (the Universal Postal Union and the Public
| Switched Telephone Network) are still hugely important,
| it's amazing that people don't understand the significance
| until it's shoved in their faces as a result of Tim's
| mediocre hypermedia software (the "World Wide Web") and
| even there are plenty of nay-sayers for years.
|
| The Network is a big deal, as big a deal as say,
| pornography or literacy. But while iterations of the
| Network are significant they're also sort of predictable. A
| society which builds the PSTN is going to build something
| akin to the Internet next.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > it's even easier to say ${new_thing} _isn't_ going to
| take off
|
| Not around here it isn't.
|
| > but it's hardest to actually have a clue when you're
| talking about something which changes life forever
|
| Most of us saw the Internet coming from a decade away,
| Google Glass was never going to be a thing, and once
| cryptocurrency "mixers" got invented everyone saw the
| writing on the wall.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > Not around here it isn't.
|
| Then why is this the top thread on the post?
|
| > Most of us saw the Internet coming from a decade away
|
| If that was true as we'd like to believe for most of us
| HN would be more of a retirement community than a startup
| community. You can blend a bit of how everyone knew which
| parts of the internet were scams and how that wasn't all
| there was to it in that as well.
|
| Everything seems obvious in retrospect, down to how
| "obviously it was only going to explode larger after the
| dot com boom" or "getting into ads would be the way the
| most money was made". All of the areas that failed or
| were different than expected get forgotten. And most
| importantly...
|
| > Google Glass was never going to be a thing
|
| Given many years a lot of things end up working out in
| ways that weren't really expected but are,
| retrospectively, "obvious from a decade away". Much of
| the time this doesn't even require new technology of the
| day, though it may be better with the advances. Will that
| be a Google Glass style thing? I doubt it personally...
| but I can also manage to temper that with my certainty
| not being absolute.
| yunwal wrote:
| > If that was true as we'd like to believe for most of us
| HN would be more of a retirement community than a startup
| community.
|
| There's a difference between saying "something like this
| will exist" (internet, cryptocurrency) and "this
| particular implementation will win the market" (www stock
| picks, coins). People here saying crypto isn't going to
| take off (as a currency) mean the whole concept, not just
| one particular implementation.
| Kiro wrote:
| We have driverless cars, Bitcoin just hit $100k, and LLMs are
| undoubtedly taking over jobs. Hyping something that never
| materializes is one thing, but these are not that.
| 3a2d29 wrote:
| I will admit, there were a lot of people saying ridiculous
| things about crypto in 2021. Many of those people were very
| wrong, but still rewarded with bitcoin hitting 100k.
|
| Those same people say it will hit 200k inevitably. I think
| all their reasoning is wrong, but yet they have been right.
| Curious what HN's opinons are.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > I think all their reasoning is wrong, but yet they have
| been right. Curious what HN's opinons are.
|
| There's no way to predict the price. Everyone who's
| claiming to make a prediction is just guessing.
|
| There are a number of influential people who are heavily
| invested in crypto, and so long as they have the ability
| to keep money funneling other people's money into it,
| prices will continue to increase. So I think the safest
| guess to make is that it prices will continue to rise for
| a least the next few years.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Those people have no self-reflection and in 5 years when
| their claims haven't come true they'll have already moved
| onto whatever the latest hyped up thing is.
|
| Yeap. Just like there are interesting use cases for
| blockchains (note that I said interesting, not necessarily
| practical) and machine learning, there are interesting use
| cases for LLMs.
|
| The problem is that people then come up with new applications
| "really soon now" and use that to hype up wallstreet.
| Animats wrote:
| > Just like how we still don't have mass driverless cars, and
| just like how Bitcoin didn't take over the world, just like
| how LLMs aren't going to take all our jobs.
|
| In San Francisco, we do have mass driverless cars. It's hard
| to drive across SF without seeing one.
|
| Bitcoin didn't take over the world, but it's well on the way
| to taking over the administration and Congress through sheer
| lobbying spending.
|
| LLMs aren't taking over all the jobs, but if everything you
| do for money goes in and out over a wire, less people like
| you are needed.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| While I don't have a dog in this race:
|
| > ...who pays?
|
| The status quo today is
|
| - ProPublica's donors
|
| - the family trust of 22 year olds in Columbia Journalism
| School. Don't take this too literally. Journalism school is a
| metonym for paying your dues.
|
| - the husbands and wives of the older journalists
|
| - millions of Boomers paying just four publications that are
| diversifying into media companies with video games and recipe
| lists, so not really journalism alone
|
| Should journalism be philanthropic? It's an interesting
| question. I'm not worried about AI writers as long as parents
| keep paying their kids' rent to break into writing, and as long
| as New York and Los Angeles remain attractive places for young
| people to live. My point is that there is a status quo where
| journalism is already essentially a charity, so anything is
| possible, it is totally incorrect to characterize journalism as
| profit motivated, because if it were it would have been gone
| long ago, and it isn't for lack of free labor, because most
| journalism is done for free.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Also often over looked is that this slop will then be scraped
| and fed into the next model. They will start to degrade further
| over time.
| nerdjon wrote:
| First I should say that I agree with you fully.
|
| However, the "5 years" timeline which yeah its crap with what
| they are saying. I do worry that what they are actually hoping
| (not paying for writers) for will actually happen. Since there
| is a lot of money in not paying people and pushing content that
| keeps people reading.
|
| Just regurgitating information over and over again in different
| ways. Or taking stray quotes or whatever as the information.
|
| I worry that the question isn't if AI is going to get better or
| how its going to answer some of those questions that you have
| when the people running the sites for news clearly already
| don't care and its going to happen anyways. It doesn't matter
| if the technology is any good or it's valuable.
|
| Maybe at some point people will wake up and realize that the
| regurgitated content serves no real value, but at that point
| how much have we dug ourselves into this hole already.
|
| I know that some people compare this to crypto but there is a
| much different acceptance level and... ease of use here that is
| making it actually gain traction.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| There are always two sides to news -- there's the consumer-
| facing text/video/whatever, which AI can create. But there's
| also newsgathering -- the reporting, which requires
| shoeleather, phone calls, building relationships, etc. AI
| cannot do that.
|
| (Disclaimer - building a news platform featuring human
| journalists' reporting - https://www.forth.news)
| braza wrote:
| > How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials
| or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based
| copy?
|
| I noticed that most of the journalism that I care about
| ~drifted~ from the writing to non-structured media (e.g.
| podcasts, videos), where in writting we have only things
| oriented to the SEO and future reference and historical
| purposes, and the actual red meat content comes in
| "conversations" or in aired media in youtube channels.
|
| Back in the day, a journalist could sit in a hearing or in an
| audience, and you could read at the weekend a deep dive with
| key points in the trial, points made by the prosecution and
| defense, the verdict, and the entire trial dynamic and buildup.
| Currently you have in writing only some high-level summary with
| no specifics and maybe some journalist opinion, and the entire
| breakdown you can have it on Youtube.
|
| For me, this is one of the two saddest trends that I see in
| modern journalism (another one is the lack of investigative
| journalism revealing political corruption), where you can only
| get in the depths by going to the prolix audio and video media
| formats.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Livestreaming trials has dome more to tamp down corruption in
| the courts than anything else. Except federal, they're above
| scrutiny of course.
| cogman10 wrote:
| At the local level, there is (almost) no modern journalism.
| Large media companies have swooped in and gobbled up pretty
| much every major newspaper, local tv news, local radio news.
| They've then fired the journalists and switched everything to
| sites that push mainly national stories mixed in with 100
| clickbait marketing garbage ads.
|
| And for national journalism, it's 90% about access
| journalism. Every interview is softballs, no follow up, etc.
| Journalists almost never press for an answer. And it's just
| so absurdly lazy. Rather than actually reporting or
| investigating anything journalists just republish press
| briefings.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| One thing in tech I find interesting is I run into a lot of
| people that view _everything_ as a tech problem. The AI can be
| a local journalist if it gets good enough and on one hand that
| 's always true, sufficiently good tech can do anything, but it
| seems weird to have it be the only suggested solution by some
| people I know.
|
| It's especially confusing to me in situations like this where
| the tech is currently exacerbating the problem and the
| underlying reasons why aren't going to go away just if the tech
| gets better. On the current trajectory I don't get why the
| technology getting better will suddenly have the AI do
| substantive local journalism instead of just higher quality
| garbage.
|
| In conjunction with actual journalists I could see it being
| useful but the article seems to be talking about a site with
| fake bylines so that doesn't seem to be the case here.
| throwup238 wrote:
| What's the practical alternative? Viewing the problems
| through a socioeconomic or political lens just makes them
| seem intractable. At least techies can influence technology,
| either through entrepreneurship or open source contributions.
|
| As myopic as it appears, the approach at least scales well
| and has drastically transformed the world in the last few
| decades, for better or worse. The problem is that we hype up
| technology as a panacea when it's at most an enabling
| component for improving human effort. At least we can do
| something to effect change if minor.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| I think it mostly just seems intractable because people at
| the end of the day don't care about local journalism (at
| least not enough to pay reasonable amounts of money for
| it). At the end of the day I think there are some problems
| that are pretty simple with collective action but people
| just don't want it badly enough to actually sacrifice
| anything (in this case, money) for it.
|
| Where I grew up had a local paper, and the community was
| more than wealthy enough money to pay for it but
| circulation was ever decreasing. In my naive view it died a
| death of apathy more than anything else and it's not
| surprising there's not a satisfying solution to it.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| As much as I hate the concept, I suspect many publications
| consider _Journalism Theatre_ to replace Journalism.
|
| Similar to security theatre substituting real security.
| lancesells wrote:
| My guess is you can trace a lot of those publications to a
| handful of conglomerates that are there for ROI and nothing
| else.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| In 5 years:
|
| An AI can go through all the breaking footage posted on social
| media. An AI can join a phone call with 400 individuals and
| retain complete notes on everything that is happening. An AI
| can go through every single expense report, every month for a
| decade to find the one thing that explodes into a story.
|
| An AI journalist won't be a 1:1 copy of the human, but it can
| definitely do actual reporting.
| tartoran wrote:
| I don't doubt that the scale will improve but I am very
| skeptical that the reasoning will see the same kind of
| growth, and at scale, in the example you're describing could
| look like a shitshow. It's possible the reasoning will
| improve but with a paradigm shift which I don't see it
| happening at the moment.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I think the point is that it might not happen in five years
| but it will certainly happen in 20, and we should still be
| as concerned about it then as we are now, because such a
| powerful technology could definitely spin out of control.
| imiric wrote:
| How useful will that AI be if most breaking footage on social
| media will be generated by other AI? When the phone call is
| joined by 400 AI assistants instead of humans (assuming such
| phone calls exist at all)? When all those expense reports are
| also AI generated?
|
| The main problem in the next 5 years and beyond will be
| filtering factual information from AI generated garbage,
| which is a difficult task for humans in traditional
| journalism. Until we solve that problem, more AI content is
| just adding more noise.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you live in a town with a major industry that industry tends
| to get a lot of free PR from local news who eat up all their
| releases at face value. AI writing would surely do the same but
| globally.
| briandear wrote:
| Most "journalism" these days is done from a desk. The Migrants
| eating Cats story for example -- the national networks ran
| statements from certain local officials but didn't actually go
| there and interview or investigate directly. They relied upon
| statements from public officials to refute the story. (Not
| saying it was a true or false story, but the major "news"
| networks certainly didn't spend much, if any, time there --
| they didn't investigate anything; they reported what public
| officials said.)
|
| Many stories might as well be AI: feed into it something Trump
| said, then the algorithm creates a story with lots of "without
| evidence" qualifiers and then call it a day.
|
| The media rarely investigates anything -- they report on what
| others investigate or choose not to investigate and that's
| printed as fact depending on who made the claim.
| lancesells wrote:
| For a story like that how do you know "no one" went there? Do
| you read every newspaper and watch every news report?
|
| It's been debunked to death and was a rumor that was posted
| to Facebook and then parroted by right-wingers looking to
| gain votes (it worked). It's a theater of the absurd that
| we're talking about journalists not doing their job and not
| the president that either lied about it, or fell for it and
| amplified it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/10/politics/jd-vance-haitian-
| imm...
| buttercraft wrote:
| Where are you getting this information?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The Migrants eating Cats story for example -- the national
| networks ran statements from certain local officials but
| didn't actually go there and interview or investigate
| directly.
|
| This is just trivially debunkable. Video evidence to the
| contrary - with CNN reporters wandering through town,
| interviewing locals - takes seconds to Google.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTWHDF-2FlI
|
| Here's PBS doing the same - drone shots, interviews in local
| churches, talking to Haitian families in the area, for a
| detailed ~9 minute segment:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/video/ohio-city-with-haitian-migrant-
| inf...
|
| It got _more_ investigating than the wild, baseless claim
| deserved, if anything. Especially considering the person who
| started it recanted.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-just-exploded-
| springfi...
|
| > The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful
| and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets
| that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national
| spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such
| incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result
| of the ensuing fallout.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's an incredible amount of local journalism--especially
| outside of major cities--that was already incredibly poorly
| covered. There used to be a labor of love type newspaper in my
| town until the publisher got ill. At this point, there's
| basically very little way to get information on the various
| town meetings outside of _major_ issues and mostly not even
| then. I 'm not spending the time and effort to attend a lot of
| random board meetings.
| lazystar wrote:
| > If so, who pays?
|
| the "carpenter media group" is paying. theyre a conglomerate
| from the southeast that started buying up small town news
| agencies across the country in 2023, and began laying off 50%
| of staff to replace them with AI. please see my other comment
| in this post.
| legitster wrote:
| > AI can hoover all that up and rewrite and expand, but surely
| there will be a need to have boots-on-the-ground?
|
| You missed the funeral for beat reporting by about 10-15 years.
| Boots on the ground has been dead since people stopped buying
| newspapers and blogging took over everything. This is just a
| further cost reduction.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| >How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials
| or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based
| copy?
|
| I suppose when we give it a robot body?
| llacb47 wrote:
| The people who think AI will replace good journalism are the
| same people who think "X" is revolutionizing citizen journalism
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| AI may not replace good journalism but it will flood the
| world with garbage so that it makes good journalism harder to
| spot for the average individual.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >Give it 5 years and this "AI slop" will write better than your
| best trained journalist. Get over it."
|
| People who believe this are either cultists or shitty at
| writing themselves and to them AI is already better than a
| trained journalist because it writes to the lowest-common-
| denominator standard of slop they are most comfortable with.
|
| LLMs are XORing averaging machines, nothing more.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| > How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials
| or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based
| copy?
|
| Is that a thing with local journalism now? Actual journalists
| still doing stuff like that? Lets not pretend that a lot of
| good writing or journalism is involved with local news papers.
| It's not a particularly hard job for an LLM to do better.
|
| In any case to answer your questions:
|
| - yes you can let an AI listen in on meetings and conversations
| and they'll do a decent enough job of transcribing what was
| said and summarizing key points.
|
| - you can also use them to prepare for interviews, get some
| background information on people, companies, etc. and prepare
| some questions. Perplexity is great for background research
| like that.
|
| - and if you provide all of that as context, it will do a half
| decent job of writing an article. You might want to do some
| prompt engineering to tune style and content and maybe fact
| check a thing or two. For best results, maybe use one model to
| generate and another to fact check.
|
| You are probably already reading a lot of stuff that is AI
| generated; or at least AI assisted without realizing it. It's
| not always that obvious. The future is last year. Already
| happened. What you are seeing is the more obvious/lazy stuff.
| Which is of course a thing because good enough is good enough
| and the benchmark for that is very low with most media
| corporations. And being factual isn't necessary something they
| value either.
| threeseed wrote:
| This isn't new. News Corp has been 'innovating' since 2023:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-c...
| lazystar wrote:
| this is new. please see my comment above on the carpenter media
| group.
| bgun wrote:
| This is straight-up identity theft, and likely breaks any number
| of consumer protection laws. I don't necessarily mind AI being
| used to write articles that are otherwise factual, but stealing a
| reporter's name to write about places he's never been and things
| he's never done, restaurants he's never eaten at - strikes me as
| a dangerous gamble for companies playing in the slim margins of
| advertising-based journalism.
|
| AI may write a great restaurant review or local experience story,
| but the lack of fact-checking is disturbing and I hope the
| corporations behind these tools can be held to account when they
| inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation
|
| Isn't the deception itself a sufficiently egregious harm?
| throw646577 wrote:
| In general, if you harm _everyone_ in an instinctively
| obvious but factually hard-to-demonstrate way, there aren 't
| any meaningful penalties. The situations in which "we all
| suffer" are the ones where people get away with it, eh?
|
| Personifying it this way -- finding someone who is clearly
| injured -- is the only way to make progress.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a
| statistic." -- Stalin
|
| Thanks for replying. I wonder, although, in US America for
| example, it requires "demonstrable harm" to bring lawsuits
| etc, there is an enduring concept of "the fabric of
| society" [0] in many legal traditions. (I think it is
| likely examined by J.S. Mill) and even appears in US
| congressional commentary [1]. In a digital context there is
| some mileage here [3].
|
| Might we see a successful lawsuit on the merits that the
| "mere existence" of some technologies is an affront.
| "Artificial Intelligence" is after all "artifice"
|
| artifice: a clever trick, guile, deception, cunning, a
| skillful or artful contrivance
|
| [0] https://societyforpeace.com/fabric-of-society-meaning/
|
| [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-
| bill/1027...
|
| [3]
| https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol27/iss1/2/
| ambicapter wrote:
| Another reason to put as little as possible on the internet; if
| you gain any measure of credibility, you now need to safeguard
| your identity, urls, etc. FOREVER lest someone steal your
| identity and launder their reputation through it. What a world
| we've created.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Isn't it a shame though that we created something like the
| internet that could have been a good thing and now it's a
| nightmare like this due to AI? It seems illogical that the same
| people who theoretically love the internet also created the
| technology that will make it a nightmare, but I guess money
| does that to them.
| randcraw wrote:
| Excellent and fascinating article. The only way this will end is
| intervention by federal law enforcement, perhaps by formally
| proscripting DNS servers to route visitors to a law enforcement
| site that reports that IP address as a criminal enterprise, and
| ideally, also providing a link to info on the particular legal
| hold that was placed on this fraudster so visitors will be
| informed and can investigate further if they desire.
|
| I continue to be astonished at how disengaged federal law
| enforcement continues to be at today's myriad internet-based
| crimes. If we need more staff to investigate and prosecute the
| volume of net-based crime, then the FBI / FCC / FTC should hire
| more people dammit. What's the argument against doing this, I
| wonder?
| krunck wrote:
| Avoid the FBI/FCC/FTC expenditures and instead fund high school
| classes in media literacy and analysis.
| lazystar wrote:
| ah, another thread on the Carpenter Media Group. previous related
| discussion here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212650#42249985
|
| this "carpenter group" have gone on a spree in 2024 of snatching
| up smaller news orgs, and cutting 50% of the staff. seems like a
| pretty big gamble on AI.
|
| > Carpenter Media Group announced earlier this month it had
| acquired another group of newspapers, Pamplin Media Group, in
| Oregon. The company now owns and manages 180 newspapers in the
| United States and Canada.
|
| > "We are committed to Everett, The Herald and all who have a
| stake in its success," Chairman Todd Carpenter said. "We have
| deep sympathy for those affected by these changes and will work
| hard with each of them to see they are well-compensated through a
| transition period that helps them move forward in a positive way.
|
| "Our responsibility to the community and our readers requires us
| to make difficult business decisions, and then invest in and
| organize our team to move forward to produce a product that
| continues to improve and serve. Our track record in this process
| is good."
|
| https://www.heraldnet.com/news/this-breaks-my-heart-roughly-...
| cgh wrote:
| The article mentions the bad guys in this case are Chinese
| scammers that acquired the newspaper's domain and filled the
| site with lightly-rewritten articles from legitimate sources.
| neilv wrote:
| Seems worse than garden-variety AI slop. Seems loaded with fraud,
| defamation, and civic sabotage.
|
| Hopefully, lawyers, law enforcement, and perhaps diplomats will
| rip apart the perpetrators.
| lazystar wrote:
| the perpetrator is the "carpenter media group" conglomerate,
| please see my earlier comment
| neom wrote:
| Also now featuring AI chat linking to AI articles in line! AI
| article is content marketing ad. https://s.h4x.club/RBubww78
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