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The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

wired.com

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Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#131
post #3

Incredibly, no videos linked in an article about a video newscast. I think this is an example. The AI doesn't even pronounce "AI" correctly. Interestingly, it looks slightly offscreen just the way real newsreaders do when they're on prompter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa7Q2S7VWUk They do a lot right. There's interaction between the bots. They look kind of professional but not Los Angeles/New York quality, which…

Ooh wow I hate this. Totally soulless appearance and delivery - and the robot fidgeting the dude is doing with his hands completely distracts from everything else. It’s totally normal to do that movement while speaking for emphasis - but whatever he’s doing does not look normal. (The mouths look nightmarish as well)

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#132
post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

As someone who's struggled to really get into podcasts, I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really actively listen to them, they just like that extra bit of noise in the background while they do something else, with the added bonus that they might just listen at just the right time to pick up some interesting factoid. Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favo…

I used to listen to podcasts during my commute, when they took the place of listening to NPR or talk radio. Now that I work from home full time, I listen to them when I'm doing dishes or similar chores, going on walks around the city, and when I'm doing any significant amount of driving. I listen to a combination of comedy/history (love The Dollop), politics, and sci-fi commentary.

For the most part, I'm listening pretty actively, but if I'm just sitting there listening without a fairly mindless activity going on, I'll get distracted pretty quickly and find myself looking at my phone...

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks, people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate human cognition. I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up…

Two things can both be true. I keep arguing both sides because: 1 Unless you’re aware of near term limits you think AI is going to the stars next year. 2 Architectures change. The only thing that doesn’t change is that we generally push on, temporarily limits are usually overcome and there’s a lot riding on this. It’s not a smart move to bet against progress over the medium term. This is also where the real benefits…

point 2 is the thing that i think is most important to point out:

"architectures change"

sure, that's a fact. let me apply this to other fields:

"there could be a battery breakthrough that gives electric cars a 2,000 mile range." "researchers could discover a new way to build nanorobots that attacks cancer directly and effectively cures all versions of it." "we could invent a new sort of aviation engine that is 1,000x more fuel efficient than the current generation."

i mean, yeah, sure. i guess.

the current hype is built on LLMs, and being charitable "LLMs built with current architecture." there are other things in the works, but most of the current generation of AI hype are a limited number of algorithms and approaches, mixed and matched in different ways, with other features bolted on to try and corral them into behaving as we hope. it is much more realistic to expect that we are in the period of diminishing returns as far as investing in these approaches than it is to believe we'll continue to see earth-shattering growth. nothing has appeared that had the initial "wow" factor of the early versions of suno, or gpt, or dall-e, or sora, or whatever else.

this is clearly and plainly a tech bubble. it's so transparently one, it's hard to understand how folks aren't seeing it. all these tools have been in the mainstream for a pretty substantial period of time (relatively) and the honest truth is they're just not moving the needle in many industries. the most frequent practical application of them in practice has been summarization, editing, and rewriting, which is a neat little parlor trick - but all the same, it's indicative of the fact that they largely model language, so that's primarily what they're good at.

you can bet on something entirely new being discovered... but what? there just isn't anything inching closer to that general AI hype we're all hearing about that exists in the real world. i'm sure folks are cooking on things, but that doesn't mean they're near production-ready. saying "this isn't a bubble because one day someone might invent something that's actually good" is kind of giving away the game - the current generation isn't that good, and we can't point to the thing that's going to overtake it.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint, GenAI is great at copying styles and typically works best with shorter content. For example, I could very easily see GenAI being able to produce 1 million TikTok dance challenges.

Which will make them completely worthless by dilution and not stand out. Oops.

Novelty grabs people's attention. A system based on the statistical analysis of past content won't do novelty. This seems like a very basic issue to me.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#135
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree, but I also think it's just not geared towards us because of our age and preexisting beliefs of "what podcasts/news/videos are supposed to be". Think of kids around age It's the same as short-video format for me. Sure, I can watch some TikToks from time to time, but making them, or continuously getting my news from them? Yeah, that's not gonna fly for me. However, for my niblings (age 8-17) that's bas…

The idea that "TikTok is for Gen Z" seems like a very stale meme, although I only have anecdata to back that up. Microtransactions are way older than 15 years. Wizards of the Coast was selling randomized MtG booster packs in 1993. I'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball card packs, with very similar psychological purpose to today's game cosmetic collectibles.

I think the main difference is digital vs physical goods. I know it's minor since a card is just a cheap piece of cardboard, but it's still something tangible (unless the game cosmetics also include a physical item, in which case...I'm dumb).

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#136
post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

I totally agree, but I also think it's just not geared towards us because of our age and preexisting beliefs of "what podcasts/news/videos are supposed to be". Think of kids around age It's the same as short-video format for me. Sure, I can watch some TikToks from time to time, but making them, or continuously getting my news from them? Yeah, that's not gonna fly for me. However, for my niblings (age 8-17) that's bas…

"If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years."

There is a sense in which that is true.

However, we all develop taste, and in a hypothetical world where current AI ends up being the limit for another 10 or 20 years, eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much "there" there as they supposed.

The wild card is that we probably don't live in that world, and it's difficult to guess how good AI is going to get.

Even now, the voice of AI that people are complaining about is just the current default voice, which will probably eventually be looked on about as favorably as bell-bottomed jeans or beehive hairdos. It is driven less by the technology itself than a complicated set of desires around not wanting to give the media nifty soundbites about how mean (or politically incorrect) AI can be, and not wanting to be sued. It's minimal prompt engineering even now to change it a lot. "Make a snappy TikTok video about whatever" is not something the tech is going to struggle with. In fact given the general poverty of the state space I would guess it'll outcompete humans pretty quickly.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#137
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks, people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate human cognition. I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up…

This is confusing. We've never had a ChatGPT-like innovation before to compare to. Yes, there have been AI hype cycles for decades, but the difference is that we now have permanent invaluable and society-changing tools out of the current AI cycle, combined with hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown at it in a level of investment we've never seen before. Unless you're on the bleeding edge of AI research yoursel…

I don't agree with this.

There's a big difference between something that benefits productivity versus something that benefits humanity.

I think a good test for if it genuinely has changed society is if all gen AI were to disappear overnight. I would argue that nothing would really fundamentally change.

Contrast that with the sudden disappearance of the internet, or the combustion engine.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#138
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy…

What's funny is every GenAI "incredible email/essay" would be better communicated with the prompt used to generate it.

"Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#139
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy…

Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to generate attention-grabbing videos? Also, "the first three seconds" isn't exactly the case anymore. There's a push for algorithm to favour videos that are longer than 1+ minutes. Which, to my understanding, is TikTok's way of fighting for YouTube's userbase.

> Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to...

blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved. If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of time". I'll believe it when I see it.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#140
post #87
post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

I've heard amazing catchy songs from Suno and Udio. So much so they're still stuck in my head as earworms several months later. If they'd been streaming on youtube or spotify I wouldn't have given it a thought that they might be AI generated. So, I can certainly imagine a podcast doing the same to some degree. Maybe not a podcast where AI wrote the script, but, a podcast where AI read a story dramatically doesn't see…

We had this recently, yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087

It's kind of horrible.

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