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‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

theguardian.com

61–70 of 76 posts

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#61

The Musk AI hype is quoted extensively - but these articles never get into Musk's line largely being reheated Yudkowsky. I had one of these discussions just a couple of days ago, where I had to point out that Musk was an accomplished businessman and engineering manager, but not actually a working engineer at any point ...

[deleted]

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#62
post #56
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unfortunately the alternative people have found is random hearsay on the web. The dieticians lost our trust and now we're just eating junk food instead.

They've been finding random hearsay for a while now. Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Is the Daily Mail or Sun or Mirror or Express more accurate than some clickbait farm? Probably not. Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news, it was low quality tabloids with a helping of TV and radio pundits.

> Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years.

Outside of NYC, the US has basically no daily tabloids.

> Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news

Most people in the US that were reading any daily news were probably reading the dominant local newspaper or one of the latter reputable metropolitan or national papers, because that covers pretty much all the daily written news outlets they would have had access to.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#63

This sort of sensationalism, in general, is so completely ingrained into reporting that it's hard to separate from journalism itself. It's part of the journalistic style, an inevitability of the medium. We see an article, click a link, by a paper, but we are never committing to more than a second or two of attention at a time. The headline makes you read the byline. The byline gets you reading the second sentence. At…

Have you tried reading the 2-3 "meat" articles in the middle of the New Yorker each week? I find that these 8-15 page articles are hugely informative in comparison to the Associated Press funnel format and clickbait drivel that dominates the web these days; you'll notice a lot of them make the front page here.

Of course the New Yorker has restaurant reviews, events, and other sections that are New York-specific, but these are remarkably easy to skip regardless of medium.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/welcoming-our-... (title is in jest) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/25/the-reputation... (astroturfing and politics) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/how-e-commerce...

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#65

This sort of sensationalism, in general, is so completely ingrained into reporting that it's hard to separate from journalism itself. It's part of the journalistic style, an inevitability of the medium. We see an article, click a link, by a paper, but we are never committing to more than a second or two of attention at a time. The headline makes you read the byline. The byline gets you reading the second sentence. At…

But most people don't want that, sadly. Instant mass media has shown us that people want to consume media about other real people -- that they admire in some fashion -- going through life. Not reporting, explanation, facts, or science. So reporters have responded with tweets and instant feedback on anything that's happening. Many times even when nothing is happening, they know they have to put out some kind of person…

How true is this really? So many times we hear "people are stupid now they don't want to do science or read fact." I'm sure that sentiment has always been said throughout history.

Yet a large deal of my millennial colleagues are the most progressively scientific, rejecting religion, embracing global warming legislation, very strongly against anti-vax movements. How many people really read the newspaper back in the day? Every period piece shows the adult male reading the paper. No one else. Do you think 26 year olds back then just read the news all the time and now it's different and no one does?

> So reporters have responded with tweets and instant feedback on anything that's happening.

It has more to do with managers and companies pushing reporters and journalists to feed page views. That's it. It's not reporters responding to the end user. It's reporters responding to the fact they don't have good jobs anymore and have to generate ad revenue.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#66

This sort of sensationalism, in general, is so completely ingrained into reporting that it's hard to separate from journalism itself. It's part of the journalistic style, an inevitability of the medium. We see an article, click a link, by a paper, but we are never committing to more than a second or two of attention at a time. The headline makes you read the byline. The byline gets you reading the second sentence. At…

But most people don't want that, sadly. Instant mass media has shown us that people want to consume media about other real people -- that they admire in some fashion -- going through life. Not reporting, explanation, facts, or science. So reporters have responded with tweets and instant feedback on anything that's happening. Many times even when nothing is happening, they know they have to put out some kind of person…

I have a streak of journalism about me, and I when I found malware on a cheap, mass-market tablet a year ago I used my soapbox to great effect, forcing a promise from a CTO to rectify the problem. Search on "Barnes Noble malware" if you're curious.

Anyway, that was my only writing that really went viral, and it was not about a person. It was about a corporation, a device, and a set of security policies.

Anyway, I've written incendiary things, informative things, and I guess some bad things.

I now understand the basic math behind "stochastic gradient descent." Maybe after some practice, I can help.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#67

This sort of sensationalism, in general, is so completely ingrained into reporting that it's hard to separate from journalism itself. It's part of the journalistic style, an inevitability of the medium. We see an article, click a link, by a paper, but we are never committing to more than a second or two of attention at a time. The headline makes you read the byline. The byline gets you reading the second sentence. At…

Then read the Economist.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#68
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been finding random hearsay for a while now. Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Is the Daily Mail or Sun or Mirror or Express more accurate than some clickbait farm? Probably not. Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news, it was low quality tabloids with a helping of TV and radio pundits.

> Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Outside of NYC, the US has basically no daily tabloids. > Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news Most people in the US that were reading any daily news were probably reading the dominant local newspaper or one of the latter reputable metropolitan or national papers, b…

Hmm, you may have raised an interesting point there, namely that the quality of the media is very location specific and some countries had better media outlets than others as a rule.

Unfortunately, it seems coverage of journalism and its decline and what not is very US centric, which likely confuses the hell out of people from other countries where their media outlets got worse much earlier on/didn't have a golden age in general. Kind of like how US media outlets and YouTubers assume the Great Video Game Crash was some worldwide thing, whereas it really only affected the US market and left the European and Japanese ones almost untouched.

It may also explain some of the comments on local journalism, since that stuff over here in the UK isn't exactly fantastic itself. Maybe there's more ambition in local US newspapers than in UK ones, in that they actually did some journalism at some point rather than merely covering what local businesses were up to or what not.

Huh, guess there's a cultural divide in how the news is presented too.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI doesent do latteral thinking that well yet. Its a meta problem, thinking about thinking requires selfawareness. But saying its just bruteforce is missing the larger point, much of evolution is bruteforce. Of course its money or power first thats how you pay for these things to begin with, with utillity we wil get more and more conscious ai but its obviously going to take time but a blip compared the time evolution…

There's this continual refrain from AI people: "well evolution is just brute force too", or "the brain is just doing complex statistics too" as if that explains anything at all. There are different ways of implementing "brute force" and "complex statistics" - what matters is the implementation, not the terminology. Clearly AI is not even remotely close to "thinking" or "awareness" in the human sense. We don't even un…

We don't even understand the implementation of those things in humans.

And we don't have to, unless you're insisting on something that might be referred to more aptly as "Artificial Human Intelligence". Generally speaking though, in the AI field, there's no particular belief that AI must work the same way human intelligence works. If AI research leads to discoveries that help us better understand human intelligence, that's a nice perk, but nobody treats that as the ultimate goal.

That said, of course it makes sense to try and model after human intelligence to the extent we can, since we are currently the best example of intelligence we have available to use as a template.

It is ignorant conceit to think we will just magically stumble upon the answer with zeitgeist machine learning techniques.

Who is out there suggesting that we will "just magically stumble upon the answer with zeitgeist machine learning techniques"? From where I sit, it seems that most contemporary researchers who are focused on Deep Learning / Deep Reinforcement Learning / etc. are not talking much at all about "Artificial Intelligence" in the general sense. And the people out there talking specifically about "Artificial General Intelligence" (Ben Goertzel, Marcus Hutter, Pei Wang, etc.) certainly aren't claiming that all we need is the currently faddish ML techniques. See, for reference:

http://agi-conf.org/2017/?page_id=20

http://agi-conf.org/2016/schedule/

http://agi-conf.org/2015/schedule/

etc..

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#70
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's true though. Look at any polls about trust in the media. It's been falling for a long time. People are becoming aware that journalists are systematically unreliable and it's having an impact.

And unfortunately the alternative people have found is random hearsay on the web. The dieticians lost our trust and now we're just eating junk food instead.

FWIW, I think a new alternative has been brewing for a while: long form interviews on YouTube and podcasts. Whether you’re a fan or not, I think Jordan Peterson has some pretty insightful things to say about this on his last interview with Joe Rogan.
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