Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 402 posts

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

#161

Post by segasaturn »

unraveller wrote: post #81
Nevermark wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever. I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was a conversation killer, even with technical people. AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many things are…

People are judging AI by what abusers of AI put out there for lols and what they themselves can wring out of it. They haven't yet seen what a bunch of AAA professionals with nothing to lose can build and align.

Billions of dollars and all of Silicon Valley's focus has been spent over the last 2 years trying to get AI to work, the "AAA professionals" are already working on AI and I still have yet to see an AI generated product that's interesting or compelling.

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

#162

Post by vbarrielle »

tomcam wrote: 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…

Looks like they're using something like motion matching to recover fragments of the presenter's motion that match the pronounced phonemes. The actors were probably instructed to avoid almost all movement to make sure it was blendable. That would explain why the guy's hand have such erratic and non-natural movement.

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

#163

Post by jcims »

mikeocool wrote: post #128
vunderba wrote: 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…

Agreed. I finally got around to listening to a NotebookLM generated podcast this weekend, and found it absolutely unlistenable. For some reason the LLM seemed to latch on to the idea that one host should say something, and the other host should just repeat a key phrase in the sentence for emphasis -- and say nothing else, and they'd do it like multiple times in a sentence, over and over again throughout the entire th…

I tried it with something fairly abstract about a decision I was working on making. Fed it a bunch of information, details about me, my background, the factors I'm considering in the decision and the impact of getting it right/wrong.

It was interesting. I certainly wouldn't say it was useless, I think the contrived dialogue actually touched on some angles I hadn't considered and I think it was useful. Not in a 'oh shit it's clear to me now' kind of way but it definitely advanced my thinking.

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

#164

Post by hansonkd »

the CocaCola commercial that everyone "hated" that "destroyed the brand equity" according to numerous news outlets solidified to me that we are passing a mark and this is the last desperate gasp of multiple industries coping with the rapid advancements AI is bringing.

Sure the Coke ad was a bit cringe. But the reality is in 5 years most ads you see will be AI and nobody will care.

That along with the Ben Affleck Rant that AI won't replace Hollywood. Watching Ben Affleck talking about how you can't replace the chemistry of actors working on set made me imagine what the conversations of famous stage actors were when film came along. You can argue film didn't replace the stage, after all broadway is still there, but it is not comparable to the economic influence of TV and Film.

In 10-20 years, human made Film, TV will still exist. But it will most likely be a small amount of the economic activity that AI produced media will be.

It doesn't matter if you care how terrible or how cringe AI is. Or that AI quality is worse than what existed before. What matters is in 5-20 years with a new generation what 90% of them care and if AI has more utility that not using AI. In the authors case in the short term for that particular medium, AI was not more useful. But in the long term AI will dominate every facet of our media.

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

#165

Post by snapcaster »

vunderba wrote: post #137
93po wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will take time though, if the internet had completely disappeared in the mid 90s nothing would have fundamentally changed

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

#166

Post by HWR_14 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #96
keiferski wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits. Doesn't seem that much different from a fashion magazine interview about what X celebrity likes to wear. Those have been around for quite a long time.

At least in the past people were celebrities for a reason other than the number of followers they had on social. It'd be nice if we could return to a time when people were part of the public discourse because they were good at something (or their parents were rich, sadly).

Why does it matter if the celebrity was good at something or not if you are just discussing what they wear?

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

#167

Post by foobarian »

bdndndndbve wrote: post #88
datahack wrote: post #82

While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error. The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are e…

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…

One problem is that people assume the end goal is to create a human-cognition-capable AI. I think it' pretty obvious by this point that that's not going to happen. But there is no need for that at all to still cause a huge disruption; let's say most current workers in roles that benefit from AI (copilot, writing, throwaway clipart, repetitive tasks, summarizing, looking up stuff, etc.) lead not even to job loss but fewer future jobs created - what does that mean for the incoming juniors? What does that mean for the people looking for that kind of work? It's not obvious at all how big of a problem that will create.

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

#169

Post by yapyap »

vunderba wrote: 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…

> Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to

the only real people that believe in that that I’ve seen are ones who are heavily invested in it succeeding

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

#170

Post by harrall »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #11
vunderba wrote: 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…

Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with normalcy.

I don’t consume AI media because it’s not very good.

I watched a lot a bad movies and read a lot of bad books as a kid that I can’t stomach now because I’ve read better books and watched better movies. My guess is that kids today would do the same, assuming AI doesn’t improve.

Post reply on HN