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The Washington Post Tells Staff It's Pivoting to AI
- wildrhythms 2y agoDoes anyone else feel embarrassed when they read statements like this? No goals. No vision. Just 'AI everywhere!'
- drewcoo 2y agoThat's always been "pivot," the "strategic" hail Mary play . . . just now with AI!
- ohthatsnotright 2y agoWell, maybe we'll get good recommendations on the type of glue to put in our pizza sauce with the new hard-hitting pieces sure to come out of WaPo.
- hnthrowaway0328 2y agoThey are just chasing winds. You can clearly see that there are two kinds of CEOs, the ones that bring the wind such as Huang, and others who chase. Unfortunately the later also gets paid big bucks and busy putting golden parachutes on themselves. I'd argue that it's better to not have a CEO than having one of those.
- VHRanger 2y agoNote that Huang was the founder of Nvidia - he's not a naked ladder climber like Pichai or Krzanich at Intel previously. Huang made good moves with CUDA, being early on tensor cores by being forward looking. That said, Nvidia is selling the shovels here, it's easy to look good. Some companies have a real usecase for generative AI, but it's something like 5% of these stories. The rest is CEOs FOMOing
- b112 2y agoI think not a CEO FOMO on AI, but the share price FOMO. Announce AI? Potential share spike, or a counter to a dip. For example "poor earnings at The Post!", vs "We're shifting to AI!"
- marcinzm 2y agoThe goal of the CEO is to drive the stock price up in whatever horizon investors care about. Usually it's not a long horizon. It's not to build a sustainable product or even a product at all.
- hnthrowaway0328 2y agoMany CEOs can't even do that properly. Check out Unity as a shiny example and they still get fat paycheck. In fact they gave themselves nice raises too if you check the SEC docs. Ironic, isn't it?
- verisimi 2y agoHow about an AI CEO?!! It too would be a good cost cutting measure!
- hnthrowaway0328 2y agoI actually think an AI CEO is way better than the average one.
- pjc50 2y agoThe goal is firing all the staff.
- gedy 2y agoYes and to appear "innovative" doing so, since it's "because of AI" and not that they are going broke.
- nicklecompte 2y ago“After six months of investigation and $15m in consulting fees, we have determined that our crossword designer can easily be replaced with advanced AI.” [two days later] “Okay, a songbird known for its imitation abilities, starts with ‘r’, ‘twe’ in the middle... wait what, Rottweiler?????”
- wslh 2y agoNo, AI is one thing today and another thing tomorrow but the trend is unstoppable. Clearly we need to understand the boundaries where AI is just "hallucination" but it is right here right now and evolving. Zillions of startups are doing AI now, most will died but some will survive in this collective experiments. Also, there was a time in HN when people argued before downvoting.
- thejohnconway 2y agoOr will it be like self-driving cars? Early gains, but then a long plateau? AI is just not at the stage where outfits like the WP should be "pivoting" to it (whatever that means). I suspect it just means producing more "content" with fewer people, and the result will be garbage. Journalism doesn't need more content-filler type articles.
- rsynnott 2y ago> No, AI is one thing today and another thing tomorrow but the trend is unstoppable. [..] Zillions of startups are doing AI now, most will died but some will survive in this collective experiments. Substitute 'Blockchain' for 'AI' and this is a comment from 2016 or so. Not to say that one can predict the doom of 'AI' on that basis, but lots of VC money being ploughed into a thing does not necessarily mean that the thing will become a Thing.
- pheatherlite 2y agoBlock chain was easy to avoid. Yes the hysteria was the same, but the foundational and fundamental shifts in how the common person does something has changed for many. I've noticed with my own 'non techie' family members who have started using various integrations of LLM and less Google. An impact of something on society at large can usually be measured by how it is used by the youth of today. Chatgpt started by aiding kids in their assignments, but now many depend on it for answers to various non academic questions. Whereas Block chain was not part of an average 5th grader's daily computer usage.
- wslh 2y agoI have companies in Blockchain, and in AI, and in Cybersecurity and can say that it is not the same. Blockchain never delivered for most people. For example, blockchain promised banks for the unbanked and the unbanked now use PSPs with mobile phone apps but not crypto. AI is delivering... I wonder why I need to explain this. In the dot com era there were a lot of hype about Internet... few consumers, then... kids don't know what Internet is while using mobile phone apps.
- philjohn 2y agoIt was ever thus - remember when everything was about "The Cloud"? TheOnion satirical news report about HP adopting "That cloud thing that everyone is talking about" is still relevant 11 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
- Tenoke 2y agoIn all fairness, most things did move to the cloud.
- danielbln 2y agoYep, I remember the comments back in the day: "it's just someone else's datacenter", "that's maybe for startups, no bigger corp worth their name will give their infrastructure to some third party". Fast forward to today, the vast majority of our clients (Germany) have their infra in Azure, the rest uses AWS with GCP being a distant third. Apart from some GPU boxes for LLM tests, none of our clients have any non-cloud/local hardware/DCs anymore.
- littlestymaar 2y agoAnd the most interesting part is that it's still an irrational thing, everybody moved towards it, lost money in the process, but they did it nonetheless. Amazon, Microsoft and Google won big at the expense of pretty much everybody else. And that's exactly what they hope they can achieve again with AI…
- seydor 2y agoEither you get on board or you get under it
- JSDevOps 2y agoIt's just so cringe, No one has a clue what it means in real terms just put AI on "it" and hope for the best. i.e Hope we get some of that cash from somewhere.
- fullshark 2y agoIt means "stop paying all these reporters and cut our costs cause we lost 77 million last year."
- theeandthy 2y agoAnd anxious I suppose. Journalism should be synonymous with “people” and healthy society. AI and journalism is going to yield one giant ball of misinformation. I would love to say “we need more printed papers” like the good ‘ol days, but people don’t much have the patience to read by and large. To be honest, at one time I was worried about the young generation and devices. But I’m starting to see older family members are getting plugged into the algorithm.
- b112 2y agoJournalism should be synonymous with “people” People based journalism in 2030: "AI seems to be exhibiting AGI characteristics, experts concerned" AI based: "Recent solar activity may cause unusual AI behaviour, nothing to be concerned about"
- rsynnott 2y agoIt's late-stage tech bubble stuff; compare the period when people were trying to shoehorn Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain into everything. The goal shifts from "we should use Buzzword where it is useful" to "we should use Buzzword so that we are using Buzzword".
- raxxorraxor 2y agoI believe we will get a lot more "industrially manufactured" stories. Just pay for API access to reuters or another press agency and let the AI rewrite the content and push it on your news site ready to be consumed. Content is wrongly summarized? I doubt in the news economy this hardly matters anymore.
- tcgv 2y ago"Pivot to AI" is a strategy. A desperate one nonetheless. From the article, this strategy is being announced to achieve a business goal: > the newspaper will be looking for ways to use AI in its reporting as it seeks to recoup some of the $77 million it lost last year. A company's vision/mission are higher-level determinations, almost like their "constitution"; everything below (goals, strategy, objectives, plans) should be defined in alignment with it. Here you can find WaPo's mission statement: - https://www.washingtonpost.com/about-the-post/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/about-the-post/
- xnx 2y agoWe'll know it's full hype when Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changes its name to Long AIsland Iced Tea Corp.
- hnthrowaway0328 2y agoI can't find any reason to read any newspaper, especially if paid. They are all mouthpieces anyway. If I need to understand anything I'd rather do my own research. The only one I might read is the local newspaper. At keast it's relevant. Ironically it's free.
- foobarbecue 2y agoInstigative journalism is a full time job, requiring skills and credentials. What do you mean by "do my own research"? Who are you interviewing? What war zones are you traveling to to become an eyewitness? Which stacks of public records are you trawling though? I agree that there's a lot of junk reporting out there, but there are also reporters providing an essential service.
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- mc32 2y agoProblem is while you’re right war-zone reporters do cover certain angles of war and can put one side in good light or bad light at their whim really.
- foobarbecue 2y agoAbsolutely. That's why you need lots of them, and many news organizations with different perspectives, each trying to build and maintain trust. You need redundant info, like error-correcting codes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Lutger 2y agoNah, probably just watch a youtube video recommended on his youtube timeline by...AI. Maybe fact check with some tweets on X or instagram posts if he's feeling very serious. I may sound sarcastic, but I assure you the vast majority of people do this kind of 'research' and truly think they know medical conditions better than their GP, understand world events better than the 'biased' mainstream journalists and even think they outperform 99% of scientists, climate or whatever. It is not limited to truly stupid people too. Just try and listen to, lets say Jordan Peterson talk on climate science, and you know he gets his (mis)information on facebook. You would fail a high schooler on any test displaying this level of misunderstanding physics. A bit of a rant, but this is the world we are in. I don't think we can fix it with old fashioned journalism. Too boring. So we need to, somehow, fix social media and 'AI' itself.
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- aden1ne 2y agoAnd how are they going to deal with the inevitable disinformation/hallucinations?
- konfusinomicon 2y agodisinformation is in the AI of the beholder
- VBprogrammer 2y agoSimples, you just train another AI to fact check the first one. Obviously.
- EwanG 2y agoAI Editor of course... (/s... I think?)
- sybercecurity 2y agoThey will probably have a handful of actual human editors, which will become the coveted job in journalism. Eventually it will become the the equivalent of the guys who hand dry your car after the carwash, only with advanced degrees and crushing student debt (if they don't have trust funds).
- rhplus 2y agoIf they want to drive revenue with AI click-bait, they should just move all the Outbrain and Taboola teasers above the fold and be done with it.
- mattmaroon 2y agoWhat could go wrong with that?
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoThe CEO was probably convinced to make a nebulous jump into AI by AI-generated blog spam, leading me to think that WaPo will soon be no better than the average SEO-seeking high-volume, no quality sites that unfortunately litter my search results.
- jhrmnn 2y agoIt‘s just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect, right? With AI, it now seems plausible at least on paper to use technology where it wasn‘t possible before in a hope that it will increase productivity, escaping the said effect.
- ilovetux 2y agoThis gives a whole new meaning to "train your replacement".
- wwweston 2y agoWith AI — and sufficiently malicious or thoughtless copyright approaches – all output is training your replacement.
- jameshart 2y agoDemocracy dies in darkness… And the Washington Post is now putting its faith in a solar powered flashlight.
- mnau 2y agoTBF solar powered flashlight are pretty cool. Charge during day, light during night. World has made a massive leaps in efficiency of LED, solar panels and batteries.
- jameshart 2y agoAnd LLMs are pretty cool too - train them once, use them to do one shot inference.. world has made massive leaps in the efficiency of neural network topology, transformers, and back propagation. But impressive as that is, I don’t want them replacing journalists in a news gathering organization, for exactly the same reason that I don’t want solar powered flashlights on my cave rescue mission.
- keiferski 2y agoI think we’ve already begun to see a three-part split in the media industry. The first part are brand-driven entities. These are places which live on their reputations (deserved or not) and play up this “unique” aspect. This includes The NY Times, Fox News, most individual commentary writers on Substack, and top magazines like The New Yorker. The second part are information-driven entities. These continue to exist because they have certain information that is worth paying for. This includes Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the more professional Substack writers like Sinocism. The third part are entities which have neither an amazing brand nor a unique collection of information, but otherwise still (for now) have some giant pool of resources or financial backing. These include the Washington Post (which hasn’t been a truly national brand name since Nixon), the LA Times, and most of the middle ground of the media industry. My prediction is that groups 1 and 2 will not implement much AI, and if they do, it won’t be announced. Group 3 will implement it as much as possible in an attempt to be relevant and cut costs. Whether that actually works remains to be seen.
- mbreese 2y agoI don’t know about the third group. I don’t think that many people cover DC like the Washington Post. There is value in more regional/niche journalism, but it certainly doesn’t pay like a national presence does. Whether or not they lean into their niche and use AI to fill in the gaps remains to be seen. But I hope not. Best case - they use AI to replace/augment human editors. I shudder to think about the worst case.
- fredgrott 2y agoin the times of AI delusions... If you understand that web users will crave human access...then you as a creator know where the actual success and money will be in the future...
- DataDive 2y agoThe problem with WaPo is that when it comes to certain topics, all their output already feels like it was AI-generated. Not all content - but (sadly) a seemingly increasing chunk of it.
- dopylitty 2y agoI guess that means I’m pivoting to not subscribing to the Washington Post. Hopefully the journalists can start their own outlets like 404 media which I’ll happily pay for.
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- suroot 2y ago[flagged]
- conartist6 2y agoYou must be **ing kidding me!!!!! If you want to turn a company around RALLY THE HUMANS YOU IDIOT
- mathieuh 2y agoJournalism seems like possibly the worst industry to do this. As so-called "AI" becomes omnipresent I think people are going to be crying out for things written by real people instead of the LLM-generated drivel that is already taking over the Internet.
- odyssey7 2y agoIt’s a peculiar contortion that AI has made wapo’s losses, suddenly, a bigger problem than they had been over the past decade. Context: wapo hasn’t been a viable company for a while. It’s Bezos’ apparent-charity project which also effects a Ben-Franklin-owns-the-megaphone strategy of being a newspaper publisher, in DC and reporting on the US government. The US government pays AWS a lot of money. Why not just be candid and say you want to try AI technology for news reporting because you think it has a place in the world?
- _8j50 2y agoIt's a paid product. Who wants to pay to read AI content? If you're monetizing on ads this would make sense but if I pay for WaPo it is because of the reputation it has thanks to human investigative journalists.
- threesevenths 2y agoMy guess is that in WaPo’s case, this will improve their reporting and story telling. Way to go WaPo.
- croes 2y agoSo why is the WaPo needed in the first place? Why shouldn't we use AI directly?
- flakeoil 2y agoReporters doing investigations, research and on- and off-the-record interviews must be a value add to the content I presume. And also a value-add to society at large.
- beepbooptheory 2y agoWhat does this look like to you?
- tsylba 2y agoAs cool it might get to badmouth the new generation and how everything is getting south, I have found more and more attempts to get back to a more convivial and humane approach to medias, especially of the literacy kind, with Reviews and Journals for niche audiences of peculiar aesthetic and intellectual values. Granted, we've seen similar fashion in the past with blog, and then with the mailing list revival, which both quickly get preempted - commodified even - by the marketing squads that devitalize every new media by their unending eager to devour their techs and cloaca'd them into ad platform trend. But it's my earnest feeling that the AI-ssistant behemoth, still quite roboto in its fake expertise and sanitized answers, could be easily defeated by the willingness for poetry and the new form language and our creativity would take to circumvent it. We easily get sidetracked by boredom, but humans are creature hooked on authenticity.
- Jupe 2y agoApologies if this is actually a human-written post - I understand not everyone's first language is English. But, is this a markov chain generated response? It has a glimmer of actual content, but the wording / point / theme is completely lost on my reading. If this was generated by an AI chat bot, then I must have a much better AI chat bot at my disposal (ChatGPT).
- namaria 2y ago> by the marketing squads that devitalize every new media I find this to be a result of "at scale" we've been adding to everything software related. We need localized media that don't scale. Then it cannot be hijacked by cv/income/profit maximizing types.
- helf 2y ago[dead]
- solarkraft 2y agoWell, that's it. They used to be known for pretty good actually journalism in a world of blogspam. Now they're pivoting to ... blogspam, huh? Cool cool, there goes your moat.
- the_snooze 2y agoCan't wait for Google to produce AI-generated summaries of AI-generated articles.
- silverlake 2y agoI think there’s a role for AI in news media. First, you still need reporters to gather information. AI can be used to speed up the final phase of writing and editing. Second, AI can provide background and context to current events. For example, a story about Israel entering Rafah is a snapshot in time. But a reader might ask historical questions: “Who controlled Gaza before Israel became a country?”. Third, combine both features above. AI can generate stories from short updates to magazine features depending on my interest. I don’t care about Trump’s trials, so give me a quick update. I am interested in China’s real estate collapse, so generate a deeper story. All this comes from reporters’ research, most of which isn’t used because editors have allotted them a fixed space. Of course, this requires better AIs that don’t hallucinate. It needs to be able to update info, and even handle non-monotonic reasoning (an earlier report was mistaken, the latest report updates info). The news has 2 parts: facts and analysis. In most cases I don’t care what the reporter thinks. Semafor.com has an interesting style of clearly saying these are the facts and here’s what the reporter thinks. An AI can deliver the facts, while leaving reporters to write a separate analysis (which I can easily skip).
- tivert 2y ago> AI everywhere in our newsroom Great, I look forward to: "According to the Washington Post, the United States has had two Black Presidents in its history. The first was Barack Hussein Obama, and the second was Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Joe Biden is the second Black president of the US."
- jjk166 2y agoThe exclusive value of journalists is in the journalism - finding sources, collecting evidence, piecing together information. The writeup at the end, be it an article or a tv segment or whatever, is little more than a tool to present the findings. Undoubtedly a well communicated piece is superior to a poorly communicated one, but good reporting is only useful so far as there is something to report. Too many news outlets have mistakenly come to believe that their articles are the content. This has led to severe degradation of actual investigative journalism as the news outlets were reduced to summarizers with delusions of grandeur. How many articles now are just "X released a statement today; brief recap of previously reported context; Y commented on the statement; Z has yet to comment" with possibly a "here were some reactions on twitter" sprinkled in? Some good pieces get through, but they drown in a sea of mediocre, regurgitated "news." Honestly, most news articles ought to be written by AI. This should allow journalists to focus on the important bit where their curiosity, their insight, their critical thinking, their zeal, and frankly their humanity can actually be put to good use. I only hope that WaPo is doing this to better focus its resources, and not to eliminate what little of its capacity remains.
- Jupe 2y agoMy guess is that, by the end of this year, we will see this pattern over-and-over. The economics are just too compelling, especially in the attention-driven business like News.
- johnea 2y agoWash Post announces further steps towards irrelevance After the recent change is accessing articles by disabling javascript, this seems like the next step to elon like platform irrelevance. It's not like bozo couldn't setup a guardian like trust to fund the wash post in perpetuity. Instead, his top priority is doing whatever the other idiot wealthy are doing.
- heisenbergcd9 2y agoEveryone needs to learn about AI now...