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Our newsroom AI policy
81–90 of 144 posts
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#82Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very r…
They're also allowed to use wikipedia to use research. It has similar sorts of problems.
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#83AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape. Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising. This in particular dawned on me when askin…
> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? AI makes this problem worse in both directions. It makes it fantastically easy to produce ""content"". So if you're scraping content, or browsing content, you're going to run in to increasing amounts of AI. Micropayments makes this worse , because it's then a means of getting paid to produce spam. The problem comes when you want the ""content…
> So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam?
Most of Spotify’s payments do not go to fraudulent AI spam.
I am aware that AI spam exists on the platform and I’ve read the articles, too. That does not mean that “most” of their payments go to AI spam.
Their pay scales by listens. The AI spam doesn’t collect many listens. The spammers do it because they can automate it and make it low effort, but it’s not a cash cow for the spammers.
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#84It is nice to see, but I fear it will be the same as with papers and their news and internet. I could buy a paper and read it but why would I? The same will most likely happen with human written news and cheap AI slop news. Why would anyone pay more for higher quality when you can have low quality cheap product? Look at food for example. Price is most important factor in the choice of what you are going to buy. I wil…
Food would actually be a pretty good example - people pay extra for higher quality food, local farm food, whatever all the time. They go out to expensive restaurants that talk up their techniques and sourcing. There's a lot of defined space for refined food like this. If ai generated and human written content ended up like that you would have a pretty decent shot at a fully human authored blog or substack that people…
You could say the same about horses: people still riding those, have stables, buy expensive ones or even bread ones themselves. Does not change the fact that common people usually drive cheap cars.
Of course everything can be argued via analogy that way, but I think outcome of cheap, mostly correct but often completely wrong news will be more probable.
Just like todays social media
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LLM can find material that it would be hard or time-consuming for you to do. You still need to verify it, but "find the right things to read in the first place" is often a time intensive process in itself. (You might, at that point, argue that "what if LLM fails to find a key article/paper/whatever", which I think is both a reasonable worry, and an unreasonable standard to apply. "What if your google search doesn…
I believe what their point is is that if you give people a "extract-needle-from-haystack" machine and then tell them they have to manually find where in the haystack the needle was, it defeats the purpose of having the machine. With that said, a good RAG solution would come with metadata to point to where it was sourced from.
> I believe what their point is is that if you give people a "extract-needle-from-haystack" machine and then tell them they have to manually find where in the haystack the needle was, it defeats the purpose of having the machine.
We've got to be careful to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I'm not an LLM enthusiast, but I think you have actually compare it against what the alternative would really be. If you give the journalist a haystack but insufficient time to manually search it properly, they're going to have to take some shortcut. And using an LLM to sort through it and verifying it actually found a needle probably better than randomly sampling documents at random or searching for keywords.
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? AI makes this problem worse in both directions. It makes it fantastically easy to produce ""content"". So if you're scraping content, or browsing content, you're going to run in to increasing amounts of AI. Micropayments makes this worse , because it's then a means of getting paid to produce spam. The problem comes when you want the ""content…
> So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? Most of Spotify’s payments do not go to fraudulent AI spam. I am aware that AI spam exists on the platform and I’ve read the articles, too. That does not mean that “most” of their payments go to AI spam. Their pay scales by listens. The AI spam doesn’t collect many listens. The spammers do it because they can automate it and make it low effort, but it’s not a cash cow for the spamm…
Spammers do it because it pays out.
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in danger It has already done so, and we can be confident in saying that. Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content. Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption. Theres jokes about GenAI being the great filter; while I doubt this, I do hope this is th…
> Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content.... > Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption. AI is a technology that's going to further entrench inequality, by warping incentives to push us further away from democratization. Unless you've got $$$ to d…
At this point, it feels like most technology will be used in favor of people with power, and not in a democratizing manner.
I'd argue that this is something that is more about the state of play, than tech itself.
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LLM can find material that it would be hard or time-consuming for you to do. You still need to verify it, but "find the right things to read in the first place" is often a time intensive process in itself. (You might, at that point, argue that "what if LLM fails to find a key article/paper/whatever", which I think is both a reasonable worry, and an unreasonable standard to apply. "What if your google search doesn…
I believe what their point is is that if you give people a "extract-needle-from-haystack" machine and then tell them they have to manually find where in the haystack the needle was, it defeats the purpose of having the machine. With that said, a good RAG solution would come with metadata to point to where it was sourced from.
I don't want to come off as an AI-maximalist or whatever, but, I mean, at some point, skill issue, right?
You can use Google to find you results reinforcing your belief that the earth is flat too; but we don't condemn Google as a helpful tool during research.
If you trust whatever the LLM spits out unconditionally, that's sorta on you. But they _can_ be helpful when treated as research assistants, not as oracles.
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? AI makes this problem worse in both directions. It makes it fantastically easy to produce ""content"". So if you're scraping content, or browsing content, you're going to run in to increasing amounts of AI. Micropayments makes this worse , because it's then a means of getting paid to produce spam. The problem comes when you want the ""content…
> So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? Most of Spotify’s payments do not go to fraudulent AI spam. I am aware that AI spam exists on the platform and I’ve read the articles, too. That does not mean that “most” of their payments go to AI spam. Their pay scales by listens. The AI spam doesn’t collect many listens. The spammers do it because they can automate it and make it low effort, but it’s not a cash cow for the spamm…
An interesting listen https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/171/ about money laundering and spam in streaming services
Re: Our newsroom AI policy
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LLM can find material that it would be hard or time-consuming for you to do. You still need to verify it, but "find the right things to read in the first place" is often a time intensive process in itself. (You might, at that point, argue that "what if LLM fails to find a key article/paper/whatever", which I think is both a reasonable worry, and an unreasonable standard to apply. "What if your google search doesn…
I believe what their point is is that if you give people a "extract-needle-from-haystack" machine and then tell them they have to manually find where in the haystack the needle was, it defeats the purpose of having the machine. With that said, a good RAG solution would come with metadata to point to where it was sourced from.
when you use the extract-needle-from-haystack machine, verify that it actually extracted a needle.
that's much easier than manually extracting the needle yourself