aifaq.wtf

Gannett was publishing AI-generated sports stories in its local markets, and they were awful. Go read the story, it gives you plenty of threads to pull at to find examples of failure.

Companies like Narrative Science and tools like Heliograf were the historical harbingers of this trend, but all of their auto-generated content was based on templates.

For example, we could write a sentence about who won by comparing the scores of the two teams:

[if team1_score > team2_score]
  [team1_name] beat [team2_name] [team1_score] to [team2_score].
[else]
  [team2_name] beat [team1_name] [team2_score] to [team1_score].

That's 100% fake code, but the idea is that everything was about filling in the blanks, not about generating novel content. With the modern batch of generative AI tools, you're turning the AI loose on the data and letting it figure out what's important and what's not, along with exactly how to phrase everything.

With the unpredictable nature of these tools, it's not a terribly good idea, and I'm certain we'll continue to see more screw-ups of this sort.

We perfected the technology years ago!! Why can't we just have templates back!!

I was hyped about this release, but today I discovered you have to pay to get the AP Stylebook?? Thanks to that, you aren't getting any details except the following excerpt:

For example, journalists should beware of far-fetched claims from AI developers describing their tools, avoid quoting company representatives about the power of their technology without providing a check on their assertions, and avoid focusing entirely on far-off futures over current-day concerns about the tools.

Not that journalists should do that about literally anything in the first place?

You can also find the AP's amazingly-brief but much-hyped Standards around Generative AI.

Wow, this is not a joke. Byline is "Story by Microsoft Travel," and the Ottawa Food Bank is definitely number three.

3. Ottawa Food Bank

The Ottawa Food Bank gives fresh and non-perishable food, as well as diapers and other necessities.

The organization has been collecting, purchasing, producing, and delivering food to needy people and families in the Ottawa area since 1984. We observe how hunger impacts men, women, and children on a daily basis, and how it may be a barrier to achievement. People who come to us have jobs and families to support, as well as expenses to pay. Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach.

This tweet has a screenshot if it disappears.

Generate AI + ethics + journalism, a match made in heaven! I'll refer you directly to this tweet, about "reselling the rendered product of scraping news sites back to the news sites after extracting the maximum value."

Which makes me wonder what LocalLens might look like in the near future once they’ve expanded to “cover what’s happening in every community in America.” Do the founders of LocalLens see themselves as something akin to a bot-driven version of Documenters that supplies much-needed notetaking and documentation of public meetings and records? Or will this eventually just become yet another “good enough” source of local news and information for residents in communities that have either lost or abandoned their own local news organizations?

I think this applies to journalism, too.

(Don't get scared, it's a joke.)

News reports focusing on clinical trials and drug development data, using models that are focused on detail recency/relevance and accuracy. We can at least agree on this header:

AI-Generated News ≠ Journalism

Read the post – at the bottom is an invitation to apply for journalists or biotech folks.

You can read the article here.