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Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

nytimes.com

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Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#81

Post by polski-g »

JohnFen wrote: post #42
echelon wrote: post #8

Earlier 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? I think that's the wrong question. The better question is how can be ensure that people aren't just out of work and can still be able to afford to live?

They shouldn't. They should go work in a different industry.

The butter churners didn't just die, they became professionals doing something else.

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#82

Post by Descon »

Loquebantur wrote: post #79
thehappypm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism is a lot more than just turning press releases and such into articles. In fact, making it cheaper to churn those out will free up money for real journalism — investigations, interviews, analysis, opinions.

No, it won't. News media today are nothing more but a vehicle to bring attention to advertisement. The majority of people do not read lengthy articles anyway, only headlines. Investigative journalism is wildly expensive and not cost-effective given said objective. News media are anachronistic anyway. People are stuck in childish and dumbed down variants of "my parents told me so". What is necessary (and severely lack…

I think they're certainly a place for publicly funded and accountable news media like CBC or BBC News, where the profit motive isn't there by the nature of funding (Of course, this model has its own separate set of issues that it needs to overcome as well. But IMO it's a better base to build off)

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#83

Post by AndrewKemendo »

solardev wrote: post #77
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing half baked about it I have regular ongoing relationships with the employees at the Giant (Grocery store) near my house and know their names and who they are as people and they know me and my kids and it's great. To the extent where together, myself, Sandi (Night Manager), the Asst Manager and some of the staff all worked together to help get a wonderful man back on his feet that was struggling and begging and…

What is Giant? The bicycle company? Do you mean you and a few employees there just got together and started, what, a shared pot of money for emergencies? Can you please share more about how that happened (or maybe even a blog post)? I'd love to try something similar.

See my edit above. It wouldn't let me reply for some reason.

Basically, I just took it upon myself to help this guy but I needed the staff to help. Because I already knew them over years of interaction, it was an easy conversation/ask that they agreed to and we were successful in giving this guy a hand up. No govt or coercion or anything needed.

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#84

Post by visarga »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7

I’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…

Not worried about low quality text from AI. Soon enough it will be hard to find a human who writes better than a human+AI+plugins team. And an AI+plugins system will be better than average human.

We need to have AI monitor the news and rate their level of factuality by consistency analysis and reputation scoring. Journalists in the loop, working with AI to find disinformation. Then we can feel safer about propaganda-LLMs, they are inevitable.

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#85

Post by tivert »

htrp wrote: post #76
tivert wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the whole industry collapses in on itself, taking opinion pieces with it. That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Opinion pieces will be the last to go, after everything of value has been destroyed. And honestly, not all opinion pieces are bad. Most are crap partisan hackery and outrage-bait, but some are very valuable (e.g. those unconnected with ideological bickering, those struggling to explain a point…

> Opinion pieces will be the last to go, after everything of value has been destroyed. Wouldn't opinion pieces be the first to go? We're already in a world where most opinion pieces are part of carefully orchestrated PR campaigns (sometimes even wholly ghostwritten) meant to drive policy discussion in one way or another. If you can AI write this and ascribe it to a reputable source, why wouldn't the industry adopt th…

> Wouldn't opinion pieces be the first to go?

No, because they're relatively cheap to produce. Everyone has an opinion and many people compelled to share and argue about them.

The hard, expensive thing is gathering facts, doing deep investigation, or cultivating relationships so the facts come to you. That's why the intersection between blogs and journalists has always been opinion and punditry, since no one has the time to do anything else when they have a day job.

> We're already in a world where most opinion pieces are part of carefully orchestrated PR campaigns (sometimes even wholly ghostwritten) meant to drive policy discussion in one way or another. If you can AI write this and ascribe it to a reputable source, why wouldn't the industry adopt this as standard?

Isn't that an argument for the idea that "opinion pieces will be the last to go"?

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#86

Post by Loquebantur »

guilamu wrote: post #80
Loquebantur wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it won't. News media today are nothing more but a vehicle to bring attention to advertisement. The majority of people do not read lengthy articles anyway, only headlines. Investigative journalism is wildly expensive and not cost-effective given said objective. News media are anachronistic anyway. People are stuck in childish and dumbed down variants of "my parents told me so". What is necessary (and severely lack…

'What is necessary (and severely lacking) is two-way communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling people to form well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive constructive criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating self-reflection on a society-level. ' Can't agree more, but how? Any insight?

One first needs to appreciate the many attempts failing at it. Reddit, Twitter, social media... They all were bad to begin with, but deliberately made worse still, to the point of not fulfilling their raison d'être anymore.

You need a functional format for group discussions (existed, killed off). You need functional standards for civil discussion (exist, see science, people somehow forgot). And you need to realize, anonymity is anathema to having a civil sphere (You don't need to give your real name, but for social self-regulation to work, an identity is necessary).

AI quite possibly could help a great deal with this. Sensible automated (and consistently reasoned/reviewable) moderation of internet forums is wildly underexplored.

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#87

Post by akomtu »

jononomo wrote: post #4

I suppose all a news writer has to do now is tell the AI what happened and then then the AI can tell everyone else what happened.

In reality: an AI bot watches the stream of twits, picks those that fit its narrative (preprompt) and tells the users what to think.

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#88

Post by thehappypm »

Loquebantur wrote: post #79
thehappypm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism is a lot more than just turning press releases and such into articles. In fact, making it cheaper to churn those out will free up money for real journalism — investigations, interviews, analysis, opinions.

No, it won't. News media today are nothing more but a vehicle to bring attention to advertisement. The majority of people do not read lengthy articles anyway, only headlines. Investigative journalism is wildly expensive and not cost-effective given said objective. News media are anachronistic anyway. People are stuck in childish and dumbed down variants of "my parents told me so". What is necessary (and severely lack…

Investigative journalism, winding up in a newspaper, is indeed outdated. However, things like documentaries and videos and such are a modern way to use those skills

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#89

Post by hnburnsy »

Here is the template to write a news article...

State some facts as reported by others (never link to supporting documents only summarize them)

Quote from expert or eyewitness on why this is important

Quote from other expert why this might not be important (optional as this might make the story not truly news worthy)

State that confusing aspects of the story are "unclear"

Fill the rest of the story from articles on the same subject even if not related (link to your publication only)

Re: Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

#90

Post by goodgoblin »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7

I’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…

b/c the 'writing' part is at the end of the process of gathering the news.
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