This is so cool. As somebody else also pointed out, journalism is all about the data collection. Say what you will about WikiLeaks, one of the things I liked about them was the whole data dump thingy. I prefer the idea of "Here's the data, make up your mind"
Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
61–70 of 142 posts
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#62I’d love to hear somebody try to explain how this won’t negatively impact the labor market for journalists. My guess is that the argument will be that the “tools will simply help augment rather than replace the writer.” We know, however, that some small segment of implementations will actually in fact, cause someone to be fired or replaced, and things will get slightly worse for the consumer. An alternative explanati…
Writers will be offered a one-time payment for their writing sample, which will be used by publishers, in perpetuity, to generate content in that style. No royalties. Also, no further employment. The shame of it is, this is actually slightly better than the current state of things, where no one who contributed writing to the training sets in any form is receiving compensation. But it is the same issue as one of the s…
Nobody gives a shit about style for news reporting, which is about fact gathering. AI-generated style imitation will hurt opinion columnists, but they're a complete waste of oxygen anyway.
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#63just wondering if this AI is aware of that Google will sunset the AI within the next two years, and if it will then write its own farewell article
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#64I’d love to hear somebody try to explain how this won’t negatively impact the labor market for journalists. My guess is that the argument will be that the “tools will simply help augment rather than replace the writer.” We know, however, that some small segment of implementations will actually in fact, cause someone to be fired or replaced, and things will get slightly worse for the consumer. An alternative explanati…
As a journalist, I hate writing. I like hunting down facts and details, the actual writing part is miserable and boring. There's constant sweating over how much context to include so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the important stuff. I've never used an LLM to write anything, but I have seriously considered doing a dense infodump and telling it to ask me up to 5 contextual questions before sp…
> There's constant sweating over how much context to include so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the important stuff
Won't help you when you have to edit the AI output because…
> Editing other people's stuff is even worse, because many writers aren't burdened by editorial concerns and don't bother to put in the effort to make their story coherent and interesting
So in the end, what do you gain?
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? I imagine that the new AI-enabled jobs are going to have so much more autonomy and that we'll see a switch from capital intensive businesses employing lots of people (eg. Hollywood studios) to lots of tiny indie houses with fewer than a dozen folks, building exactly what they want with freedom.
> How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? This gets said about every wave of technological driven job loss and it ignores that it is quite difficult for people to change careers in their mid life. Laid off auto workers in the 80s and 90s didn't switch to other manufacturing jobs or "learn to code". They fell down the ladder into service work and became destitute. And the difference with LLMs is that…
A knock-on effect of non-retrainable workers being displaced is that they become convenient vectors for authoritarianism.
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#66As a (formerly?) information retrieval company, isn't this shitting where one eats? They don't exactly need more irrelevant material to sort out.
Google has been shitting where they eat ever since they decided to put the answers to questions in the SERP itself instead of just offering search links.
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a shopper, self checkout is wonderful . It's so much faster and easier than waiting for a single cashier or two. Especially the ones with a scan gun, so you don't have to fight the stupid countertop scanner. As for lost jobs, should we really be propping up unnecessary jobs that really don't do much except poorly substituting a machine? Whether it's checkout or journalism or coding or politics... if a computer can…
>why not let it and free up the human for other things? Cause this has never been the majority outcome in the history of technology The outcome in 90%? of mechanization/automation is not upskilling - it’s displacement. Work gets outsourced to cheaper labor areas or you’re now a baby sitter instead of a tradesperson that is more easily replaced because you have few skills. All the “meritocracy” goes out the window whe…
you’re doing someone else’s labor
I'm doing my own labor. Personally I often don't want to have conversations while doing my grocery shopping, especially not the fake corporate kind. Having to have such conversations as an employee of a supermarket was a very unpleasant experience, lacking in dignity.
You make a lot of good points, but others are extremely half baked.
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#68[flagged]
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a journalist, I hate writing. I like hunting down facts and details, the actual writing part is miserable and boring. There's constant sweating over how much context to include so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the important stuff. I've never used an LLM to write anything, but I have seriously considered doing a dense infodump and telling it to ask me up to 5 contextual questions before sp…
> There's constant sweating over how much context to include so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the important stuff Won't help you when you have to edit the AI output because… > Editing other people's stuff is even worse, because many writers aren't burdened by editorial concerns and don't bother to put in the effort to make their story coherent and interesting So in the end, what do you gain?
ChatGPT writes better and takes feedback better than many real people. I would rather fine-tune and LLM on my won writing and a collection of source documents. That way I could focus on information-gathering, write an extremely terse summary of what I consider to be the key points, and save myself many hours of misery writing boilerplate.
Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles
#70Sounds like a ChatGPT trained for journalist use cases? I don't think the goal is to auto populate people's feed with some generative contents. Google probably doesn't want to be legally liable with all those machine generated articles...