3 ms·

Journalism needs to pursue facts and produce new information as events take place or new developments emerge. Also, a lot of investigative journalism takes work

by n_ary 2y ago

Journalism needs to pursue facts and produce new information as events take place or new developments emerge. Also, a lot of investigative journalism takes work and fearless collection of sources and other dangerous activities. For me, news is the "new" things, not some LLM generated regurgiation of old facts. I am really saddened for last few years since the emergence of genAI, because everyone(who do not understand more than hype info) somehow assumes that, genAI can start writing latest news and articles of events or somehow predict(Minority Report is not real!) future events. But, these LLMs know only as much _as they are trained on_, and by the time they are being trained on latest news, those are no longer news at all. I see how News can be immune to genAI because of the "new" factor of it, but the greed of automation of money-printing is too much and reality is still not sinking in. As an alternative, news reporters can have somekind of twitter(X) like channel somewhere, where they can post latest events, bits of investigation and an omnichannel genAI can scrape these live and start combining and summarizing the events into more cohorent report, which could give the news management the greed of plugging genAI and printing money, while reduce the workload of journalists of sitting in and writing up that whole report ... I honestly don't know, why journalism even needs genAI, just because everyone is using it to generate slop does not mean I must jump in.

tempodox 2y ago
The problem is, you cannot reason anybody out of something that they want to believe. And LLMs seem to rekindle people's forgotten need to believe in miracles again like nothing else.
libertine 2y ago
> Journalism needs to pursue facts and produce new information as events take place or new developments emerge. Journalism is competing against post-truth entertainment content, that thrives on conspiracies passed as facts. How can they compete with that, when facts are boring and go against their beliefs? > Also, a lot of investigative journalism takes work and fearless collection of sources and other dangerous activities. For years you've had journalists being murdered in Russia for doing their job, and you had Tucker Carlson doing the classic "Russia lives better than us - look at their grocery store, they have nice bread!" - which ones do you think had more reach and had a greater impact on people? The actual journalists who risked and paid with their lives, or Tucker Carlson's lies? Because that's the competition of journalists, millionaires sitting in the comfort of a podcast studio, with no accountability or responsibility, and a massive reach. This is what we're dealing with here. Yet you demand so much from journalists, isn't this unbalanced? In the sphere of information, LLMs at the moment are more a tool for the amplification of deliberately produced disinformation at scale, rather than a way to create/develop information. That's the true problem in my opinion, not in terms of developing content. > As an alternative, news reporters can have somekind of twitter(X) like channel somewhere, where they can post latest events, bits of investigation Do you genuinely believe this wouldn't be hammered down by the algorithm of "it's a platform being controlled by the deep state/spreading lies/echo chamber/woke news"? Remember people rallied for Elon Musk to buy Twitter, with the banner of free speech, only to support him converting it into a right-wing/MAGA propaganda platform - and they still support this, claiming its better than ever. Until recently we could claim "its a loud minority", yet here we are.

by n_ary 2y ago

tempodox 2y ago

The problem is, you cannot reason anybody out of something that they want to believe. And LLMs seem to rekindle people's forgotten need to believe in miracles again like nothing else.

libertine 2y ago

> Journalism needs to pursue facts and produce new information as events take place or new developments emerge. Journalism is competing against post-truth entertainment content, that thrives on conspiracies passed as facts. How can they compete with that, when facts are boring and go against their beliefs? > Also, a lot of investigative journalism takes work and fearless collection of sources and other dangerous activities. For years you've had journalists being murdered in Russia for doing their job, and you had Tucker Carlson doing the classic "Russia lives better than us - look at their grocery store, they have nice bread!" - which ones do you think had more reach and had a greater impact on people? The actual journalists who risked and paid with their lives, or Tucker Carlson's lies? Because that's the competition of journalists, millionaires sitting in the comfort of a podcast studio, with no accountability or responsibility, and a massive reach. This is what we're dealing with here. Yet you demand so much from journalists, isn't this unbalanced? In the sphere of information, LLMs at the moment are more a tool for the amplification of deliberately produced disinformation at scale, rather than a way to create/develop information. That's the true problem in my opinion, not in terms of developing content. > As an alternative, news reporters can have somekind of twitter(X) like channel somewhere, where they can post latest events, bits of investigation Do you genuinely believe this wouldn't be hammered down by the algorithm of "it's a platform being controlled by the deep state/spreading lies/echo chamber/woke news"? Remember people rallied for Elon Musk to buy Twitter, with the banner of free speech, only to support him converting it into a right-wing/MAGA propaganda platform - and they still support this, claiming its better than ever. Until recently we could claim "its a loud minority", yet here we are.