8 ms·

CNET Has Been Quietly Publishing AI-Written Articles for Months

158 points by herbertl 4y ago

deeel 4y ago
Bankrate.com has also been using AI.https://twitter.com/tonythill/status/1612860930085294080 https://twitter.com/tonythill/status/1612860930085294080 This will be interesting to see over time how Google responds which it looks like they somewhat have regarding Bankrate: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-content-guidelines-bankrate-34732.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-content-guidelines-ba...
bombcar 4y ago
The quality of the average “news” article has been in decline for years. We demand too much news and too quickly, production hasn’t been keeping up. Many pieces are now just regurgitating twitter posts anyway.
- 5looking 4y ago
  It’s not demand but that media really wants to tell you what’s true.
- CWuestefeld 4y ago
  I think the problem is that recently, the quality of pages linked from search results has increased. There seem to be a lot of people out there who are algorithmically generating product reviews and comparisons, especially. In years past, I think it was much easier to discern such low-value content. But lately I find that it's not immediately obvious, and I waste time in drawing that conclusion and moving on. So my search strategy, at least for the kinds of things most susceptible, is to shift from "open-ended with exceptions" to "only trust sites whose names I recognize". Sad to see that I should consider moving CNet from the good column to the bad.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > I think the problem is that recently, the quality of pages linked from search results has increased. There seem to be a lot of people out there who are algorithmically generating product reviews and comparisons, especially. > In years past, I think it was much easier to discern such low-value content. But lately I find that it's not immediately obvious, and I waste time in drawing that conclusion and moving on. I know what you mean, but I wouldn't describe that as an increase in "quality." > So my search strategy, at least for the kinds of things most susceptible, is to shift from "open-ended with exceptions" to "only trust sites whose names I recognize". IMHO, one interesting thing "AI" might do, is finally kill the open, free-to-access Web, returning things to something like the 90s, where if you wanted to know something, you had to buy a newspaper, magazine, or book published by an institution. It would do it by filling the web with low value stuff that's too hard to detect. DALL-E/Stable Diffusion are already killing the appeal of certain styles of fantastic art, due to overexposure and mediocrity. I look forward to the day when Wikipedia is overrun with "AI"-generated vandalism that's difficult to detect, but designed to corrupt it according to various agendas. They could even include generated citations to documents that sound like they could support the vandalistic claims (because few actually go through the trouble of verifying those).
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Well, if your goal is information does the provenance being a machine matter? Quality here I assume means more detailed and better written with more nuance. For most of my knowledge seeking searches I don’t care much who wrote it and more whether I gain the knowledge I seek
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > Well, if your goal is information does the provenance being a machine matter? My goal is good information, but these technologies (especially currently) mainly enable bad/mediocre information at scale.
        dumpsterlid 4y ago
        [dead]
- jccalhoun 4y ago
  "Many pieces are now just regurgitating twitter posts anyway" What is funny is that this is exactly that and to make things worse, this article from gizmodo is just regurgitating an article from https://futurism.com/the-byte/cnet-publishing-articles-by-ai https://futurism.com/the-byte/cnet-publishing-articles-by-ai that is regurgitating a twitter thread which is more informative because it includes information on how the person found it in the first place https://twitter.com/GaelBreton/status/1613110185995771905 https://twitter.com/GaelBreton/status/1613110185995771905 Now we are on, hacker news, talking about a gizmodo article, based on a futurism article, based on a twitter thread.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    With the responses written by chatgpt.
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    [dead]
- ThinkingGuy 4y ago
  And we demand that news be free of charge.
nottorp 4y ago
Let me guess, they sound exactly like the first page of google results on any term before ChatGPT. "Helpful" articles that all tell you the same generic useless stuff. Except now they're not on 3000 sites, they're on 3000 sites plus CNET.
- nottorp 4y ago
  Ok, new lows, replying to myself: https://www.minitool.com/backup-tips/crucial-bx500-vs-mx500.html https://www.minitool.com/backup-tips/crucial-bx500-vs-mx500.... Is this ChatGPT written or minimum wage copywriter written? Does it matter? It doesn't help me in the least and it's the first result for "crucial bx500 vs mx500".
  - feintruled 4y ago
    And of course we must ask 'cui bono?' for this atrocity and the answer soon comes with the button for the free download of the minitool disk clone tool. Prime SEO work.
    - nottorp 4y ago
      Yep. And it was a genuine search, I'm messing with an old macbook white that only has (finnicky) sata, i've been told the bx and mx will definitely work with it and I was trying to decide which one to get. I did find my answer, but at the end of the first search results page on a ... reddit thread. This was duckduckgo btw. Edit: seriously, doesn't it sound exactly like ChatGPT articles?
aliqot 4y ago
This is less of a testament for AI and more of a testament of how far gone CNET is.
- papito 4y ago
  Red Ventures seems to me like a regular vulture capitalist outfit. Acquire a property and then squeeze it for money while keeping it on life support: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-global-capital-killing-americas-newspapers/620171/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g... What better way to cut costs than to replace the journalists with AI?
Dalewyn 4y ago
I would be more surprised if journalism isn't some form of computer generated garbage checked for a minimum level of sanity by an editor who couldn't care less.
jerf 4y ago
"ChatGPT, he says, doesn’t have the ability to describe the feelings seen on a player’s face when they win the World Cup," Oh piffle. My wife and I roll our eyes and mock the sports reporters when they run down to the field and ask the question "How does it feel to have won the $CHAMPIONSHIP?" "Oh man, it's... it's just so incredible, you know, you work all your life to reach this height and... here I am... it's just... sniffle it's really amazing. I have a really great team and I'd like to say HI MOM and... just.. oh man..." "We'll let you go join the celebration. There you have it, $OTHER_ANNOUNCER." (Our favorite is: "Hey, $COACH, what do you plan to do to win this game?" "Well, you know, that's a good question, and we've got a plan we're going to execute to, you know, go out there and play strong, we're gonna try to, you know, score points and, uh, prevent the other team from scoring points. We're pretty confident that if we can execute that plan we're going to win." In fairness, sometimes the answer is better than that. But a lot of the times, if you think about what they just said, that's what it amounts to without any particular loss. After all, even if they have a good answer, they're not terribly interested in giving it to you before the game....) I mean, I get it, I'm not so cold hearted as to not understand why they ask the question. It just doesn't happen to speak to us. But I would rate it more on the easy-mode side of sports writing, way easier than, say, being accurate about statistics or being correct about what strategy a team needs to pursue against another team for victory or what strategy they're going to pursue. Extremely, extremely stereotyped responses. Can't hardly be wrong, it's not like saying "excitedly" instead of "energetically" is going to be the difference between accurate and inaccurate. Easy mode for a transformer architecture.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  They obviously didn’t ask chatgpt to act like a sports announcer. And, given the expressions on the players faces, as you point out, is completely predictable and has been described a million times with a high rate of consistency, I would expect it could completely and reliably describe the feelings seen on a players face when they win the World Cup.
- benmanns 4y ago
  GPT-3 Prompt: A broadcast from the Super Bowl: Reporter: "How does it feel to have won the Super Bowl?" Star quarterback: Completion: "It feels amazing. We worked so hard all season and to finally have won the championship is truly a dream come true. I'm so proud of my teammates and coaches for their dedication and hard work. It's been a long journey and I'm so grateful for this victory."
ram4jesus 4y ago
I don't want to live in a world where I'm tricked into reading things that were not directly created by other humans; I don't want to consume AI-generated or AI-infused content. Day by day, we're getting siloed by technology alienating us from the essential things that make us humans, like having meaningful interactions with others.
- educaysean 4y ago
  We've been reading articles edited by grammarly for many years on various websites all without realizing that we're consuming "AI-edited" content. I doubt AI-generated content will feel much different.
- jimmydorry 4y ago
  It depends. Purely factual things, like reporting on the markets and a majority of objective news could be AI-assisted. Opinion pieces and reporting on subjective material (or trying to shape narratives), that's a whole different game and a topic that society is not ready to even begin tackling yet. There is no interaction to be had in the consumption of most material online, and any perceived interaction is surface-level as best.
  - b3morales 4y ago
    Factual reporting always has background, though. The bottom 1/2 to 2/3 of the article will be descriptive context, like what $SUBJECT did in a previous similar situation. I don't think the current AIs are up to the task of figuring out which accessory bits of information are most pertinent, and in what order.
- cpersona 4y ago
  I feel the same way, but I was struggling to understand why. Could you explain why you would not want to read content generated by AI? If you’re reading an article from CNET, it’s probably for the information value and so therefore should be no different from that perspective. Are you looking for opinions or other color as well that the AI won’t be able to provide?
mwexler 4y ago
The AP has been doing this for years. Play by play for sports teams and summaries of earnings reports have been "ai-written" and shared out with nary a peep. See, for example, https://automatedinsights.com/customer-stories/associated-press/ https://automatedinsights.com/customer-stories/associated-pr... The fact that we just noticed appears to be driving the angst, not that it's suddenly here. Because it was here all along.
- beilabs 4y ago
  It's one thing doing this for sport; but guarantee AP don't do this for editorial stories. source: shared an office with them
- junesix 4y ago
  It's only gotten attention because it's "ChatGPT". If it was any other vendor, this would have slipped by without a blip.
walnutclosefarm 4y ago
There is an awful lot of content published on the internet that is highly predictable, which is to say, ripe to be generated by large language models. But that stuff is already so low bandwidth in new or useful information that I wonder "who cares" if it's now not only predictable, but literally predicted? It was already there just to generate page one search results, and it does, and it will continue to do so. Which raises the interesting question of how self-referential and useless search results go, if they are primarily great big generative, predictive models feeding huge indexing models for the purpose of predictively generating the right additional content intended to snag an actual human neuron (that is, to select advertisements)? Once the whole thing is computers talking to computers hoping some gullible living person is watching, it becomes indistinguishable from bitcoin mining - a kind of viral, self-referential internet onanism.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  > indistinguishable from bitcoin mining In a way its ad-money mining via SEO/engineered content to get high page views/CPM. The issue with this comparison to crypto mining is that the surface area of low-quality content prevailing means their ad campaigns are likely going to be less effective because humans reading the low-quality content just aren't going to stay long enough and/or will avoid the content. I can imagine the ad companies shifting to other types of content like video, then the AI generated content doesn't bring ad-revenue.
  - walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    I agree, the comparison is inexact, and I expect that advertisers will have to change strategies. My use of the word "indistinguishable" overstates the comparison. I should have said "not entirely unlike."
    - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
      Oh I wasn't being pedantic about wordings. You are right on target that this is a computer automated revenue stream. Crypto miners have had to change strategies too I assume, buying bigger iron or whatever.
wintorez 4y ago
We're entering a strange time in the history of written media. Most articles will be written by the AI, and the AI will be trained by the articles that was written by AI. I wouldn't be surprised to see a badge similar to "Organic" to be created for any written content, to certify that it was written by a human.
Xcelerate 4y ago
It’s funny to me that there is such a strong emotional response to progress in AI (e.g., ChatGPT). It really seems like it stems from a strong biological desire to maintain the feeling that “humans are special” even if no one will state that outright. Banning generated art or text comes across as a last ditch hurdle on the way to the inevitable. I think it’s better just to embrace this head-on and address any problems early before they become a bigger problem in the future (bias, factual correctness, etc.) This stuff really has the potential to improve society; let’s not unnecessarily cripple it out of some misplaced sense of human uniqueness.
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with biology vs computer. It's simply the fear to lose your place; getting replaced by the cheaper poorer solution even. It could be AI, it could be the younger worker fresh from college, or someone from another country. Those who have to lose, will fear.
- omnicognate 4y ago
  I'd suggest having a bit more respect for the people you disagree with. People are raising quite specific concerns about this technology and its potential impacts, and are doing so in a world that has been coping with the unintended consequences of new technologies since the industrial revolution. You may perfectly validly disagree with their concerns, but to ascribe them to an emotional need for humans to be "special" doesn't contribute to the debate. It's just incredibly condescending. You could do worse than to avoid making arguments of the form "your points are so wrong you can only possibly be making them out of spite/jealousy/insecurity/other" in all debates on principle.
- rep_lodsb 4y ago
  Maybe that is a reason for some people's negative reactions, but on the other hand there seems to be a lot of unwarranted enthusiasm from another crowd, who seem to think that Friend Computer will soon usher in an utopian age. What currently exists is far from a human-level AGI, and it's not likely that just making a few tweaks would even get closer to that goal. The model doesn't in any sense understand what it is writing, it generates text that is optimized for appearing as if there is intelligence behind it, as long as you don't read too closely. And while we don't have to fear a godlike superintelligence turning us into paperclips yet, there are a lot of potential negative consequences to this kind of limited AI, and very little of value to society. We don't need more efficient ways to generate bullshit or propaganda.
marban 4y ago
https://www.cnet.com/tech/cnet-is-experimenting-with-an-ai-assist-heres-why/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/cnet-is-experimenting-with-an-ai-a...
pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- there is this guy on youtube - simon whistler - has a bunch of channels - he basically reads wikipedia articles in an exciting british accent - some of the paid text to speech stuff getting so good - been thinking - should just text to speech wiki articles with some tweaking so they read like a script - or just copy paste a wiki article to GTP3 and ask it to rewrite it as a script - coupled with video diffusion - upload them and see what happens - but the whole thing feels very gross to me - so not done it --
- DamnInteresting 4y ago
  Simon Whistler is a parasitic knob. I own and operate a website where I have been researching and writing original non-fiction content for almost 20 years, and Simon used to do paid voice work for me, narrating my writings for podcasts and audio books. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up, but one day I discovered that he had quietly started making videos for a site that was systematically borderline plagiarizing my writings. Then he started multiple other YouTube channels where he covered the same topics he had recorded for my site, often with striking similarities. To date there are well over 100 of his videos that appear to be "inspired" by my content. For example: Me, 2008: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-orbiting-superweapon/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-... Simon, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP4RQ783lk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP4RQ783lk Me, 2005: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-man-who-was-a-dwarf-and-a-giant/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-man-who-was-a-dwarf-and-... Simon, 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpdMolMlDzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpdMolMlDzw The list goes on and on. I've been writing online long enough that I've been poached and plagiarized six ways from Sunday, but no one else has come close to leeching so long and systematically as this unoriginal, abject freeloader. Simon Whistler is downright seaward.
  - pigtailgirl 4y ago
    -- sorry for calling you wikipedia - great work!! - per my original post - maybe you can use new ML tech to beat simon at his own game =) --
yrgulation 4y ago
[dead]
oldstrangers 4y ago
I'd say roughly 70% of the articles Google pushes to my Android's 'news feed' is clearly AI generated garbage designed to maximize SEO. It's absurd. This has been going on for more than a year. It's usually pretty obvious because you'll read something and some form of uncanny valley starts to creep in where you're like "no sane person writes like this."
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  If old media plays their cards right, the proliferation of AI-generated content may prove a blessing in disguise for them. If they take firm stances against publishing AI-generated content, then paying old media for the news may become the best way to reliably get real content written by humans.
  - oldstrangers 4y ago
    Yeah I've had similar thoughts about this. The areas where AI can't really compete (probably ever) is in reporting / photo journalism. We'll always need someone to be on the scene to capture the events / investigate the stories, and I don't think the world is dystopian enough to start manufacturing AI news drones. Efforts will be put in place to filter out the garbage AI content with human made, real world reporting.
  - FormerBandmate 4y ago
    It already essentially is. Free news is almost always going to be absolute garbage, although paid news is frequently intelligent but designed to confirm their target audience’s priors
erenyeager 4y ago
Personally I love ChatGPT and think this should be implemented in schools in the future for writing courses. Many times people have concepts they wish to express but are not so proficient in what is the cultural “prestige” writing. I think it is much more important to creatively combine concepts and apply them, compared to the nitty-gritty of fine writing. Also, I feel the rise of Chat GPT will result in more value for verified human-written or human-supervised content. I will much prefer hearing an organic, person’s personal experience in another country, for example, as a verification for things that actually happened, compared to a fictitious AI generated story. Now combine a verified human + AI assistance, you have a reliable narrator and good content. The hardest hit will probably be to the anonymous writers and commenters, who cannot provide verification of being actual sources, and will be washed in the storm of AI content.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  > Many times people have concepts they wish to express but are not so proficient in what is the cultural “prestige” writing. Many times people are bad at writing, I agree. I see what you mean, but if you have a concept and cannot express it, do you really "have" a concept. It is like knowing mathematics and being unable to solve any exercises.
jameshart 4y ago
There’s genuine loss of value going on if we fall into the trap of language-generated SEO - but it’s more subtle than just ‘the internet will be full of crap’ The thing is that webpages don’t ‘exist’ in the way most people mentally kind of think of them - as ‘documents on the file system of some computer’. And google is not an index over all those ‘documents’. How search actually works is Google bots go out to a bunch of servers and ask them ‘hey, what kind of documents can you make?’, and the servers respond with dynamically generated lists of links to those ‘documents’, and google it requests them, and the server makes them and sends them to google, which indexes them so that later when someone searches the internet, google can send them to the same link, and the server can make the document again for them. In an internet that works like this, using an LLM to generate documents that google indexes is a waste of everyone’s time. This turns google into an index of the output of various LLM prompts that someone has run that they think someone might later search for. This wastes everybody’s time. An LLM outputted summary of every earnings report of every company doesn’t need to be pregenerated - we can make that later, at the time the customer asks the query ‘what was in the earnings report of Foocorp in Q4 2013?’ This breaks the ‘document-centric’ conceit of search; and that might not be a bad thing.
- elecush 4y ago
  everything accurate but it is only a "waste of some peoples' time" while others profit with their SEO-friendly garbledy-gook
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Interesting point, but there's a lot of use cases where chat bots still need some novel data, like your "earnings report of Foocorp in Q4 2013" example. So maybe we end up with [smaller] sites of raw data for bots to digest when someone wants a readable form of it. Frankly that might be better then everything being wrapped up in prose.
- distortionfield 4y ago
  > Google requests a set of documents that turn out to be LLM generated > Other prompts using Google data make more content for Google to crawl and request > Lather, rinse, repeat AI contamination is already starting. There's no way that content written by an LLM hasn't already been used to train an LLM.
karaterobot 4y ago
> Since then, the news site has published 73 AI-generated articles, but the outlet says on its website that a team of editors is involved in the content “from ideation to publication. Ensuring that the information we publish and the recommendations we make are accurate, credible, and helpful to you is a defining responsibility for what we do.” This is the thing that actually scares me, because I don't believe them when they say they have editors scrutinizing everything the AI writes. They may give it a glance, but I would bet any amount of money that they don't rigorously check everything. And as time goes on, they're going to spend fewer and fewer resources on editorial, I guarantee it. My basis for saying this is that editorial has already been deeply cut — forget rewrites, forget fact checking, it feels like half these articles have outright typos that never get caught. I'm not sure anyone but the author closely reads an article before it goes into publication, and if the author is an AI... They aren't going to staff up on editorial if AI can generate content, they will just spend $0 on writers, and as little as they can get away with on editors, approaching $0.
Decabytes 4y ago
I believe that writing on the internet is about to become more public and personal if you want people to follow and trust you. While we have been able to get away with being able to write semi anonymously and still be successful there will now always be a question about whether the words were generated by an AI. It's kind of like the deal with the More Plates More Dates YouTube Channel, and the Matt Does Fitness guy. Matt has an amazing physique, but because of that people thought he was on steroids. He paid MPMD to randomly drug test him over the course of six months like WADA (world anti-doping agency) to prove he was natural. He had to do this because steroids exist in the world. Same thing with writing. Using perfect grammar and a more formal sentence structure will probably cause people to think you are a robot. But writing about your life, your hobby projects and what you are doing with them will show people that you are a real person
- tjchear 4y ago
  That makes sense to me, but I wonder if that's gonna launch a writing arms race between genuine writers and AI researchers.
ohashi 4y ago
CNET has been publishing garbage content for a while now. Look no further than their 'reviews.' I work with web hosting reviews and look at what they disclaim “While we didn't test the services, we did carefully examine each service's offerings and ranked them according to essential web hosting features.” (source: https://archive.ph/UtlsB https://archive.ph/UtlsB ) They are writing reviews with no experience? lol.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Reviewing web hosts based on comparing feature checklists? Oh dear. For those who aren't aware, feature checklists for web hosting services are 90% bullshit. Not that they aren't true, but the items that get checked off are often trivial nonsense which are implicitly available from any commodity hosting provider like "control panel", "access logs", or "password protected directories". The real differentiators are usually things which don't show up in marketing materials, like "is the support team halfway competent" or "how badly does this provider try to nickel and dime you". Which is why you need to actually work with the provider to give them a meaningful review.
  - ohashi 4y ago
    After doing web hosting reviews for over a decade now... 99.9% of the people do any form of review are lying or manipulating things for affiliate commissions. The few that aren't, most don't actually know what reviewing/benchmarking/testing well looks like. It's atrocious. And Google just pumps this garbage. I need to finish writing about all bullshit from big brands doing these reviews. CNET is just one easy example.
anonymousab 4y ago
That is more of an indictment of CNET's average article quality than anything else.
itisit 4y ago
CNET is unrecognizable to me these days. Practically all of CNET's great editors have long since left the company. It's just a once trusted brand slapped on top of ad-optimized time-relevant trash. Prime fodder for the "More articles like this" junk recommendations the likes of which ZergNet and OutBrain serve up.
bool3max 4y ago
And nobody noticed because nobody reads CNN.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

158 points by herbertl 4y ago

Bankrate.com has also been using AI.https://twitter.com/tonythill/status/1612860930085294080 https://twitter.com/tonythill/status/1612860930085294080 This will be interesting to see over time how Google responds which it looks like they somewhat have regarding Bankrate: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-content-guidelines-bankrate-34732.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-content-guidelines-ba...

bombcar 4y ago

The quality of the average “news” article has been in decline for years. We demand too much news and too quickly, production hasn’t been keeping up. Many pieces are now just regurgitating twitter posts anyway.

5looking 4y ago
It’s not demand but that media really wants to tell you what’s true.
CWuestefeld 4y ago
I think the problem is that recently, the quality of pages linked from search results has increased. There seem to be a lot of people out there who are algorithmically generating product reviews and comparisons, especially. In years past, I think it was much easier to discern such low-value content. But lately I find that it's not immediately obvious, and I waste time in drawing that conclusion and moving on. So my search strategy, at least for the kinds of things most susceptible, is to shift from "open-ended with exceptions" to "only trust sites whose names I recognize". Sad to see that I should consider moving CNet from the good column to the bad.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > I think the problem is that recently, the quality of pages linked from search results has increased. There seem to be a lot of people out there who are algorithmically generating product reviews and comparisons, especially. > In years past, I think it was much easier to discern such low-value content. But lately I find that it's not immediately obvious, and I waste time in drawing that conclusion and moving on. I know what you mean, but I wouldn't describe that as an increase in "quality." > So my search strategy, at least for the kinds of things most susceptible, is to shift from "open-ended with exceptions" to "only trust sites whose names I recognize". IMHO, one interesting thing "AI" might do, is finally kill the open, free-to-access Web, returning things to something like the 90s, where if you wanted to know something, you had to buy a newspaper, magazine, or book published by an institution. It would do it by filling the web with low value stuff that's too hard to detect. DALL-E/Stable Diffusion are already killing the appeal of certain styles of fantastic art, due to overexposure and mediocrity. I look forward to the day when Wikipedia is overrun with "AI"-generated vandalism that's difficult to detect, but designed to corrupt it according to various agendas. They could even include generated citations to documents that sound like they could support the vandalistic claims (because few actually go through the trouble of verifying those).
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Well, if your goal is information does the provenance being a machine matter? Quality here I assume means more detailed and better written with more nuance. For most of my knowledge seeking searches I don’t care much who wrote it and more whether I gain the knowledge I seek
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Well, if your goal is information does the provenance being a machine matter? My goal is good information, but these technologies (especially currently) mainly enable bad/mediocre information at scale.
      - dumpsterlid 4y ago
        [dead]
jccalhoun 4y ago
"Many pieces are now just regurgitating twitter posts anyway" What is funny is that this is exactly that and to make things worse, this article from gizmodo is just regurgitating an article from https://futurism.com/the-byte/cnet-publishing-articles-by-ai https://futurism.com/the-byte/cnet-publishing-articles-by-ai that is regurgitating a twitter thread which is more informative because it includes information on how the person found it in the first place https://twitter.com/GaelBreton/status/1613110185995771905 https://twitter.com/GaelBreton/status/1613110185995771905 Now we are on, hacker news, talking about a gizmodo article, based on a futurism article, based on a twitter thread.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  With the responses written by chatgpt.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
  [dead]
ThinkingGuy 4y ago
And we demand that news be free of charge.

nottorp 4y ago

Let me guess, they sound exactly like the first page of google results on any term before ChatGPT. "Helpful" articles that all tell you the same generic useless stuff. Except now they're not on 3000 sites, they're on 3000 sites plus CNET.

nottorp 4y ago
Ok, new lows, replying to myself: https://www.minitool.com/backup-tips/crucial-bx500-vs-mx500.html https://www.minitool.com/backup-tips/crucial-bx500-vs-mx500.... Is this ChatGPT written or minimum wage copywriter written? Does it matter? It doesn't help me in the least and it's the first result for "crucial bx500 vs mx500".
- feintruled 4y ago
  And of course we must ask 'cui bono?' for this atrocity and the answer soon comes with the button for the free download of the minitool disk clone tool. Prime SEO work.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    Yep. And it was a genuine search, I'm messing with an old macbook white that only has (finnicky) sata, i've been told the bx and mx will definitely work with it and I was trying to decide which one to get. I did find my answer, but at the end of the first search results page on a ... reddit thread. This was duckduckgo btw. Edit: seriously, doesn't it sound exactly like ChatGPT articles?

aliqot 4y ago

This is less of a testament for AI and more of a testament of how far gone CNET is.

papito 4y ago
Red Ventures seems to me like a regular vulture capitalist outfit. Acquire a property and then squeeze it for money while keeping it on life support: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-global-capital-killing-americas-newspapers/620171/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g... What better way to cut costs than to replace the journalists with AI?

Dalewyn 4y ago

I would be more surprised if journalism isn't some form of computer generated garbage checked for a minimum level of sanity by an editor who couldn't care less.

jerf 4y ago

"ChatGPT, he says, doesn’t have the ability to describe the feelings seen on a player’s face when they win the World Cup," Oh piffle. My wife and I roll our eyes and mock the sports reporters when they run down to the field and ask the question "How does it feel to have won the $CHAMPIONSHIP?" "Oh man, it's... it's just so incredible, you know, you work all your life to reach this height and... here I am... it's just... sniffle it's really amazing. I have a really great team and I'd like to say HI MOM and... just.. oh man..." "We'll let you go join the celebration. There you have it, $OTHER_ANNOUNCER." (Our favorite is: "Hey, $COACH, what do you plan to do to win this game?" "Well, you know, that's a good question, and we've got a plan we're going to execute to, you know, go out there and play strong, we're gonna try to, you know, score points and, uh, prevent the other team from scoring points. We're pretty confident that if we can execute that plan we're going to win." In fairness, sometimes the answer is better than that. But a lot of the times, if you think about what they just said, that's what it amounts to without any particular loss. After all, even if they have a good answer, they're not terribly interested in giving it to you before the game....) I mean, I get it, I'm not so cold hearted as to not understand why they ask the question. It just doesn't happen to speak to us. But I would rate it more on the easy-mode side of sports writing, way easier than, say, being accurate about statistics or being correct about what strategy a team needs to pursue against another team for victory or what strategy they're going to pursue. Extremely, extremely stereotyped responses. Can't hardly be wrong, it's not like saying "excitedly" instead of "energetically" is going to be the difference between accurate and inaccurate. Easy mode for a transformer architecture.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
They obviously didn’t ask chatgpt to act like a sports announcer. And, given the expressions on the players faces, as you point out, is completely predictable and has been described a million times with a high rate of consistency, I would expect it could completely and reliably describe the feelings seen on a players face when they win the World Cup.
benmanns 4y ago
GPT-3 Prompt: A broadcast from the Super Bowl: Reporter: "How does it feel to have won the Super Bowl?" Star quarterback: Completion: "It feels amazing. We worked so hard all season and to finally have won the championship is truly a dream come true. I'm so proud of my teammates and coaches for their dedication and hard work. It's been a long journey and I'm so grateful for this victory."

ram4jesus 4y ago

I don't want to live in a world where I'm tricked into reading things that were not directly created by other humans; I don't want to consume AI-generated or AI-infused content. Day by day, we're getting siloed by technology alienating us from the essential things that make us humans, like having meaningful interactions with others.

educaysean 4y ago
We've been reading articles edited by grammarly for many years on various websites all without realizing that we're consuming "AI-edited" content. I doubt AI-generated content will feel much different.
jimmydorry 4y ago
It depends. Purely factual things, like reporting on the markets and a majority of objective news could be AI-assisted. Opinion pieces and reporting on subjective material (or trying to shape narratives), that's a whole different game and a topic that society is not ready to even begin tackling yet. There is no interaction to be had in the consumption of most material online, and any perceived interaction is surface-level as best.
- b3morales 4y ago
  Factual reporting always has background, though. The bottom 1/2 to 2/3 of the article will be descriptive context, like what $SUBJECT did in a previous similar situation. I don't think the current AIs are up to the task of figuring out which accessory bits of information are most pertinent, and in what order.
cpersona 4y ago
I feel the same way, but I was struggling to understand why. Could you explain why you would not want to read content generated by AI? If you’re reading an article from CNET, it’s probably for the information value and so therefore should be no different from that perspective. Are you looking for opinions or other color as well that the AI won’t be able to provide?

mwexler 4y ago

The AP has been doing this for years. Play by play for sports teams and summaries of earnings reports have been "ai-written" and shared out with nary a peep. See, for example, https://automatedinsights.com/customer-stories/associated-press/ https://automatedinsights.com/customer-stories/associated-pr... The fact that we just noticed appears to be driving the angst, not that it's suddenly here. Because it was here all along.

beilabs 4y ago
It's one thing doing this for sport; but guarantee AP don't do this for editorial stories. source: shared an office with them
junesix 4y ago
It's only gotten attention because it's "ChatGPT". If it was any other vendor, this would have slipped by without a blip.

walnutclosefarm 4y ago

There is an awful lot of content published on the internet that is highly predictable, which is to say, ripe to be generated by large language models. But that stuff is already so low bandwidth in new or useful information that I wonder "who cares" if it's now not only predictable, but literally predicted? It was already there just to generate page one search results, and it does, and it will continue to do so. Which raises the interesting question of how self-referential and useless search results go, if they are primarily great big generative, predictive models feeding huge indexing models for the purpose of predictively generating the right additional content intended to snag an actual human neuron (that is, to select advertisements)? Once the whole thing is computers talking to computers hoping some gullible living person is watching, it becomes indistinguishable from bitcoin mining - a kind of viral, self-referential internet onanism.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
> indistinguishable from bitcoin mining In a way its ad-money mining via SEO/engineered content to get high page views/CPM. The issue with this comparison to crypto mining is that the surface area of low-quality content prevailing means their ad campaigns are likely going to be less effective because humans reading the low-quality content just aren't going to stay long enough and/or will avoid the content. I can imagine the ad companies shifting to other types of content like video, then the AI generated content doesn't bring ad-revenue.
- walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  I agree, the comparison is inexact, and I expect that advertisers will have to change strategies. My use of the word "indistinguishable" overstates the comparison. I should have said "not entirely unlike."
  - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
    Oh I wasn't being pedantic about wordings. You are right on target that this is a computer automated revenue stream. Crypto miners have had to change strategies too I assume, buying bigger iron or whatever.

wintorez 4y ago

We're entering a strange time in the history of written media. Most articles will be written by the AI, and the AI will be trained by the articles that was written by AI. I wouldn't be surprised to see a badge similar to "Organic" to be created for any written content, to certify that it was written by a human.

Xcelerate 4y ago

It’s funny to me that there is such a strong emotional response to progress in AI (e.g., ChatGPT). It really seems like it stems from a strong biological desire to maintain the feeling that “humans are special” even if no one will state that outright. Banning generated art or text comes across as a last ditch hurdle on the way to the inevitable. I think it’s better just to embrace this head-on and address any problems early before they become a bigger problem in the future (bias, factual correctness, etc.) This stuff really has the potential to improve society; let’s not unnecessarily cripple it out of some misplaced sense of human uniqueness.

PurpleRamen 4y ago
This has nothing to do with biology vs computer. It's simply the fear to lose your place; getting replaced by the cheaper poorer solution even. It could be AI, it could be the younger worker fresh from college, or someone from another country. Those who have to lose, will fear.
omnicognate 4y ago
I'd suggest having a bit more respect for the people you disagree with. People are raising quite specific concerns about this technology and its potential impacts, and are doing so in a world that has been coping with the unintended consequences of new technologies since the industrial revolution. You may perfectly validly disagree with their concerns, but to ascribe them to an emotional need for humans to be "special" doesn't contribute to the debate. It's just incredibly condescending. You could do worse than to avoid making arguments of the form "your points are so wrong you can only possibly be making them out of spite/jealousy/insecurity/other" in all debates on principle.
rep_lodsb 4y ago
Maybe that is a reason for some people's negative reactions, but on the other hand there seems to be a lot of unwarranted enthusiasm from another crowd, who seem to think that Friend Computer will soon usher in an utopian age. What currently exists is far from a human-level AGI, and it's not likely that just making a few tweaks would even get closer to that goal. The model doesn't in any sense understand what it is writing, it generates text that is optimized for appearing as if there is intelligence behind it, as long as you don't read too closely. And while we don't have to fear a godlike superintelligence turning us into paperclips yet, there are a lot of potential negative consequences to this kind of limited AI, and very little of value to society. We don't need more efficient ways to generate bullshit or propaganda.

marban 4y ago

https://www.cnet.com/tech/cnet-is-experimenting-with-an-ai-assist-heres-why/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/cnet-is-experimenting-with-an-ai-a...

pigtailgirl 4y ago

-- there is this guy on youtube - simon whistler - has a bunch of channels - he basically reads wikipedia articles in an exciting british accent - some of the paid text to speech stuff getting so good - been thinking - should just text to speech wiki articles with some tweaking so they read like a script - or just copy paste a wiki article to GTP3 and ask it to rewrite it as a script - coupled with video diffusion - upload them and see what happens - but the whole thing feels very gross to me - so not done it --

DamnInteresting 4y ago
Simon Whistler is a parasitic knob. I own and operate a website where I have been researching and writing original non-fiction content for almost 20 years, and Simon used to do paid voice work for me, narrating my writings for podcasts and audio books. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up, but one day I discovered that he had quietly started making videos for a site that was systematically borderline plagiarizing my writings. Then he started multiple other YouTube channels where he covered the same topics he had recorded for my site, often with striking similarities. To date there are well over 100 of his videos that appear to be "inspired" by my content. For example: Me, 2008: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-orbiting-superweapon/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-... Simon, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP4RQ783lk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP4RQ783lk Me, 2005: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-man-who-was-a-dwarf-and-a-giant/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-man-who-was-a-dwarf-and-... Simon, 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpdMolMlDzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpdMolMlDzw The list goes on and on. I've been writing online long enough that I've been poached and plagiarized six ways from Sunday, but no one else has come close to leeching so long and systematically as this unoriginal, abject freeloader. Simon Whistler is downright seaward.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago
  -- sorry for calling you wikipedia - great work!! - per my original post - maybe you can use new ML tech to beat simon at his own game =) --

yrgulation 4y ago

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oldstrangers 4y ago

I'd say roughly 70% of the articles Google pushes to my Android's 'news feed' is clearly AI generated garbage designed to maximize SEO. It's absurd. This has been going on for more than a year. It's usually pretty obvious because you'll read something and some form of uncanny valley starts to creep in where you're like "no sane person writes like this."

LarryMullins 4y ago
If old media plays their cards right, the proliferation of AI-generated content may prove a blessing in disguise for them. If they take firm stances against publishing AI-generated content, then paying old media for the news may become the best way to reliably get real content written by humans.
- oldstrangers 4y ago
  Yeah I've had similar thoughts about this. The areas where AI can't really compete (probably ever) is in reporting / photo journalism. We'll always need someone to be on the scene to capture the events / investigate the stories, and I don't think the world is dystopian enough to start manufacturing AI news drones. Efforts will be put in place to filter out the garbage AI content with human made, real world reporting.
- FormerBandmate 4y ago
  It already essentially is. Free news is almost always going to be absolute garbage, although paid news is frequently intelligent but designed to confirm their target audience’s priors

erenyeager 4y ago

Personally I love ChatGPT and think this should be implemented in schools in the future for writing courses. Many times people have concepts they wish to express but are not so proficient in what is the cultural “prestige” writing. I think it is much more important to creatively combine concepts and apply them, compared to the nitty-gritty of fine writing. Also, I feel the rise of Chat GPT will result in more value for verified human-written or human-supervised content. I will much prefer hearing an organic, person’s personal experience in another country, for example, as a verification for things that actually happened, compared to a fictitious AI generated story. Now combine a verified human + AI assistance, you have a reliable narrator and good content. The hardest hit will probably be to the anonymous writers and commenters, who cannot provide verification of being actual sources, and will be washed in the storm of AI content.

mejutoco 4y ago
> Many times people have concepts they wish to express but are not so proficient in what is the cultural “prestige” writing. Many times people are bad at writing, I agree. I see what you mean, but if you have a concept and cannot express it, do you really "have" a concept. It is like knowing mathematics and being unable to solve any exercises.

jameshart 4y ago

There’s genuine loss of value going on if we fall into the trap of language-generated SEO - but it’s more subtle than just ‘the internet will be full of crap’ The thing is that webpages don’t ‘exist’ in the way most people mentally kind of think of them - as ‘documents on the file system of some computer’. And google is not an index over all those ‘documents’. How search actually works is Google bots go out to a bunch of servers and ask them ‘hey, what kind of documents can you make?’, and the servers respond with dynamically generated lists of links to those ‘documents’, and google it requests them, and the server makes them and sends them to google, which indexes them so that later when someone searches the internet, google can send them to the same link, and the server can make the document again for them. In an internet that works like this, using an LLM to generate documents that google indexes is a waste of everyone’s time. This turns google into an index of the output of various LLM prompts that someone has run that they think someone might later search for. This wastes everybody’s time. An LLM outputted summary of every earnings report of every company doesn’t need to be pregenerated - we can make that later, at the time the customer asks the query ‘what was in the earnings report of Foocorp in Q4 2013?’ This breaks the ‘document-centric’ conceit of search; and that might not be a bad thing.

elecush 4y ago
everything accurate but it is only a "waste of some peoples' time" while others profit with their SEO-friendly garbledy-gook
advisedwang 4y ago
Interesting point, but there's a lot of use cases where chat bots still need some novel data, like your "earnings report of Foocorp in Q4 2013" example. So maybe we end up with [smaller] sites of raw data for bots to digest when someone wants a readable form of it. Frankly that might be better then everything being wrapped up in prose.
distortionfield 4y ago
> Google requests a set of documents that turn out to be LLM generated > Other prompts using Google data make more content for Google to crawl and request > Lather, rinse, repeat AI contamination is already starting. There's no way that content written by an LLM hasn't already been used to train an LLM.

karaterobot 4y ago

> Since then, the news site has published 73 AI-generated articles, but the outlet says on its website that a team of editors is involved in the content “from ideation to publication. Ensuring that the information we publish and the recommendations we make are accurate, credible, and helpful to you is a defining responsibility for what we do.” This is the thing that actually scares me, because I don't believe them when they say they have editors scrutinizing everything the AI writes. They may give it a glance, but I would bet any amount of money that they don't rigorously check everything. And as time goes on, they're going to spend fewer and fewer resources on editorial, I guarantee it. My basis for saying this is that editorial has already been deeply cut — forget rewrites, forget fact checking, it feels like half these articles have outright typos that never get caught. I'm not sure anyone but the author closely reads an article before it goes into publication, and if the author is an AI... They aren't going to staff up on editorial if AI can generate content, they will just spend $0 on writers, and as little as they can get away with on editors, approaching $0.

Decabytes 4y ago

I believe that writing on the internet is about to become more public and personal if you want people to follow and trust you. While we have been able to get away with being able to write semi anonymously and still be successful there will now always be a question about whether the words were generated by an AI. It's kind of like the deal with the More Plates More Dates YouTube Channel, and the Matt Does Fitness guy. Matt has an amazing physique, but because of that people thought he was on steroids. He paid MPMD to randomly drug test him over the course of six months like WADA (world anti-doping agency) to prove he was natural. He had to do this because steroids exist in the world. Same thing with writing. Using perfect grammar and a more formal sentence structure will probably cause people to think you are a robot. But writing about your life, your hobby projects and what you are doing with them will show people that you are a real person

tjchear 4y ago
That makes sense to me, but I wonder if that's gonna launch a writing arms race between genuine writers and AI researchers.

ohashi 4y ago

CNET has been publishing garbage content for a while now. Look no further than their 'reviews.' I work with web hosting reviews and look at what they disclaim “While we didn't test the services, we did carefully examine each service's offerings and ranked them according to essential web hosting features.” (source: https://archive.ph/UtlsB https://archive.ph/UtlsB ) They are writing reviews with no experience? lol.

duskwuff 4y ago
Reviewing web hosts based on comparing feature checklists? Oh dear. For those who aren't aware, feature checklists for web hosting services are 90% bullshit. Not that they aren't true, but the items that get checked off are often trivial nonsense which are implicitly available from any commodity hosting provider like "control panel", "access logs", or "password protected directories". The real differentiators are usually things which don't show up in marketing materials, like "is the support team halfway competent" or "how badly does this provider try to nickel and dime you". Which is why you need to actually work with the provider to give them a meaningful review.
- ohashi 4y ago
  After doing web hosting reviews for over a decade now... 99.9% of the people do any form of review are lying or manipulating things for affiliate commissions. The few that aren't, most don't actually know what reviewing/benchmarking/testing well looks like. It's atrocious. And Google just pumps this garbage. I need to finish writing about all bullshit from big brands doing these reviews. CNET is just one easy example.

anonymousab 4y ago

That is more of an indictment of CNET's average article quality than anything else.

itisit 4y ago

CNET is unrecognizable to me these days. Practically all of CNET's great editors have long since left the company. It's just a once trusted brand slapped on top of ad-optimized time-relevant trash. Prime fodder for the "More articles like this" junk recommendations the likes of which ZergNet and OutBrain serve up.

bool3max 4y ago

And nobody noticed because nobody reads CNN.

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