aifaq.wtf

Nearly 70% of newsroom staffers from a variety of backgrounds and organizations surveyed in December say they’re using the technology for crafting social media posts, newsletters and headlines; translation and transcribing interviews; and story drafts, among other uses. One-fifth said they’d used generative AI for multimedia, including social graphics and videos.

Love it, filing under #lol for pain.

Even if it works in the short-term news outfits are going to get screwed. There's no long-term money for Google in journalism.

My favorite part was the observation that the content farm people aren't interested in the drama of politics and misinformation:

Other researchers agree. "This sort of work is of great interest to me, because it’s demystifying actual use cases of generative AI," says Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. While there’s valid concern about how AI might be used as a tool to spread political misinformation, this network demonstrates how content mills are likely to focus on uncontroversial topics when their primary aim is generating traffic-based income. "This report feels like it is an accurate snapshot of how AI is actually changing our society so far—making everything a little bit more annoying."

Welcome to the future! Story here (paywall skip)

It's honestly worth reading, every paragraph is a new list of Bad Stuff! Here's an example of doubling down on hallucinations:

The chatbot responded quickly, stating that Funiciello was alleged to have received money from a lobbying group financed by pharmaceutical companies in order to advocate for the legalization of cannabis products. But the entire corruption allegation against Funiciello was an AI hallucination. To “back up” its baseless allegations, the chatbot linked to five different websites including Funiciello’s own website, her Wikipedia page, a news article where the lawmaker highlights the problem of femicide in Switzerland, and an interview she gave with a mainstream Swiss broadcaster about the issue of consent.

And in its (ineffective) race to protect from the Bad Stuff, it isn't even good at the easy stuff:

In their study, the researchers concluded that a third of the answers given by Copilot contained factual errors and that the tool was “an unreliable source of information for voters.” In 31 percent of the smaller subset of recorded conversations, they found that Copilot offered inaccurate answers, some of which were made up entirely.

:(

The conflation of generative AI with AI/machine learning in general is good in the sense that there is acceptance of tools that would once be thought of as too technical, but on the other side gen AI is awful at truth-telling, the only thing that journalism needs to care about.

Esp unsettling that they don’t seem to have a solid grasp of the tech.

One of the big problems in journalism + AI is the lack of informed, combative discourse. I've tried, I've tried: at a conference last month I put together a last-minute session called Trusting AI in the newsroom: Hallucinations, bias, security and labor which did its best to specifically address the intersection of journalism and problems with AI.