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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

#121

Post by topato »

edm0nd wrote: post #117
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…

How would you go about eating said stovetop hat? Would you eat it raw or would you have to boil it down to soften it up and then drink/eat its hat soup?

Cook it like stovetop stuffing, I'd imagine....

Isn't it a stovePIPE hat?

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

#122

Post by pawelduda »

yardstick wrote: post #28
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…

The first thing I thought of when I saw this is that some mid-tier dictatorships could replace a lot of their newscasters with this approach. Can always guarantee they’ll say what they need to say, and a lack of emotion is a plus maybe? Except with the dear leader passes then you bring out a real person for the emotions.

AI's not mandatory for that

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

#123

Post by unsui »

93po wrote: post #116
bdndndndbve wrote: post #88

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…

Because the hype will always outdistance the utility, on average.

Yes, you'll get peaks where innovation takes everyone by surprise.

Then the salesbots will pivot, catch up, and ingest the innovation into the pitch machine as per usual.

So yes, there is genuine innovation and surprise. That's not what is being discussed. It's the hype that inevitably overwhelms the innovation, and also inevitably pollutes the pool with increasing noise. That's just human nature, trying to make a quick buck from the new-hotness.

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

#124

Post by CuriouslyC »

vunderba wrote: post #65
bilater wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again - think of where we were two years ago. I never understand this hubris people have to think AI can never do X while being proved repeatedly wrong.

Everybody trots out this argument. GPT styled LLMs were introduced back in 2018 so SIX years ago. Have they gotten more COHERENT ? Absolutely. Is coherence the same thing as NOVELTY ? NOT EVEN REMOTELY. I've played with markov chains in the 90s that were capable of producing surprising content. Unless there is a radical advancement in the underlying tech, I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine…

If you have a particular style of witty observational humor that you prefer, providing the model some examples of that will help it generate better output. It's capable of generating pretty much anything if you prompt it the right way. For truly nuanced or novel things, you have to give it a nucleus of novelty and axis of nuance for it to start generating things in your desired space.

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

#125

Post by topato »

Nevermark wrote: post #54
keiferski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have probably written this comment about a dozen times on HN already, but: I agree completely, because people don't listen to podcasts purely for information, they listen for information plus community, personality, or just a basic human connection. If you're a content creator today, the best thing you can do to "AI-proof" your work is to inject your personality into it as much as possible. Preferably your physical…

> 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…

I find your ideas intreguing, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

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

#126

Post by smitelli »

petercooper wrote: post #68
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…

Someone in 2020: "If you can find a computer program that can generate an image with even a FRACTION of the aesthetic appeal of human created art...." Give it time. Progress is fast.

“Generate” does not have the same connotation that “create” does. Are they really that interchangeable?

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

#127

Post by cryptozeus »

Is it just me or does everyone feel this way ? Its an instant put off for me when i hear that article was generated by AI. I would lose trust of that publication and move on.

People think AI is the magic answer for shitty content. In some cases AI is only adding speed not quality.

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

#128

Post by mikeocool »

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 thing.

Slightly less weird -- but it seems like the LLM caught on that a good narrative structure for a two-host podcast is that one host is the 'expert' on the topic, and the other host plays dumb and ask questions. Not an unreasonable narrative structure. Except that the hosts would seamlessly, and very weirdly, switch roles constantly throughout the podcast.

And ultimately the result was just a high level summary of the article I had provided. They told me in the intro and the outro about the interesting parts they were going to dive into, but they never actually got around to diving into those parts.

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

#129

Post by segasaturn »

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…

There's a reason why so many of the people on the crypto grift in 2020-2022 have jumped to the AI grift. Same logic of "revolution is just around the corner", with the added mix of AGI millenarianism which hits a lot of nerds' soft spots.

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

#130

Post by CuriouslyC »

keiferski wrote: post #98
CuriouslyC wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That’s not true at all. Fame for no reason or dumb reasons is hardly a 21st century phenomenon.

The scale isn't even close, and it's become normalized now. I think it bears talking about as a 21st century phenomenon.
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