7 ms·

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 “too

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.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    A knock-on effect of non-retrainable workers being displaced is that they become convenient vectors for authoritarianism.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  > How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? More than exist today probably. We should not be regularly eliminating slightly less efficient processes that use human workers, for completely alienated processes that are worse, that use fewer workers. Self checkout is a perfect example of this. It’s worse for everyone except for grocery store owners.
  - solardev 3y ago
    As a shopper, self checkout is wonderful. It's so much faster and easier than waiting for a single cashier or two. Especially the ones with a scan gun, so you don't have to fight the stupid countertop scanner. As for lost jobs, should we really be propping up unnecessary jobs that really don't do much except poorly substituting a machine? Whether it's checkout or journalism or coding or politics... if a computer can do it better, why not let it and free up the human for other things? Technology leading to job losses and changes has been happening for a couple centuries now. It has real social impacts, but the answer can't just be "pretend it didn't happen and keep employing them". Maybe our economic and educational systems need to evolve to keep pace, rather than keeping people stuck in assembly line monotony just to keep them meaninglessly employed.
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      >why not let it and free up the human for other things? Cause this has never been the majority outcome in the history of technology The outcome in 90%? of mechanization/automation is not upskilling - it’s displacement. Work gets outsourced to cheaper labor areas or you’re now a baby sitter instead of a tradesperson that is more easily replaced because you have few skills. All the “meritocracy” goes out the window when there’s no need for human expertise - so everyone is the same faceless commodity that simply enforces the rules of whatever mechanical system they are now monitoring. At the end of the day, where once a person went to be a cashier for 8-10 hours a day having conversations and fixing problems and helping people - now you’re on your own waiting for the one person who is running the self-checkout to come over and fix the weight error because you thought you typed in the UPC for a pear but you accidentally typed the UPC for a watermelon and the system required human assistance Everything is worse and you’re doing someone else’s labor and they now have fewer job options.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? I think that's the wrong question. The better question is how can be ensure that people aren't just out of work and can still be able to afford to live?
  - polski-g 3y ago
    They shouldn't. They should go work in a different industry. The butter churners didn't just die, they became professionals doing something else.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > They should go work in a different industry. This is more problematic than it seems, though. What if there isn't enough work in other industries to absorb the people? If AI works out as proponents want, this seems likely because lots of jobs, across a wide swath of industries, will be eliminated. There's also the issue that not everyone is suited for every kind of job.
    - DoughnutHole 3y ago
      That’s not the reality of real industrial displacements. Rust belt towns in the US and coal towns in Britain are miserable places - their populations didn’t adapt when the industries that employed 90% percent of their working population disappeared, the quality of life in these areas just plummeted. People often adapt when big changes come to their industries. They don’t adapt when their entire livelihoods disappear. LLMs look to have the potential to do this not just to a segment of one part of the economy in some regions, but to the entire knowledge economy the world over.
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Replace [butter churner] with [coal miner] or [auto worker] and in fact that's what happened to thousands of people who were cast to the wind when entire industries shut down. They lost their homes and health care and died earlier than they had to, leaving nothing but broken families and communities.
antegamisou 3y ago
> My guess is that the argument will be that the “tools will simply help augment rather than replace the writer.” Yet they always end up augmenting the scammer, grifter and undermine those that want to remain articulate.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
shoubidouwah 3y ago
I think there's a difference between the concept of journalism and content creation / copywriting. Both come from the same school programs in a way, but while the latter is pretty trivially replaced by AI, the former is a combination of curiosity, multi-step investigation, physical ferreting of information and sensations, and emotionally charged writing to get a point across in a way that is recognizable as art when well done. Journalism is safe from AI for now, but was not safe from cost-cutting and (infotainementization?) cultural debasement. A potential upside is: lowering the marginal cost of page filling drivel so much in conjunction with declining advertisement revenue, the whole industry collapses in on itself, taking opinion pieces with it. The baseline for getting out of journalism school would be "write better than an AI", and the reporter jobs themselves become high status / high difficulty again. A potential downside is: nothing written ever matters again, all information is a rehashed AP cutting with prompt engineering, and AP / Reuters become a set of controlled bottlenecks. The scary thing is: this will be decided by whether the paying customer wants to be informed, or feel the warm glow of confirmation bias?
- tivert 3y ago
  > the whole industry collapses in on itself, taking opinion pieces with it. That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Opinion pieces will be the last to go, after everything of value has been destroyed. And honestly, not all opinion pieces are bad. Most are crap partisan hackery and outrage-bait, but some are very valuable (e.g. those unconnected with ideological bickering, those struggling to explain a point of view to hostile audiences, those "swimming against the tide," etc.).
  - htrp 3y ago
    > Opinion pieces will be the last to go, after everything of value has been destroyed. Wouldn't opinion pieces be the first to go? We're already in a world where most opinion pieces are part of carefully orchestrated PR campaigns (sometimes even wholly ghostwritten) meant to drive policy discussion in one way or another. If you can AI write this and ascribe it to a reputable source, why wouldn't the industry adopt this as standard?
carlosjobim 3y ago
Real journalists investigate and discover facts and create new content: "news". But many people working as "journalists" just re-write what other people have reported. The first category can never be replaced by a machine, because the machine can only repeat material it has been fed, or make up lies. The second category should be replaced by machines. There's unlimited ventures for investigation for anybody who wants to be a journalist, but it takes much more work than rewrites. I read a lot of newspapers, and the news part consist of about 50% rewrites from other sources, 40% mindlessly repeating press releases from companies and government, and at most 10% investigating and actually reporting new knowledge. Even without machines we already have enough tech that re-writes shouldn't be needed.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  So then you just chose to respond with my final example: “ 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.”” In fact something has been lost, which is a human being is now less able to feed themselves and their family and take a vacation and create something valuable. The fact that you and others don’t care about that outcome is the problem.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    If a person is a journalist, then that person has the capacity to conduct investigations, make interviews and such things that an AI can never do. If the person is only able to make re-writes, then he or she is not a journalist. If the AI is good at making rewrites, that will free up time for journalists to focus on making more quality reporting.
    - solardev 3y ago
      We're probably not very far away from an AI being able to email and make calls and do those interviews. Or create a Zoom avatar for itself. Is it going to produce Pulutzwr-winning articles right off the bat? Probably not. But I could easily see it replacing the more mundane everyday articles, especially when it's just regurgitating some press release or new study or product launch.
skepticATX 3y ago
There isn’t enough information to make that call. If it’s perfect then sure, it’d impact things. Essentially what we know is that Google (with a financial incentive to make exaggerated claims) has demoed something to media execs (with little to no background required to critically evaluate these claims).
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I’d agree with this, but… I think it’s safe to say the intention of every party here seems to be aligned with the notable exclusion of an actual writer Writers and journalists aren’t quoted in the article and I see no reference to them being included in the product pitch (article only discusses executives being given demos) So in terms of incentive alignment, the person being impacted seems to be the least involved.
davidguetta 3y ago
That doesn't matter in the end. 1/ Technology has always disrupted labor market so I mean that's not even a question this will happen. 2/ It's not that sad: I've worked in journaism and the reality is that 80% of news article are already most of the time a sad copypasta of a single main source of info such as reuters / AFP in france. Most of journalism is already noise. Maybe that will help recenter journalism on real investigative missions rather than this current low value state.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  >That doesn't matter in the end. Doesn't matter to who? I'm pretty sure it matters a lot to people working in a newsroom
  - davidguetta 3y ago
    Sure but once again so what ? Change is part of life
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      We know that change, specifically in employment status in America, can and often does mean the difference between life or death. So yes it’s extremely important that employment changes not be thrust on people if we can at all avoid it as a society. You should care more about the plight of others.
      - davidguetta 3y ago
        I do ! But the point technology is not the one to blame, it's the current structure of society, in particular the one in the USA who throws people in poverty while there's so many wealth around. I an in Europe and wealth is a lot more redistributed. AI will just amplify wealth accumulation but it's the policies who have to step up to counterbalance it with coporate taxes. Blaming AI is like blaming rain for being wet.
        3y ago
tivert 3y ago
> I’d love to hear somebody try to explain how this won’t negatively impact the labor market for journalists. According to the OP: "[t]he tool...can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content." IMHO, that's not really journalism at all, which I would define as gathering that information and deciding what bits are worthy of being reported (e.g. what's new and interesting vs what's already well-known and understood). Honestly, this tool seems like another example of techies redefining the problem to what their program can do, instead of writing a tool to solve the problem. I would imagine that the "writing" part of a news article happens nearly automatically as a side effect of all the other activities a journalist has to do. Sort of like how the "writing a program" part of developing software will nearly automatically fall out of the task of writing a sufficiently precise specification. A tool that can translate such a specification into code is a nothingburger (despite its maker's inevitable hype about rendering software engineers obsolete), because that's not where the work is. > 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. I totally agree on this. I might be fruitful to develop an AI tasked with hunting down and exterminating software engineers and tech executives who seek develop AI to replace human labor. /s
baron816 3y ago
There's a lot of work journalists want to do, but just don't have the capacity for because these types of articles take precedence. It could higher value, but riskier/time intensive work (ie investigative work). It's possible that news rooms will be able to generate more content like this and provide them that profit buffer to then allow their human journalists to go pursue more complex stories. I have no idea though. Predictions are hard to make, especially when they're about the future.
- _djo_ 3y ago
  That would be true if newsrooms keep the same number of journalists on staff, so that they're freed to conduct more investigative work. Looking at the trend in global newsrooms and the way they've already been gutted in the name of dividends how likely do you think that's going to be? More like this will be used as an excuse to cut even more journalists and, worse, to run local and regional news without any journalists at all, with the few who remain being as under pressure and overworked as ever.
holoduke 3y ago
Good journalism is also a formvof activism. Not sure if that exists in AI writers.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  Which would sadly make AI writing more attractive to the C-suite rather than less. It would produce writing to match their current preference.
- atlantic 3y ago
  You mean, bad journalism is a form of activism. Good journalism aims at objectivity, and allows readers to form their own opinions.
nonameiguess 3y ago
This has already been said, though you seemingly didn't like it. A journalist is not the same thing as a writer. They develop ideas, conduct investigations, interview subjects and witnesses, travel to locations, check and verify the work of other journalists by calling sources to see if they're told the same thing the second time. They maintain relationships with sources. Let's imagine that, currently, a journalist spends 50% of their time conducting investigations and 50% of their time sitting at a keyboard typing up their findings. The ideal hope for a technology like this is the future then consists of 90% of a journalist's time being spent conducting investigations and 10% telling a text generator to type up the findings for them and cleaning it up. Overall, more time spent investigating and following up should result in higher-quality, more interesting work. It may appear to consumers at our end that the work of a journalist is just writing because the writing is all we see, but this is not the case.
slowmovintarget 3y ago
Writers will be offered a one-time payment for their writing sample, which will be used by publishers, in perpetuity, to generate content in that style. No royalties. Also, no further employment. The shame of it is, this is actually slightly better than the current state of things, where no one who contributed writing to the training sets in any form is receiving compensation. But it is the same issue as one of the sticking points in the SAG-AFTRA strike.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The endgame of this is having to pay enormous sums up-front for training data of dubious value. Like if you dictated that all creativity had to be paid for purely through Kickstarter.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Nobody gives a shit about style for news reporting, which is about fact gathering. AI-generated style imitation will hurt opinion columnists, but they're a complete waste of oxygen anyway.
srsQ 3y ago
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thehappypm 3y ago
Journalism is a lot more than just turning press releases and such into articles. In fact, making it cheaper to churn those out will free up money for real journalism — investigations, interviews, analysis, opinions.
- dahwolf 3y ago
  Indeed, for example turning Tweets and Tiktok videos into articles.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  No, it won't. News media today are nothing more but a vehicle to bring attention to advertisement. The majority of people do not read lengthy articles anyway, only headlines. Investigative journalism is wildly expensive and not cost-effective given said objective. News media are anachronistic anyway. People are stuck in childish and dumbed down variants of "my parents told me so". What is necessary (and severely lacking) is two-way (or rather, public) communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling people to form well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive constructive criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating self-reflection on a society-level.
  - guilamu 3y ago
    'What is necessary (and severely lacking) is two-way communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling people to form well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive constructive criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating self-reflection on a society-level. ' Can't agree more, but how? Any insight?
    - Loquebantur 3y ago
      One first needs to appreciate the many attempts failing at it. Reddit, Twitter, social media... They all were bad to begin with, but deliberately made worse still, to the point of not fulfilling their raison d'être anymore. You need a functional format for group discussions (existed, killed off). You need functional standards for civil discussion (exist, see science, people somehow forgot). And you need to realize, anonymity is anathema to having a civil sphere (You don't need to give your real name, but for social self-regulation to work, an identity is necessary). AI quite possibly could help a great deal with this. Sensible automated (and consistently reasoned/reviewable) moderation of internet forums is wildly underexplored.
hef19898 3y ago
Well, those people who wrote the 234th article about a lionesse potentially on the loose in Berlin today will definitely have a hard competing with AI...
anigbrowl 3y ago
As a journalist, I hate writing. I like hunting down facts and details, the actual writing part is miserable and boring. There's constant sweating over how much context to include so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the important stuff. I've never used an LLM to write anything, but I have seriously considered doing a dense infodump and telling it to ask me up to 5 contextual questions before spitting out a report. Editing other people's stuff is even worse, because many writers aren't burdened by editorial concerns and don't bother to put in the effort to make their story coherent and interesting in the first draft. Also the money is terrible unless you are lucky enough to work in a corporate newsroom.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  > There's constant sweating over how much context to include so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the important stuff Won't help you when you have to edit the AI output because… > Editing other people's stuff is even worse, because many writers aren't burdened by editorial concerns and don't bother to put in the effort to make their story coherent and interesting So in the end, what do you gain?
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    ChatGPT writes better and takes feedback better than many real people. I would rather fine-tune and LLM on my won writing and a collection of source documents. That way I could focus on information-gathering, write an extremely terse summary of what I consider to be the key points, and save myself many hours of misery writing boilerplate.
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    Sometimes there is value to having someone else write the first draft that you can then edit. Personally I think this is going to put a lot of journalists out of work. Many of them aren’t investigative journalists and do mostly write, and their days are numbered.
thumbuddy 3y ago
Anyone else looking at these things as propaganda machines that have zero liability? "Ewps da AI said to stage a coup again lul sorry we fix it 4 u mb"
visarga 3y ago
Not worried about low quality text from AI. Soon enough it will be hard to find a human who writes better than a human+AI+plugins team. And an AI+plugins system will be better than average human. We need to have AI monitor the news and rate their level of factuality by consistency analysis and reputation scoring. Journalists in the loop, working with AI to find disinformation. Then we can feel safer about propaganda-LLMs, they are inevitable.
goodgoblin 3y ago
b/c the 'writing' part is at the end of the process of gathering the news.
hervature 3y ago
> 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. You are aware that, prior to refrigeration, people would harvest ice from the Arctic? Honestly, I don't care they all lost their jobs if it means millions of people don't die during heat waves.
- sva_ 3y ago
  > prior to refrigeration, people would harvest ice from the Arctic Umm, are you sure about that? Source?
  - rirarobo 3y ago
    Not necessarily from the artic, but it's true that ice harvest and trade was at one time in history a major industry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
theknocker 3y ago
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notatoad 3y ago
>well The writing wasn’t very good anyway, it was all a regurgitation of the same thing over and over anyways well, yes. you clearly understand the problem, but stating it dismissively doesn't refute it. paying people to do minimal rewrites of press releases or wire service articles is not productive work. at all. people would be better served by reading the original source. a job that requires no skill and provides no benefit isn't really a job, it's just a selectively-applied welfare program, disproportionately provided to the people with the best connections. putting a stop to those sorts of "jobs" is not a bad thing.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  " it's just a selectively-applied welfare program, disproportionately provided to the people with the best connections. putting a stop to those sorts of "jobs" is not a bad thing." As long as you have somewhere else to put them...or else they will go on another type of welfare program where they don't have to do any work. That is the issue here...
  - notatoad 3y ago
    Why is a fairly-distributed welfare program worse than an unfairly-distributed one?
    - Nasrudith 3y ago
      Because it is unfair in their favor and thus motivated reasoning springs forth.
ecf 3y ago
Maybe a controversial opinion but the world needs news that contains no opinions, no fluff, no guesses at what that piece of news may hold for the future, no interpretation whatsoever. Basically I want journalists to not journal at all and just give the headline. If this requires AI, so be it. I will pay for it.
mc32 3y ago
A problem with automation is that there is no pushback against the narrative. Bias will be a dial in either direction without fussy journalists daring to question the received narrative.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  There was significant pushback against narratives beyond reporters getting pissed at prompts to interupt this story from Iraq for Britney Spears release from prison? That is news to me, no pun intendes. Pushback seems more the domain of the audience than the writers.
hulitu 3y ago
> I’d love to hear somebody try to explain how this won’t negatively impact the labor market for journalists. The AI is not able to construct a lie so credible like some journalists.

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.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  A knock-on effect of non-retrainable workers being displaced is that they become convenient vectors for authoritarianism.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
> How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? More than exist today probably. We should not be regularly eliminating slightly less efficient processes that use human workers, for completely alienated processes that are worse, that use fewer workers. Self checkout is a perfect example of this. It’s worse for everyone except for grocery store owners.
- solardev 3y ago
  As a shopper, self checkout is wonderful. It's so much faster and easier than waiting for a single cashier or two. Especially the ones with a scan gun, so you don't have to fight the stupid countertop scanner. As for lost jobs, should we really be propping up unnecessary jobs that really don't do much except poorly substituting a machine? Whether it's checkout or journalism or coding or politics... if a computer can do it better, why not let it and free up the human for other things? Technology leading to job losses and changes has been happening for a couple centuries now. It has real social impacts, but the answer can't just be "pretend it didn't happen and keep employing them". Maybe our economic and educational systems need to evolve to keep pace, rather than keeping people stuck in assembly line monotony just to keep them meaninglessly employed.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    >why not let it and free up the human for other things? Cause this has never been the majority outcome in the history of technology The outcome in 90%? of mechanization/automation is not upskilling - it’s displacement. Work gets outsourced to cheaper labor areas or you’re now a baby sitter instead of a tradesperson that is more easily replaced because you have few skills. All the “meritocracy” goes out the window when there’s no need for human expertise - so everyone is the same faceless commodity that simply enforces the rules of whatever mechanical system they are now monitoring. At the end of the day, where once a person went to be a cashier for 8-10 hours a day having conversations and fixing problems and helping people - now you’re on your own waiting for the one person who is running the self-checkout to come over and fix the weight error because you thought you typed in the UPC for a pear but you accidentally typed the UPC for a watermelon and the system required human assistance Everything is worse and you’re doing someone else’s labor and they now have fewer job options.
JohnFen 3y ago
> How many humans do you want employed as butter churners? I think that's the wrong question. The better question is how can be ensure that people aren't just out of work and can still be able to afford to live?
- polski-g 3y ago
  They shouldn't. They should go work in a different industry. The butter churners didn't just die, they became professionals doing something else.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > They should go work in a different industry. This is more problematic than it seems, though. What if there isn't enough work in other industries to absorb the people? If AI works out as proponents want, this seems likely because lots of jobs, across a wide swath of industries, will be eliminated. There's also the issue that not everyone is suited for every kind of job.
  - DoughnutHole 3y ago
    That’s not the reality of real industrial displacements. Rust belt towns in the US and coal towns in Britain are miserable places - their populations didn’t adapt when the industries that employed 90% percent of their working population disappeared, the quality of life in these areas just plummeted. People often adapt when big changes come to their industries. They don’t adapt when their entire livelihoods disappear. LLMs look to have the potential to do this not just to a segment of one part of the economy in some regions, but to the entire knowledge economy the world over.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Replace [butter churner] with [coal miner] or [auto worker] and in fact that's what happened to thousands of people who were cast to the wind when entire industries shut down. They lost their homes and health care and died earlier than they had to, leaving nothing but broken families and communities.

antegamisou 3y ago

> My guess is that the argument will be that the “tools will simply help augment rather than replace the writer.” Yet they always end up augmenting the scammer, grifter and undermine those that want to remain articulate.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

shoubidouwah 3y ago

I think there's a difference between the concept of journalism and content creation / copywriting. Both come from the same school programs in a way, but while the latter is pretty trivially replaced by AI, the former is a combination of curiosity, multi-step investigation, physical ferreting of information and sensations, and emotionally charged writing to get a point across in a way that is recognizable as art when well done. Journalism is safe from AI for now, but was not safe from cost-cutting and (infotainementization?) cultural debasement. A potential upside is: lowering the marginal cost of page filling drivel so much in conjunction with declining advertisement revenue, the whole industry collapses in on itself, taking opinion pieces with it. The baseline for getting out of journalism school would be "write better than an AI", and the reporter jobs themselves become high status / high difficulty again. A potential downside is: nothing written ever matters again, all information is a rehashed AP cutting with prompt engineering, and AP / Reuters become a set of controlled bottlenecks. The scary thing is: this will be decided by whether the paying customer wants to be informed, or feel the warm glow of confirmation bias?

tivert 3y ago
> the whole industry collapses in on itself, taking opinion pieces with it. That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Opinion pieces will be the last to go, after everything of value has been destroyed. And honestly, not all opinion pieces are bad. Most are crap partisan hackery and outrage-bait, but some are very valuable (e.g. those unconnected with ideological bickering, those struggling to explain a point of view to hostile audiences, those "swimming against the tide," etc.).
- htrp 3y ago
  > Opinion pieces will be the last to go, after everything of value has been destroyed. Wouldn't opinion pieces be the first to go? We're already in a world where most opinion pieces are part of carefully orchestrated PR campaigns (sometimes even wholly ghostwritten) meant to drive policy discussion in one way or another. If you can AI write this and ascribe it to a reputable source, why wouldn't the industry adopt this as standard?

carlosjobim 3y ago

Real journalists investigate and discover facts and create new content: "news". But many people working as "journalists" just re-write what other people have reported. The first category can never be replaced by a machine, because the machine can only repeat material it has been fed, or make up lies. The second category should be replaced by machines. There's unlimited ventures for investigation for anybody who wants to be a journalist, but it takes much more work than rewrites. I read a lot of newspapers, and the news part consist of about 50% rewrites from other sources, 40% mindlessly repeating press releases from companies and government, and at most 10% investigating and actually reporting new knowledge. Even without machines we already have enough tech that re-writes shouldn't be needed.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
So then you just chose to respond with my final example: “ 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.”” In fact something has been lost, which is a human being is now less able to feed themselves and their family and take a vacation and create something valuable. The fact that you and others don’t care about that outcome is the problem.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  If a person is a journalist, then that person has the capacity to conduct investigations, make interviews and such things that an AI can never do. If the person is only able to make re-writes, then he or she is not a journalist. If the AI is good at making rewrites, that will free up time for journalists to focus on making more quality reporting.
  - solardev 3y ago
    We're probably not very far away from an AI being able to email and make calls and do those interviews. Or create a Zoom avatar for itself. Is it going to produce Pulutzwr-winning articles right off the bat? Probably not. But I could easily see it replacing the more mundane everyday articles, especially when it's just regurgitating some press release or new study or product launch.

skepticATX 3y ago

There isn’t enough information to make that call. If it’s perfect then sure, it’d impact things. Essentially what we know is that Google (with a financial incentive to make exaggerated claims) has demoed something to media execs (with little to no background required to critically evaluate these claims).

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I’d agree with this, but… I think it’s safe to say the intention of every party here seems to be aligned with the notable exclusion of an actual writer Writers and journalists aren’t quoted in the article and I see no reference to them being included in the product pitch (article only discusses executives being given demos) So in terms of incentive alignment, the person being impacted seems to be the least involved.

davidguetta 3y ago

That doesn't matter in the end. 1/ Technology has always disrupted labor market so I mean that's not even a question this will happen. 2/ It's not that sad: I've worked in journaism and the reality is that 80% of news article are already most of the time a sad copypasta of a single main source of info such as reuters / AFP in france. Most of journalism is already noise. Maybe that will help recenter journalism on real investigative missions rather than this current low value state.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
>That doesn't matter in the end. Doesn't matter to who? I'm pretty sure it matters a lot to people working in a newsroom
- davidguetta 3y ago
  Sure but once again so what ? Change is part of life
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    We know that change, specifically in employment status in America, can and often does mean the difference between life or death. So yes it’s extremely important that employment changes not be thrust on people if we can at all avoid it as a society. You should care more about the plight of others.
    - davidguetta 3y ago
      I do ! But the point technology is not the one to blame, it's the current structure of society, in particular the one in the USA who throws people in poverty while there's so many wealth around. I an in Europe and wealth is a lot more redistributed. AI will just amplify wealth accumulation but it's the policies who have to step up to counterbalance it with coporate taxes. Blaming AI is like blaming rain for being wet.
      - 3y ago

tivert 3y ago

> I’d love to hear somebody try to explain how this won’t negatively impact the labor market for journalists. According to the OP: "[t]he tool...can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content." IMHO, that's not really journalism at all, which I would define as gathering that information and deciding what bits are worthy of being reported (e.g. what's new and interesting vs what's already well-known and understood). Honestly, this tool seems like another example of techies redefining the problem to what their program can do, instead of writing a tool to solve the problem. I would imagine that the "writing" part of a news article happens nearly automatically as a side effect of all the other activities a journalist has to do. Sort of like how the "writing a program" part of developing software will nearly automatically fall out of the task of writing a sufficiently precise specification. A tool that can translate such a specification into code is a nothingburger (despite its maker's inevitable hype about rendering software engineers obsolete), because that's not where the work is. > 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. I totally agree on this. I might be fruitful to develop an AI tasked with hunting down and exterminating software engineers and tech executives who seek develop AI to replace human labor. /s

baron816 3y ago

There's a lot of work journalists want to do, but just don't have the capacity for because these types of articles take precedence. It could higher value, but riskier/time intensive work (ie investigative work). It's possible that news rooms will be able to generate more content like this and provide them that profit buffer to then allow their human journalists to go pursue more complex stories. I have no idea though. Predictions are hard to make, especially when they're about the future.

_djo_ 3y ago
That would be true if newsrooms keep the same number of journalists on staff, so that they're freed to conduct more investigative work. Looking at the trend in global newsrooms and the way they've already been gutted in the name of dividends how likely do you think that's going to be? More like this will be used as an excuse to cut even more journalists and, worse, to run local and regional news without any journalists at all, with the few who remain being as under pressure and overworked as ever.

holoduke 3y ago

Good journalism is also a formvof activism. Not sure if that exists in AI writers.

slowmovintarget 3y ago
Which would sadly make AI writing more attractive to the C-suite rather than less. It would produce writing to match their current preference.
atlantic 3y ago
You mean, bad journalism is a form of activism. Good journalism aims at objectivity, and allows readers to form their own opinions.

nonameiguess 3y ago

This has already been said, though you seemingly didn't like it. A journalist is not the same thing as a writer. They develop ideas, conduct investigations, interview subjects and witnesses, travel to locations, check and verify the work of other journalists by calling sources to see if they're told the same thing the second time. They maintain relationships with sources. Let's imagine that, currently, a journalist spends 50% of their time conducting investigations and 50% of their time sitting at a keyboard typing up their findings. The ideal hope for a technology like this is the future then consists of 90% of a journalist's time being spent conducting investigations and 10% telling a text generator to type up the findings for them and cleaning it up. Overall, more time spent investigating and following up should result in higher-quality, more interesting work. It may appear to consumers at our end that the work of a journalist is just writing because the writing is all we see, but this is not the case.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

Writers will be offered a one-time payment for their writing sample, which will be used by publishers, in perpetuity, to generate content in that style. No royalties. Also, no further employment. The shame of it is, this is actually slightly better than the current state of things, where no one who contributed writing to the training sets in any form is receiving compensation. But it is the same issue as one of the sticking points in the SAG-AFTRA strike.

kmeisthax 3y ago
The endgame of this is having to pay enormous sums up-front for training data of dubious value. Like if you dictated that all creativity had to be paid for purely through Kickstarter.
anigbrowl 3y ago
Nobody gives a shit about style for news reporting, which is about fact gathering. AI-generated style imitation will hurt opinion columnists, but they're a complete waste of oxygen anyway.

srsQ 3y ago

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thehappypm 3y ago

Journalism is a lot more than just turning press releases and such into articles. In fact, making it cheaper to churn those out will free up money for real journalism — investigations, interviews, analysis, opinions.

dahwolf 3y ago
Indeed, for example turning Tweets and Tiktok videos into articles.
Loquebantur 3y ago
No, it won't. News media today are nothing more but a vehicle to bring attention to advertisement. The majority of people do not read lengthy articles anyway, only headlines. Investigative journalism is wildly expensive and not cost-effective given said objective. News media are anachronistic anyway. People are stuck in childish and dumbed down variants of "my parents told me so". What is necessary (and severely lacking) is two-way (or rather, public) communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling people to form well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive constructive criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating self-reflection on a society-level.
- guilamu 3y ago
  'What is necessary (and severely lacking) is two-way communication. Enabling OSINT. Enabling people to form well-founded opinions. To discuss and receive constructive criticism of their views and ideas. Facilitating self-reflection on a society-level. ' Can't agree more, but how? Any insight?
  - Loquebantur 3y ago
    One first needs to appreciate the many attempts failing at it. Reddit, Twitter, social media... They all were bad to begin with, but deliberately made worse still, to the point of not fulfilling their raison d'être anymore. You need a functional format for group discussions (existed, killed off). You need functional standards for civil discussion (exist, see science, people somehow forgot). And you need to realize, anonymity is anathema to having a civil sphere (You don't need to give your real name, but for social self-regulation to work, an identity is necessary). AI quite possibly could help a great deal with this. Sensible automated (and consistently reasoned/reviewable) moderation of internet forums is wildly underexplored.

hef19898 3y ago

Well, those people who wrote the 234th article about a lionesse potentially on the loose in Berlin today will definitely have a hard competing with AI...

anigbrowl 3y ago

As a journalist, I hate writing. I like hunting down facts and details, the actual writing part is miserable and boring. There's constant sweating over how much context to include so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the important stuff. I've never used an LLM to write anything, but I have seriously considered doing a dense infodump and telling it to ask me up to 5 contextual questions before spitting out a report. Editing other people's stuff is even worse, because many writers aren't burdened by editorial concerns and don't bother to put in the effort to make their story coherent and interesting in the first draft. Also the money is terrible unless you are lucky enough to work in a corporate newsroom.

jonny_eh 3y ago
> There's constant sweating over how much context to include so that the reader is well-informed vs the risk of burying the important stuff Won't help you when you have to edit the AI output because… > Editing other people's stuff is even worse, because many writers aren't burdened by editorial concerns and don't bother to put in the effort to make their story coherent and interesting So in the end, what do you gain?
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  ChatGPT writes better and takes feedback better than many real people. I would rather fine-tune and LLM on my won writing and a collection of source documents. That way I could focus on information-gathering, write an extremely terse summary of what I consider to be the key points, and save myself many hours of misery writing boilerplate.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  Sometimes there is value to having someone else write the first draft that you can then edit. Personally I think this is going to put a lot of journalists out of work. Many of them aren’t investigative journalists and do mostly write, and their days are numbered.

thumbuddy 3y ago

Anyone else looking at these things as propaganda machines that have zero liability? "Ewps da AI said to stage a coup again lul sorry we fix it 4 u mb"

visarga 3y ago

Not worried about low quality text from AI. Soon enough it will be hard to find a human who writes better than a human+AI+plugins team. And an AI+plugins system will be better than average human. We need to have AI monitor the news and rate their level of factuality by consistency analysis and reputation scoring. Journalists in the loop, working with AI to find disinformation. Then we can feel safer about propaganda-LLMs, they are inevitable.

goodgoblin 3y ago

b/c the 'writing' part is at the end of the process of gathering the news.

hervature 3y ago

> 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. You are aware that, prior to refrigeration, people would harvest ice from the Arctic? Honestly, I don't care they all lost their jobs if it means millions of people don't die during heat waves.

sva_ 3y ago
> prior to refrigeration, people would harvest ice from the Arctic Umm, are you sure about that? Source?
- rirarobo 3y ago
  Not necessarily from the artic, but it's true that ice harvest and trade was at one time in history a major industry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade

theknocker 3y ago

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notatoad 3y ago

>well The writing wasn’t very good anyway, it was all a regurgitation of the same thing over and over anyways well, yes. you clearly understand the problem, but stating it dismissively doesn't refute it. paying people to do minimal rewrites of press releases or wire service articles is not productive work. at all. people would be better served by reading the original source. a job that requires no skill and provides no benefit isn't really a job, it's just a selectively-applied welfare program, disproportionately provided to the people with the best connections. putting a stop to those sorts of "jobs" is not a bad thing.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
" it's just a selectively-applied welfare program, disproportionately provided to the people with the best connections. putting a stop to those sorts of "jobs" is not a bad thing." As long as you have somewhere else to put them...or else they will go on another type of welfare program where they don't have to do any work. That is the issue here...
- notatoad 3y ago
  Why is a fairly-distributed welfare program worse than an unfairly-distributed one?
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    Because it is unfair in their favor and thus motivated reasoning springs forth.

ecf 3y ago

Maybe a controversial opinion but the world needs news that contains no opinions, no fluff, no guesses at what that piece of news may hold for the future, no interpretation whatsoever. Basically I want journalists to not journal at all and just give the headline. If this requires AI, so be it. I will pay for it.

mc32 3y ago

A problem with automation is that there is no pushback against the narrative. Bias will be a dial in either direction without fussy journalists daring to question the received narrative.

Nasrudith 3y ago
There was significant pushback against narratives beyond reporters getting pissed at prompts to interupt this story from Iraq for Britney Spears release from prison? That is news to me, no pun intendes. Pushback seems more the domain of the audience than the writers.

hulitu 3y ago

> I’d love to hear somebody try to explain how this won’t negatively impact the labor market for journalists. The AI is not able to construct a lie so credible like some journalists.