AI and current journalism standards

[Roscablo]

Roger McNamee is a private equity investor (early investor in Facebook; later became critical of it) who is never shy with an opinion about tech and is right an awful lot in his sensibilities.

I saw this tweet last week.


He did the interview in the link belowa little while ago.

Investors betting on AI, but tech isn't ready: Elevation Partners' Roger McNamee

He is saying that AI is being way overhyped. ... people are ahead of themselves and it has become a speculative bubble without evidence yet that all the revolutionary things people are ashuming are going to be actualized.

His last point is what I am most concerned with in terms of media and journalism. What is the source? Who is to say it is correct? It could work with at least a human editor, but to just blindly take AI info seems to be a big risk to me. And we did do a few AI stories while I was editor, to experiment and to make the one owner who loves AI happy, and as I said a little earlier I had to make one pretty big correction one time and that was with editing it. Seems so risky, but that's just me.

 

[Octave]

Roscablo, dunno, I've seen a lot of phantom positions and it makes me think those writing jobs are not legit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_job

 

[HanSenSE]

They're hiring writers to help their machine language be, well, less machine-like. Interesting experiment.

That should put a lot of unemployed copy editors back to work. They did that with humans.

 

[I Should Coco]

Roger McNamee is a private equity investor (early investor in Facebook; later became critical of it) who is never shy with an opinion about tech and is right an awful lot in his sensibilities.

I saw this tweet last week.


He did the interview in the link belowa little while ago.

Investors betting on AI, but tech isn't ready: Elevation Partners' Roger McNamee

He is saying that AI is being way overhyped. ... people are ahead of themselves and it has become a speculative bubble without evidence yet that all the revolutionary things people are ashuming are going to be actualized.

He's certainly right about water use (for AI and data storage centers in general).

A lot of those are sited in desert areas of the West, and as NPR reported, the average data center uses about 300,000 gallons of water a day to keep cool. That's roughly equivalent to the water used in 100,000 homes.

 

[Octave]

HanSENSE-

AI's the next industrial revolution.

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

AI is good enough to work for The Plain Dealer, errrrrr, Cleveland.com:

 

[Roscablo]

At least they included a tag that it is AI and was edited by a person. Really if every place that used AI as real content did this there wouldn't be as many questions about its use.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

AI is good enough to work for The Plain Dealer, errrrrr, Cleveland.com:

Poor Ace.

 

[ChrisLong]

At least they included a tag that it is AI and was edited by a person. Really if every place that used AI as real content did this there wouldn't be as many questions about its use.

Would there be time for the copyeditors to rewrite every story? Or have they been re-trained to not do their jobs very well.

 

[Roscablo]

Would there be time for the copyeditors to rewrite every story? Or have they been re-trained to not do their jobs very well.

This is a whole other issue. My experience with AI so far, though, is it does need an editor. Maybe one day that won't be the case, but kind of doubt it will ever be perfect. So in the sense that the Plain Dealer is using AI but is upfront about it is good I guess. How they decide to use their actual personnel to get that stuff published is left to be seen.

 

[cake in the rain]

Would there be time for the copyeditors to rewrite every story? Or have they been re-trained to not do their jobs very well.

Some places still employ copy editors?

 

[Azrael]

Sequenced in my Twitter / X feed this morning: