aifaq.wtf

Someone's been scraping reddit and posting AI-generated stories using threads, and the World of Warcraft sub took advantage of it in the best possible way. I'm actually shocked at the quality of the resulting article. It's next level Google poisoning.

🤷

Sigh.

One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others

This is always the line. It generally isn't what we get, though. Instead we get people fired based on the promise of AI-generated content. When someone gives me concrete examples of a journalist saving time I'll be happy, but until then it's just a veneer.

I'd also like to draw attention to the title: "Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles." There's no reason to take this at face value when we've seen time and time again that even in the best case these tools don't have what it takes to execute anything resembling accurate journalism. I'd believe Google says it can write news articles, but there are only one or two bones in my body that have any faith in that statement.

No, there was not.

Great tweet was this follow up:

Of the many sick things in need of scrutiny is that "interview" is in scare quotes, but "Harriet Tubman" is not.

Yes, the darling of the error-filled Star Wars listicle is back at it, doubling down on bot content.

This piece has plenty of appropriately harsh critique and references to all my favorite actually-published AI-generated stories, but there's also something new! I was intrigued by G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller's reference of his time at Forbes.com, where external content like wires etc was a big part of the site:

Spanfeller estimates that his staff produced around 200 stories each day but that Forbes.com published around 5,000 items.

And back then, Spanfeller said, the staff-produced stories generated 85 to 90 percent of the site’s page views. The other stuff wasn’t valueless. Just not that valuable.

The thing that makes wire content so nice, though, is that it shows up ready to publish. Hallucination-prone AI content, on the other hand, has to pass through a human for even basic checks. If you're somehow producing 25x as much content using AI, you're going to need a similar multiplier on your editor headcount (which we all know isn't on the menu).

Between the replies and the quote tweets this is getting dragged all to hell. AJP funds good newsrooms but this is a wee bit ominous.

While there are plenty of private equity firms dressed up trenchcoats that say "press" on the front, I swear there's at least one tiny potential use case for responsible and ethical use of AI in the world of news. Unfortunately no one knows what it is yet, and instead we just get a thousand shitty AI-generated stories at the expense of journalists. In a bright beautiful utopia this $5M+ unearths some good use cases, but we'll see.

This is weak. I'm tired of generic advice.