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Well, as of the last 10 years the journalism industry has just been a lazy tweet regurgitation factory. The pipeline looks something like Tweets -> Journalists

Well, as of the last 10 years the journalism industry has just been a lazy tweet regurgitation factory. The pipeline looks something like Tweets -> Journalists -> LLMs. So maybe it would be best if we cut out the middlemen?

jaredwiener 2y ago
If that were true then why not just index the tweets?
claudiulodro 2y ago
To be blunt, this seems like a lazy regurgitation of a tweet. There are lots of organizations out there doing really good work. Look at a couple of the Pulitzer winners from the last couple years for example: - Mississippi Today spent more than 5 years investigating and reporting on the welfare agency and uncovered huge corruption going all the way to the governor's office: https://mississippitoday.org/2023/05/08/pulitzer-prize-winning-backchannel/ https://mississippitoday.org/2023/05/08/pulitzer-prize-winni... - Lookout Santa Cruz was on the ground reporting during catastrophic flooding this year, including setting up a text message service to get information to people because the internet was unreliable: https://lookout.co/lookout-santa-cruz-wins-pulitzer-prize-for-breaking-news-reporting/ https://lookout.co/lookout-santa-cruz-wins-pulitzer-prize-fo... This is the stuff you lose without journalism.
lancesells 2y ago
LLMs are the middlemen. Search engines are the middlemen. Social networks are the middlemen. Go to the NY Times or LA Times and tell me it's based on Tweets. If you're talking about a place like The Verge which is a tech blog with journalism, they have articles based on tweets but also plenty that are legitimate, researched articles.
- segasaturn 2y ago
  If that was true then what do journalists have to be worried about? Why would they need to "fight back" against the LLMs as the above poster said - as you know, ChatGPT can't do original research or investigations on its own. The truth is that the bulk of what is called "journalism" today isn't on-the-ground gumshoes reporting, it's rewording tweets/press releases/PR statements and maybe a couple of phone calls mixed in. A good rule of thumb is that anything that can be replaced by a current-gen AI wasn't worth much to begin with.
  - lancesells 2y ago
    > If that was true then what do journalists have to be worried about? What part are you talking about? Journalists, and everyone else, has to worry that anything they publish then gets served up by the magic bot that billions of dollars are going towards making it an everyday part of life. And Perplexity with $165M in funding is so shady that they can't respect robots.txt and scrape without attribution. > The truth is that the bulk of what is called "journalism" today isn't on-the-ground gumshoes reporting, it's rewording tweets/press releases/PR statements and maybe a couple of phone calls mixed in I think that's kind of true but don't neccessarily think that's the majority of major newspapers. It's definitely true for blogs or something like Techcrunch that is 90% press release and 10% articles based on other articles from other outlets. Looking at the LA Times it seems to me like they are reporting the news: https://www.latimes.com https://www.latimes.com
  - jaredwiener 2y ago
    > A good rule of thumb is that anything that can be replaced by a current-gen AI wasn't worth much to begin with. That's the point, though. It isn't replacing journalists, it's just stealing from them. The reporters are the ones doing the work, the AI is just plagiarizing. It's using their work, while not only removing credit, but more importantly, undermining their livelihoods.

jaredwiener 2y ago

If that were true then why not just index the tweets?

claudiulodro 2y ago

To be blunt, this seems like a lazy regurgitation of a tweet. There are lots of organizations out there doing really good work. Look at a couple of the Pulitzer winners from the last couple years for example: - Mississippi Today spent more than 5 years investigating and reporting on the welfare agency and uncovered huge corruption going all the way to the governor's office: https://mississippitoday.org/2023/05/08/pulitzer-prize-winning-backchannel/ https://mississippitoday.org/2023/05/08/pulitzer-prize-winni... - Lookout Santa Cruz was on the ground reporting during catastrophic flooding this year, including setting up a text message service to get information to people because the internet was unreliable: https://lookout.co/lookout-santa-cruz-wins-pulitzer-prize-for-breaking-news-reporting/ https://lookout.co/lookout-santa-cruz-wins-pulitzer-prize-fo... This is the stuff you lose without journalism.

lancesells 2y ago

LLMs are the middlemen. Search engines are the middlemen. Social networks are the middlemen. Go to the NY Times or LA Times and tell me it's based on Tweets. If you're talking about a place like The Verge which is a tech blog with journalism, they have articles based on tweets but also plenty that are legitimate, researched articles.

segasaturn 2y ago
If that was true then what do journalists have to be worried about? Why would they need to "fight back" against the LLMs as the above poster said - as you know, ChatGPT can't do original research or investigations on its own. The truth is that the bulk of what is called "journalism" today isn't on-the-ground gumshoes reporting, it's rewording tweets/press releases/PR statements and maybe a couple of phone calls mixed in. A good rule of thumb is that anything that can be replaced by a current-gen AI wasn't worth much to begin with.
- lancesells 2y ago
  > If that was true then what do journalists have to be worried about? What part are you talking about? Journalists, and everyone else, has to worry that anything they publish then gets served up by the magic bot that billions of dollars are going towards making it an everyday part of life. And Perplexity with $165M in funding is so shady that they can't respect robots.txt and scrape without attribution. > The truth is that the bulk of what is called "journalism" today isn't on-the-ground gumshoes reporting, it's rewording tweets/press releases/PR statements and maybe a couple of phone calls mixed in I think that's kind of true but don't neccessarily think that's the majority of major newspapers. It's definitely true for blogs or something like Techcrunch that is 90% press release and 10% articles based on other articles from other outlets. Looking at the LA Times it seems to me like they are reporting the news: https://www.latimes.com https://www.latimes.com
- jaredwiener 2y ago
  > A good rule of thumb is that anything that can be replaced by a current-gen AI wasn't worth much to begin with. That's the point, though. It isn't replacing journalists, it's just stealing from them. The reporters are the ones doing the work, the AI is just plagiarizing. It's using their work, while not only removing credit, but more importantly, undermining their livelihoods.