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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

#221

Post by sleepybrett »

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…

> 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.

cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

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

#222

Post by bluGill »

portaouflop wrote: post #213
jerf wrote: 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.

I never had that requirement outside the first years of school- where it’s more about writing practice than writing actual essays. After it was always “must be below X pages”

X words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research that you have something to say with depth. A history of the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but you are supposed to go find something more to say.

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

#224

Post by lolinder »

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…

> 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 evolving.

No, the prevailing counter argument is that the prevailing argument in favor of AI taking over everything assumes that the acceleration will remain approximately constant, when in fact we don't know that it will do so and we have every reason to believe that it won't.

No technology in history has ever maintained an exponential growth curve for very long. Every innovation has followed the same pattern:

* There's a major scientific breakthrough which redefines what is possible.

* That breakthrough leads to a rapid increase in technology along a certain axis.

* We eventually see a plateau where we reach the limits of this new paradigm and begin to adapt to the new normal.

AI hypists always talk as though we should extrapolate the last 2 years' growth curve out to 10 years and come to the conclusion that General Intelligence is inevitable, but to do so would be to assume that this particular technological curve will behave very differently than all previous curves.

Instead, what I and many others argue is that we are already starting to see the plateau. We are now in the phase where we've hit the limits of what these models are capable of and we're moving on to adapting them to a variety of use cases. This will bring more change, but it will be slower and not as seismic as the hype would lead you to believe, because we've already gotten off the exponential train.

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

#225

Post by bsder »

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…

Because the problem is that "AI generated" content is vapid slop. The problem is that most "human generated" content is also vapid slop.

My problems on the modern internet are simply that I can't find interesting things through the slop, period--human or AI generated.

It will be interesting to see if "curation" can actually find a business model this time.

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

#226

Post by jdougan »

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…

On the other hand, I'm getting some of my news from shorter (5 - 10 min these days, though they used to be shorter) videos with talking maps and war machines...and I'm very much not young.

Buff/Franklin for 2028!

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

#227

Post by thaumasiotes »

jprete wrote: post #39
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 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'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball card packs

Baseball card packs are an innovation. If you read Peanuts, you'll see that they're referred to as "bubble gum cards", because cards were included as promotional items in packs of gum, a "free toy inside" that was compatible with the size and shape of bubble gum. They moved to dedicated packs of cards when people started buying gum to get the cards.

https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1964/04/12

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

#228

Post by frigidnonce »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #183
mvdtnz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://xkcd.com/605/

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

#229

Post by janalsncm »

chrononaut wrote: post #105
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 way the mouths move are so far off from the words they're speaking that my first impressions would be they're just playing a video loop of these people talking about other random things and dubbing over it.

They could’ve definitely fixed the audio by making it sound like the avatars were wearing mics.

Honestly the whole thing is so off-putting and lazy.

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

#230

Post by StableAlkyne »

ljsprague wrote: post #71
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…

I ... don't think there's a time limit on TikToks unless you mean that 60 minutes is a time limit. Are you thinking of Vine?

I miss Vine
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