Live data from Hacker News

The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

wired.com

351–360 of 402 posts

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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Do you think the people who make TikTok or Clash of Clans (or, hell, the Daily Mail) use their own products?

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

#352
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…

I was surprised at how game the AI was to pronounce the Hawaiian place names, it was confident enough that I assumed the pronunciation was correct. The article notes that it is butchering the placenames though. To me this illustrates a common cognitive mismatch when evaluating AI, it can be confident in a way that most humans can't, and that misleading social cue is another reason we trust its output.

I've seen plenty of human newsreaders be confidently incorrect about place names. And some pronunciations aren't necessarily "wrong" so much as contested.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A system that digs out undiscovered mechanisms to drape novelty on based on where the statistical analysis says it’s already been, that would do it though.

We can sit and imagine horrors the whole week. It has no bearing on the capabilities of machine learning.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m only half joking when I’ve described ChatGPT-authored emails as a uniquely inefficient transport format. Author feeds bullet points into ChatGPT which burns CPU cycles producing paragraphs of fluff. Recipient feeds paragraphs of fluff into ChatGPT and asks it to summarise into bullet points.

Similarily, MSFT recently announced the upcoming ability to clone your voice for Teams meetings. Extrapolating, in a few months, there will be Teams meetings which are only frequented by avatars. At the end of the meeting, you get an email with the essential content. Weird times ahead.

A meeting where I can be represented by an AI is a meeting that doesn't need to happen.

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

#355
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

When WotC first offered digital cards, they had a system whereby you could redeem a complete set for its physical equivalent. At the time this helped convince naysayers they weren’t giving money for nothing. Twenty years later, with their latest online offerings, nobody really cares. I’ve certainly spent more money and had more fun with online Magic, and when I wanted to build my own cube I just got proxies printed anyway. I think the “collectible” part fell away a long time ago and now you’re happy just paying for an experience.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarily, MSFT recently announced the upcoming ability to clone your voice for Teams meetings. Extrapolating, in a few months, there will be Teams meetings which are only frequented by avatars. At the end of the meeting, you get an email with the essential content. Weird times ahead.

A meeting where I can be represented by an AI is a meeting that doesn't need to happen.

If only those who schedule meetings would know that.

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A system that digs out undiscovered mechanisms to drape novelty on based on where the statistical analysis says it’s already been, that would do it though.

We can sit and imagine horrors the whole week. It has no bearing on the capabilities of machine learning.

If there’s a clear distinction between LLMs looking for patterns in text and LLMs looking for patterns in patterns in text, I’m interested in seeing it better and understanding it.

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

#358
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes comes from one of his correspondences: 'My apologies for such a long letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one.'

Probably not by Twain, but still a good quote. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

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

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a very off putting start a good thing?

The videos in question would’ve been considered science fiction a mere 5 years ago, so I definitely don’t consider them a very off putting start . That doesn’t mean that I think they’re perfect or that the technology will keep improving at a fast pace (nobody knows for sure).

Yeah it's very hard to do and once it's done it's very off putting. And this is not about first results, this has been on the works for years and after hundreds of billions of dollars of investment it is very off putting. We're not at the concept phase, we're at the top of the logistic curve and the whole shtick is arguing that we're at the bottom.

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write a comment explaining that the ostensibly simple task of writing a dozen or so thank you letters for those socks/etc you received for Christmas can, for some people, be an excruciating task that takes weeks to complete, but with the aid of LLMs can easily be done in an hour. On second thought, you're right. That was easy.

That's old world stuff - I've never sent a thank you card and have lost no sleep bc of it.

Sure, it's not just thank you cards though. I once had a job in which my boss assigned me the weekly task of manually emailing an automatically generated report to his boss, and insisted that each email have unique body text amounting to "here's that report you asked for" but stretched into three or four sentences, custom written each week and never repeating. The guy apparently hated to receive automated emails and would supposedly be offended if I copy-pasted the same email every time.

Absolutely senseless work, perfect job for an LLM.

Post reply on HN