12 ms·

Google tests A.I. tool that is able to write news articles

100 points by asnyder 3y ago

neom 3y ago
https://archive.is/x09Z5 https://archive.is/x09Z5
NVHacker 3y ago
In summary: under the pretext of showcasing a writing assistant / tool, Google scares the (s... out of) newspaper companies by showing them an AI that can write news articles all by itself.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Or, it's Google firing a shot across the bow of newspaper companies that think Google should pay to use their content. Google's modus operandi has always been to automate people out of the equation. This lets Google have its own news operation, without paying for all those pesky journalists. I wonder if the AI will eventually write stories about any of the bad things that Google does, or just the good things.
jononomo 3y ago
I suppose all a news writer has to do now is tell the AI what happened and then then the AI can tell everyone else what happened.
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  Is good quality journalism really that bad to invest in? These days I have to scroll through a lot of fillers in articles just to get into the real story.
  - esafak 3y ago
    So... have one AI to generate the article and another to condense it back to the summary it was created from :)
- akomtu 3y ago
  In reality: an AI bot watches the stream of twits, picks those that fit its narrative (preprompt) and tells the users what to think.
jmount 3y ago
As a (formerly?) information retrieval company, isn't this shitting where one eats? They don't exactly need more irrelevant material to sort out.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Google has been shitting where they eat ever since they decided to put the answers to questions in the SERP itself instead of just offering search links.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I’d love to hear somebody try to explain how this won’t negatively impact the labor market for journalists. My guess is that the argument will be that the “tools will simply help augment rather than replace the writer.” We know, however, that some small segment of implementations will actually in fact, cause someone to be fired or replaced, and things will get slightly worse for the consumer. An alternative explanation will be “well The writing wasn’t very good anyway, it was all a regurgitation of the same thing over and over anyways”, so “nothing of value has been lost.” I’d love to hear people saying hey maybe let’s not do this in order to maintain a human system run by humans for the benefit of humans and that includes paying humans for labor (when you could actually get equivalent labor from a machine) because it’s important to keep humans alive and creating communities and supporting each other.
- echelon 3y ago
  How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? I imagine that the new AI-enabled jobs are going to have so much more autonomy and that we'll see a switch from capital intensive businesses employing lots of people (eg. Hollywood studios) to lots of tiny indie houses with fewer than a dozen folks, building exactly what they want with freedom.
  - dangerwill 3y ago
    > How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? This gets said about every wave of technological driven job loss and it ignores that it is quite difficult for people to change careers in their mid life. Laid off auto workers in the 80s and 90s didn't switch to other manufacturing jobs or "learn to code". They fell down the ladder into service work and became destitute. And the difference with LLMs is that they threaten essentially every human not working in manual labour with the same fate. > I imagine that the new AI-enabled jobs are going to have so much more autonomy and that we'll see a switch from capital intensive businesses employing lots of people (eg. Hollywood studios) to lots of tiny indie houses with fewer than a dozen folks, building exactly what they want with freedom. I'm sorry but I can't reconcile this with my view of what is actually going on. The entire point of LLMs being introduced in the film industry is to remove humans from the equation to increase profit margins and avoid having to pay actor/writer residuals. That is where all of the investment money is going, not some utopia where the investment money is being split between AI studios churning out "content" and some small human, indie studios making "art". Also, one of the ways the indie film scene has survived is as a proving ground for up and coming actors/actresses (it being part of the career ladder for the acting profession provides a supply of actors/actresses despite low pay) who can then go on to more mainstream films and make their living. If we cede the mainstream to AI then that career progression breaks down and indie films become wholly personal passion projects by folks with enough money to have an extremely expensive hobby.
civilized 3y ago
America's most prestigious news organization is reporting that an AI can write news articles, with no evidence other than Google's say-so. We seem to be reaching peak generative AI hype.
Brendinooo 3y ago
> The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product. Doesn't this already exist in some form? I remember headlines from a few years ago about how stuff like wire reports about sports games could be generated from a box score.
- nils-herzig 3y ago
  A lot of these spam / clickbait articles and SEO Blogposts were written (at least partially) by a less advanced version of this for quite some time. They are probably written by openai these days
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  The Simpsons called it the DJ 3000[0], complete with the executive threatening to replace people with it. It's not exactly a novel idea. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_VwP8yf5TI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_VwP8yf5TI
  - Brendinooo 3y ago
    Of course not, but I thought it was already more than just an idea.
pengaru 3y ago
I look forward to the "hallucinations" defense in explaining away the rampant fake news and market manipulation of our future automated news sources...
Philorandroid 3y ago
Soon, journalists the world over will be in contest with a purpose-built machine for the fakest and least-grounded (but most-believable-sounding) content.
- consumer451 3y ago
  > a purpose-built machine for the fakest and least-grounded (but most-believable-sounding) content truthiness.ai edit: wow, it's actually registered.
onetokeoverthe 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
basitmakine 3y ago
I manage a network of news websites. We've played with few and currently using WordAssistant.org/news-ai. I wonder how will it compare to existing tools.
bastardoperator 3y ago
Good, this will cause media to rethink their relationship with Google.
morkalork 3y ago
I guess this is Google's way of telling media companies in Canada / Australia how they feel about link taxes. I wonder where they got their training data though..
thecleaner 3y ago
This is so cool. As somebody else also pointed out, journalism is all about the data collection. Say what you will about WikiLeaks, one of the things I liked about them was the whole data dump thingy. I prefer the idea of "Here's the data, make up your mind"
- efields 3y ago
  Surely data can never be biased. Most sources of data are honorable. This approach is flawless. (extremely, heavily italicized and bolded: /s) [edit: typo]
choas 3y ago
just wondering if this AI is aware of that Google will sunset the AI within the next two years, and if it will then write its own farewell article
cboswel1 3y ago
[flagged]
summerlight 3y ago
Sounds like a ChatGPT trained for journalist use cases? I don't think the goal is to auto populate people's feed with some generative contents. Google probably doesn't want to be legally liable with all those machine generated articles...
efields 3y ago
> Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories. Google engineers: I'm I so out of touch? [ beat ] Ge: No, surely it is the users who are wrong.
hnburnsy 3y ago
Here is the template to write a news article... State some facts as reported by others (never link to supporting documents only summarize them) Quote from expert or eyewitness on why this is important Quote from other expert why this might not be important (optional as this might make the story not truly news worthy) State that confusing aspects of the story are "unclear" Fill the rest of the story from articles on the same subject even if not related (link to your publication only)
- d13 3y ago
  And if it’s more than 500 words, add “on a cold November morning” somewhere.
- rickette 3y ago
  Painfully accurate
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  You forgot the part where you cover all of this up with ads that actively block you from reading any of it.
- leet_thow 3y ago
  Also, never forget to mention at least once, advocates, activists, experts and lawmakers.
- junon 3y ago
  Also don't name the expert. It's forbidden.
- joshka 3y ago
  Make sure to state the names of anyone you've reached out for comment that haven't gotten back to you.
- zagrebian 3y ago
  Don’t forget to end the article with “We’ve reached out to [company involved] for comment but didn’t receive a response in time.”
catsarebetter 3y ago
Ironic when they shadow ban AI articles. I've written articles using 90% AI, ranked the same day for keywords, then they've disappeared the next day.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Show me the evidence or it didn't happen. There is no fingerprint or smoking gun in textual prose to distinguish between bullshit human writers and generative AI. If we wished to prove humans are behind content, then we should all be posting pictures of today's newspaper with the handwritten message we intended to convey. Imagine how much less shit social media would contain if that were the barrier to hitting the "post" button.
frozenlettuce 3y ago
I built a simple and ugly website that generates AI news based on updates from frameworks and libraries, and content that is trending on reddit/HN using the OpenAI API. Yes, it has ads. Some things that I've learned so far: - The AI is too gullible. If I ask it to write a short summary of an article, if the source article is trying to shill a product or service, the AI will replicate the salesman discourse. I tried adjusting the prompt to see if I could make it more critical of content that it is analyzing (by telling it ahead of time that the post might be trying to push a product/service). - Costs are ludricously low. It costs like 1 cent per 15 articles. - My next experiment will be with local news. I'm building some feeds with public information from my town (the town's hall official news, the legislators weekly meeting notes, weather reports, waze, etc), and based on that make it generate news items. The thing about it is that its sources will be (nearly) primary - it will not copy content from other journalists (apart from the official prefecture news, which I will need to tell the AI that will be biased towards the current administration). When analyzing the local records, it might be able to catch shady stuff that regular journalists would not notice. Imagine feeding some buying orders from the town and asking the AI ("is something illegal going on here" or "are any of these items overpriced?") - I see a risk/opportunity for infinite content generation. Example: generate 50 headlines for articles about the Kardashians. The next day, ask for more and provide the last 200 headlines, to make sure that no repetitions occur. It would flood search engines with almost random content. I think that something like that could be useful to fill "holes" in wikipedia, though. The site that I built is https://dev-radar.com/ https://dev-radar.com/
yummypaint 3y ago
People seem to be confusing composition with journalism. Journalism is what happens before an article is composed, and this system does nothing resembling original research or fact finding.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  We can never replicate the entirety of Robert Scheer, Jeremy Scahill, Abby Martin, or Chris Hedges with an algorithm, nor should we because of the ethical implications: the power it would transfer to the government-industrial complex or anyone seeking to manufacture sentiment without the intent of committing Walter Cronkite journalism. This conflation is a critical flaw of reasoning. It will increase the tendency of so-called journalists hitting the "write copy using AI" button to spew out content. It will not, cannot, and should not replace critical thinking skills, interviews, or research. I'm curious how this was pitched by Google and the thinking of newsroom management. Tools should augment and automate mechanic work such as an enhanced LexisNexis search, not substitute or delegate human expertise. At some point, without necessarily donning a tin foil hat, we ought to reflect on the possibility of computing power and automation misusing ability beyond the filter bubble of selective "resharing" for user persuasion to the realm of generative faux organizations, personalities, and content. Elaborate digital hallucinations intent on gaslighting and arguing with users individually.
dogman144 3y ago
There are interesting angles to this. Newsrooms started shifting journalists over to contractors a while back because of risk from libel lawsuits, even if defendable. Gawker and Peter Thiel started this trend. This contractor shift paired with the revenue pressure from the internet’s impact has made journalism a real tough industry. I wonder how LLMs writing news would impact the contractor/libel situation. I could see it freeing up resources to then pay w2 journalists worth protecting for bigger stories. Or maybe LLMs writing the controversial stories and seeing who gets sued in that situation.
jonplackett 3y ago
https://whatsthefuckingnews.com https://whatsthefuckingnews.com
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Definitely the Winsted Citizen.
ilaksh 3y ago
This NY Times articles fails to provide any concrete examples of the inputs and outputs of the program.
tzm 3y ago
I hope Google opens this up to actual journalists who can find and validate facts, then use AI to write long form content.
dave333 3y ago
It might be more valuable to have AI read news articles and decide which are factual and important or apply whatever filter the user defines. Automated HN but with much broader input.

100 points by asnyder 3y ago

neom 3y ago

https://archive.is/x09Z5 https://archive.is/x09Z5

In summary: under the pretext of showcasing a writing assistant / tool, Google scares the (s... out of) newspaper companies by showing them an AI that can write news articles all by itself.

reaperducer 3y ago
Or, it's Google firing a shot across the bow of newspaper companies that think Google should pay to use their content. Google's modus operandi has always been to automate people out of the equation. This lets Google have its own news operation, without paying for all those pesky journalists. I wonder if the AI will eventually write stories about any of the bad things that Google does, or just the good things.

jononomo 3y ago

I suppose all a news writer has to do now is tell the AI what happened and then then the AI can tell everyone else what happened.

Alifatisk 3y ago
Is good quality journalism really that bad to invest in? These days I have to scroll through a lot of fillers in articles just to get into the real story.
- esafak 3y ago
  So... have one AI to generate the article and another to condense it back to the summary it was created from :)
akomtu 3y ago
In reality: an AI bot watches the stream of twits, picks those that fit its narrative (preprompt) and tells the users what to think.

jmount 3y ago

As a (formerly?) information retrieval company, isn't this shitting where one eats? They don't exactly need more irrelevant material to sort out.

kmeisthax 3y ago
Google has been shitting where they eat ever since they decided to put the answers to questions in the SERP itself instead of just offering search links.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

I’d love to hear somebody try to explain how this won’t negatively impact the labor market for journalists. My guess is that the argument will be that the “tools will simply help augment rather than replace the writer.” We know, however, that some small segment of implementations will actually in fact, cause someone to be fired or replaced, and things will get slightly worse for the consumer. An alternative explanation will be “well The writing wasn’t very good anyway, it was all a regurgitation of the same thing over and over anyways”, so “nothing of value has been lost.” I’d love to hear people saying hey maybe let’s not do this in order to maintain a human system run by humans for the benefit of humans and that includes paying humans for labor (when you could actually get equivalent labor from a machine) because it’s important to keep humans alive and creating communities and supporting each other.

echelon 3y ago
How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? I imagine that the new AI-enabled jobs are going to have so much more autonomy and that we'll see a switch from capital intensive businesses employing lots of people (eg. Hollywood studios) to lots of tiny indie houses with fewer than a dozen folks, building exactly what they want with freedom.
- dangerwill 3y ago
  > How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? This gets said about every wave of technological driven job loss and it ignores that it is quite difficult for people to change careers in their mid life. Laid off auto workers in the 80s and 90s didn't switch to other manufacturing jobs or "learn to code". They fell down the ladder into service work and became destitute. And the difference with LLMs is that they threaten essentially every human not working in manual labour with the same fate. > I imagine that the new AI-enabled jobs are going to have so much more autonomy and that we'll see a switch from capital intensive businesses employing lots of people (eg. Hollywood studios) to lots of tiny indie houses with fewer than a dozen folks, building exactly what they want with freedom. I'm sorry but I can't reconcile this with my view of what is actually going on. The entire point of LLMs being introduced in the film industry is to remove humans from the equation to increase profit margins and avoid having to pay actor/writer residuals. That is where all of the investment money is going, not some utopia where the investment money is being split between AI studios churning out "content" and some small human, indie studios making "art". Also, one of the ways the indie film scene has survived is as a proving ground for up and coming actors/actresses (it being part of the career ladder for the acting profession provides a supply of actors/actresses despite low pay) who can then go on to more mainstream films and make their living. If we cede the mainstream to AI then that career progression breaks down and indie films become wholly personal passion projects by folks with enough money to have an extremely expensive hobby.

civilized 3y ago

America's most prestigious news organization is reporting that an AI can write news articles, with no evidence other than Google's say-so. We seem to be reaching peak generative AI hype.

Brendinooo 3y ago

> The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product. Doesn't this already exist in some form? I remember headlines from a few years ago about how stuff like wire reports about sports games could be generated from a box score.

nils-herzig 3y ago
A lot of these spam / clickbait articles and SEO Blogposts were written (at least partially) by a less advanced version of this for quite some time. They are probably written by openai these days
hotpotamus 3y ago
The Simpsons called it the DJ 3000[0], complete with the executive threatening to replace people with it. It's not exactly a novel idea. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_VwP8yf5TI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_VwP8yf5TI
- Brendinooo 3y ago
  Of course not, but I thought it was already more than just an idea.

pengaru 3y ago

I look forward to the "hallucinations" defense in explaining away the rampant fake news and market manipulation of our future automated news sources...

Philorandroid 3y ago

Soon, journalists the world over will be in contest with a purpose-built machine for the fakest and least-grounded (but most-believable-sounding) content.

consumer451 3y ago
> a purpose-built machine for the fakest and least-grounded (but most-believable-sounding) content truthiness.ai edit: wow, it's actually registered.

onetokeoverthe 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

basitmakine 3y ago

I manage a network of news websites. We've played with few and currently using WordAssistant.org/news-ai. I wonder how will it compare to existing tools.

bastardoperator 3y ago

Good, this will cause media to rethink their relationship with Google.

morkalork 3y ago

I guess this is Google's way of telling media companies in Canada / Australia how they feel about link taxes. I wonder where they got their training data though..

thecleaner 3y ago

This is so cool. As somebody else also pointed out, journalism is all about the data collection. Say what you will about WikiLeaks, one of the things I liked about them was the whole data dump thingy. I prefer the idea of "Here's the data, make up your mind"

efields 3y ago
Surely data can never be biased. Most sources of data are honorable. This approach is flawless. (extremely, heavily italicized and bolded: /s) [edit: typo]

choas 3y ago

just wondering if this AI is aware of that Google will sunset the AI within the next two years, and if it will then write its own farewell article

cboswel1 3y ago

[flagged]

summerlight 3y ago

Sounds like a ChatGPT trained for journalist use cases? I don't think the goal is to auto populate people's feed with some generative contents. Google probably doesn't want to be legally liable with all those machine generated articles...

efields 3y ago

> Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories. Google engineers: I'm I so out of touch? [ beat ] Ge: No, surely it is the users who are wrong.

hnburnsy 3y ago

Here is the template to write a news article... State some facts as reported by others (never link to supporting documents only summarize them) Quote from expert or eyewitness on why this is important Quote from other expert why this might not be important (optional as this might make the story not truly news worthy) State that confusing aspects of the story are "unclear" Fill the rest of the story from articles on the same subject even if not related (link to your publication only)

d13 3y ago
And if it’s more than 500 words, add “on a cold November morning” somewhere.
rickette 3y ago
Painfully accurate
darth_avocado 3y ago
You forgot the part where you cover all of this up with ads that actively block you from reading any of it.
leet_thow 3y ago
Also, never forget to mention at least once, advocates, activists, experts and lawmakers.
junon 3y ago
Also don't name the expert. It's forbidden.
joshka 3y ago
Make sure to state the names of anyone you've reached out for comment that haven't gotten back to you.
zagrebian 3y ago
Don’t forget to end the article with “We’ve reached out to [company involved] for comment but didn’t receive a response in time.”

catsarebetter 3y ago

Ironic when they shadow ban AI articles. I've written articles using 90% AI, ranked the same day for keywords, then they've disappeared the next day.

1letterunixname 3y ago
Show me the evidence or it didn't happen. There is no fingerprint or smoking gun in textual prose to distinguish between bullshit human writers and generative AI. If we wished to prove humans are behind content, then we should all be posting pictures of today's newspaper with the handwritten message we intended to convey. Imagine how much less shit social media would contain if that were the barrier to hitting the "post" button.

frozenlettuce 3y ago

I built a simple and ugly website that generates AI news based on updates from frameworks and libraries, and content that is trending on reddit/HN using the OpenAI API. Yes, it has ads. Some things that I've learned so far: - The AI is too gullible. If I ask it to write a short summary of an article, if the source article is trying to shill a product or service, the AI will replicate the salesman discourse. I tried adjusting the prompt to see if I could make it more critical of content that it is analyzing (by telling it ahead of time that the post might be trying to push a product/service). - Costs are ludricously low. It costs like 1 cent per 15 articles. - My next experiment will be with local news. I'm building some feeds with public information from my town (the town's hall official news, the legislators weekly meeting notes, weather reports, waze, etc), and based on that make it generate news items. The thing about it is that its sources will be (nearly) primary - it will not copy content from other journalists (apart from the official prefecture news, which I will need to tell the AI that will be biased towards the current administration). When analyzing the local records, it might be able to catch shady stuff that regular journalists would not notice. Imagine feeding some buying orders from the town and asking the AI ("is something illegal going on here" or "are any of these items overpriced?") - I see a risk/opportunity for infinite content generation. Example: generate 50 headlines for articles about the Kardashians. The next day, ask for more and provide the last 200 headlines, to make sure that no repetitions occur. It would flood search engines with almost random content. I think that something like that could be useful to fill "holes" in wikipedia, though. The site that I built is https://dev-radar.com/ https://dev-radar.com/

yummypaint 3y ago

People seem to be confusing composition with journalism. Journalism is what happens before an article is composed, and this system does nothing resembling original research or fact finding.

1letterunixname 3y ago
We can never replicate the entirety of Robert Scheer, Jeremy Scahill, Abby Martin, or Chris Hedges with an algorithm, nor should we because of the ethical implications: the power it would transfer to the government-industrial complex or anyone seeking to manufacture sentiment without the intent of committing Walter Cronkite journalism. This conflation is a critical flaw of reasoning. It will increase the tendency of so-called journalists hitting the "write copy using AI" button to spew out content. It will not, cannot, and should not replace critical thinking skills, interviews, or research. I'm curious how this was pitched by Google and the thinking of newsroom management. Tools should augment and automate mechanic work such as an enhanced LexisNexis search, not substitute or delegate human expertise. At some point, without necessarily donning a tin foil hat, we ought to reflect on the possibility of computing power and automation misusing ability beyond the filter bubble of selective "resharing" for user persuasion to the realm of generative faux organizations, personalities, and content. Elaborate digital hallucinations intent on gaslighting and arguing with users individually.

dogman144 3y ago

There are interesting angles to this. Newsrooms started shifting journalists over to contractors a while back because of risk from libel lawsuits, even if defendable. Gawker and Peter Thiel started this trend. This contractor shift paired with the revenue pressure from the internet’s impact has made journalism a real tough industry. I wonder how LLMs writing news would impact the contractor/libel situation. I could see it freeing up resources to then pay w2 journalists worth protecting for bigger stories. Or maybe LLMs writing the controversial stories and seeing who gets sued in that situation.

jonplackett 3y ago

https://whatsthefuckingnews.com https://whatsthefuckingnews.com

1letterunixname 3y ago
Definitely the Winsted Citizen.

ilaksh 3y ago

This NY Times articles fails to provide any concrete examples of the inputs and outputs of the program.

tzm 3y ago

I hope Google opens this up to actual journalists who can find and validate facts, then use AI to write long form content.

dave333 3y ago

It might be more valuable to have AI read news articles and decide which are factual and important or apply whatever filter the user defines. Automated HN but with much broader input.