The premise of this article is far more depressing than the “depressing” conclusion that the author seems to propose, which is that journalists are going to be

The premise of this article is far more depressing than the “depressing” conclusion that the author seems to propose, which is that journalists are going to be out of jobs. “Journalist who doesn’t understand technology tells chatgpt ‘write me a 200 word article from this press release’ and rails against bland outputs” is a better headline for her piece. I partly work in product management at a news company. I have a “reduce press release to article” prompt that I’ve developed over the past few months. It’s got 5 sections and 63 instructions to handle everything from formatting to tense to attribution to catching hallucinations. The output of that prompt goes into another that specifically focuses on catching hallucination, paraphrasing and mis-attribution. That might sound like overkill but it works brilliantly and turns out copy that is often better than the human writers doing the same thing. By taking this off their plate they can focus on high value and interesting writing, not simply regurgitating a press release. Though as someone else has pointed out, many writers are bland and good for little else than regurgitating press releases. They should find alternative employment fast, because they will be the first writers to feel the true impacts of LLMs. I didn’t really believe in “prompt engineering” before I worked on this, and regarded it as techbro snake oil akin to “SEO hacking” but going through the process of building out this mini-product (which also looks at incoming press releases and score for relevancy against topic, companies mentioned and people mentioned) has shown me how incredibly important having a well thought out and well structured prompt is. If you’re just asking your LLM to rubber duck with you it’s not important but if you want high quality replicable outputs it’s fundamental. Yes, if you put a press release into chatgpt and don’t think about the outputs, you’re going to get slop out the other side. All the more depressing because she’s promoting her book about syntax - and syntax is a core competency for prompt engineering. Online news is about to be left behind. Yet again.