4 ms·

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. I

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.

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.