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The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

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

#181

Post by benatkin »

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…

Hmm, does Google not use the Claude or ChatGPT API for it? I still don't hear of people chatting with Gemini nearly as often as with the other two.

Edit: looks like the subreddit is still called Bard. Well played, Internets. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0egad/gemini_vs_not...

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

#183

Post by tokioyoyo »

mvdtnz wrote: post #139
tokioyoyo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the technology. It’s hard to look at the progress from December of 2022 till today, and think we won’t go further. Image generation is getting better every day. Parts of the video generation pipelines are also advancing.

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

#184

Post by jandrese »

fny wrote: post #7

Give it time y'all. This is the first inning, and I'm already terrified. I encourage you to have a conversation with ChatGPT's advanced audio for a taste of what's to come. If you can, have someone talk to it in a relatively unpopular language like Afrikaans or even Icelandic--they will shit their pants.

I'm not so convinced. A lot of people have been noting the rapid development of ML systems in the past few years and projecting continued exponential improvements based on previous growth rates, but unbounded exponential improvement doesn't happen. This is an S curve and I think we're already well into the diminishing returns part of the curve. I think future growth is going to require increasingly impractical amounts of hardware for ever smaller levels of improvement.

People saying that this version is flawed but still amazing, so the next version is going to be perfect and mind blowing are going to be disappointed I think. The next version will be slightly better but still flawed. The version after that will be a touch better but annoyingly still not quite there. Constantly teasing you that full success is just around the corner while never quite getting there.

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

#185

Post by brabel »

lukev wrote: post #102
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…

But we don't know if AI development is following an exponential or sigmoid curve (actually we do kind of, now, but that's beside the point for this post.) A wise institution will make decisions based on current capabilities, not a prognostication.

If investors didn't invest based on expected future performance, the share market would look completely different than it actually does today. So, I can't understand how anyone can claim that.

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

#186

Post by jandrese »

sailfast wrote: post #21

Clickbait title for a decent write-up. The author left Hawaii, and as indicated in the article the local press resorted to AI presenters because it was hard to keep talent on board. This is not a "job replacement" story so much as a "backup plan" story in my opinion.

> local press resorted to AI presenters because it was hard to keep talent on board

I see a phrase like that and my first thought is "the pay is crap" and/or "the bosses are awful" and nobody in their right mind would work there.

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

#187

Post by neom »

fragmede wrote: post #174
mjr00 wrote: 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…

> If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. Is that based on a vigorous experience as a content creator on TikTok as a long form content creator or are you going off what you've heard about TikTok, or it's what your feed is full of? (which says more about you/your feed than it does about TikTok) https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ 1.1 M views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/…

I've never used tiktok and this post was... enlightening. The ClickUP HR guys are actually pretty funny... but wtf is this from that first channel you posted... lol? https://www.tiktok.com/@luckypassengers/video/74395775119539... - I mean, she's not wrong.

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

#188

Post by WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW »

petercooper wrote: post #155
WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give it time. Progress is fast. Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around the time the current set of techniques came about. We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver has been generative art for over 20 years now. Obviously generative art has come a long way but people have been working on various approaches to it for at least 30 years.

From 2020 until now, we've gone from crude blurry or clearly generative artefacts to being able to create full professional illustrations based upon textual prompts. That is huge. Classic generative art techniques look like cave paintings compared to what the latest image generation models put out (and I'm not talking about "AI slop" type stuff that DALL-E does). Similarly, tools could fabricate podcasts years ago th…

Can current techniques be scaled/improved/optimized to do this or do we need new techniques?

It took 30 years in the generative art world to move from cave paintings to the level that we have today because we needed new techniques.

For podcasts we are at the cave paintings level.

If we can get to professional level quality podcasts with the current techniques then we might only be a few years away.

I think it is more likely we will need new techniques which puts us potentially decades away.

If we look at LLMs the improvements over the last 18+ months since gpt4 was released have been minor despite incredible levels of investment.

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

#189

Post by mjr00 »

fragmede wrote: post #174
mjr00 wrote: 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…

> If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. Is that based on a vigorous experience as a content creator on TikTok as a long form content creator or are you going off what you've heard about TikTok, or it's what your feed is full of? (which says more about you/your feed than it does about TikTok) https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ 1.1 M views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/…

All of those immediately have something attention-grabbing within the first few seconds: picture of Mars' surface, run map showing funny human shape, text with "Gen Z programmers are crazy" prefacing the anecdote, going immediately into the IT-related rap, guy holding a big and cool-looking stick, "dealing with your 10x coworker" immediately showing the point of the video. The only one that doesn't is the SQL one I guess but that's a very low view count (relatively) on a niche channel.

So thanks for providing a bunch of examples that prove my point, I guess?

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

#190

Post by tehkadz »

mjr00 wrote: post #20
tokioyoyo wrote: post #11

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 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…

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