Already facing scandal, the Washington Post's new-ish CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, has announced that the newspaper will be pivoting to artificial intelligence to turn around its dismal financial situation.
how does nobody ever seem to notice that it doesn't fucking work
It works great. I use it everyday while working in a virtual reality office trading NFTs. My timesheet is on a blockchain.
C-suite types mostly interact with upper management, who tell them nothing but puffed up bullshit, which they spun from middle management, who tell them nothing but puffed up bullshit, etc.
So sometimes I wonder if the reason they believe in AI so much is that it really is as competent as the people around them.
I have a similar suspicion about those terrible ai image facebook jesus posts, like the people posting them actually don't notice the extra arms and legs
My all-time favorite is anything religious. Jesus freaks lecture the world that the bible is the "word of God" and they also proclaim stuff like "They follow every word of it."
Oh, yeah? The SUV-sized Holy Bibble has cops, soldiers, guns, and the like because that's the holy text of Facebook 3:16?
B-but my Senior Vice President of Cargo Culting said that line would go up!
I have a core memory of years ago, maybe a few months after I first started working my current white collar job.
In passing, I had our controller (accounting VP basically) ask me how it was going, and I made some off the cuff remark about how something was having issues (but it was minor).
He immediately grew concerned, pressed me on it a bit, and I was honest about it (but again, from what I recall it was pretty minor in the scheme of even day to day things). I had my immediate boss exasperatedly ask me later that day why I told this guy what I had
It drives me insane! People keep talking about what AI is going to do while ignoring that it currently doesn’t do anything. Every application is just a tech demo or a needless augmentation of something that already existed. Anyone who has “lost their job” to AI was already going to be fired and got “we replaced you with AI” as an excuse. Nonsense all the way down.
Same story as with nft's, it was always tremendously obvious on its face to be an absolute scam that had no practical purpose or value, yet inflated to nonsensical proportions nevertheless - all of which was also incredibly infuriating to me
If I had to guess, the bosses see the glamorous PR videos the companies put out, tell their managers to get it done, and you end up with a large chain of people (and a time delay) between the people who have to use it and know it doesn't do what people think it does, and the people demanding they use it because they think it's real.
I'm watching this play out in real time where I work. I was hoping that what it meant was they would train a neural net for making automated, semi-intelligent optimizations on our utility systems based on known inputs and usage patterns, but in reality it probably means a bunch of customer service people are about to get laid off for six months and then rehired or replaced when the magic bean[i]s don't pan out as expected. The CTO will get a golden parachute and move on to greener pastures, and we'll get some new asshole who is even more backwards than the last two, and rates will go up anyway because Texas will be too hot or too cold for a week, so everyone else must suffer.
All I've ever used it for is questions so stupid that the IRC channel would be mean to me
works great at writing software tests. at this point i basically won’t code without it
I don't think they need advanced AI to copy and paste state department and CIA press releases
for now, but it will suddenly stop working in 2026 when the CIA turns to AI generated press releases that constantly leak classified documents
Can some explain to me why the fuck Bezos would even care about the profitability of the Post? It's not like he bought it because he thought it was gonna be some great investment, and those losses are pocket change to him.
"As a large language model trained to write extremely poor quality articles with catchy headlines, even I cannot stoop that low."
In praise of neo-listicles
The many surprising ways in the world that listicles can teach us and show us which have not been fully explored
By Al "That's AL not AI" Hackneyed
First of all - what is a list? A list is...
I have to admit that I love doing parodies of AI and/or bad writing
What is up with capitalists? Why would a news room need this? Why are they so desperate to use AI?
It's first major automation in a pretty long time, and to boot, it's in a multiple fields which were previously thought to be impossible to automate: writing, art, etc. So there is large untapped potential in reducing variable capital, every capitalist immediately gets hardon on the mere thought of that.
Its important to remind that as you know some of these news outlets already had to transition from physical to digital media and this transition was entirely driven the 2000's Google monopoly on the internet. Everything was about search traffic and SEO.
Things changed a bit when social media started to drive traffic on their own taking some of that share from Google search but only the platform changed, not the methods.
In the age of competing both for SEO and for social media engagement, real "journalism" i.e actual humans to write reasonably accurate 500-1000 word articles to drive traffic are not important anymore. IMO the authority website model google created is long dead or irrelevant, these giant websites will never leave the #1 spot anymore anyway so the only competition is among those that can afford to pay for adsense(literaly why google pushes top paid results over actual search for some time now, they're desperate).
Old black hat SEO tools have existed right alongside Google since 2006. This AI paradigm then is just another step along these black hat tools, now not deemed black hat anymore and openly embraced.
When google became "the internet" the enshitiffication future was sealed. AI is just another tool from this long process not at all new though I guess people are also more aware now that this hit the mainstream. yet people forget the industry was using bots to spin fake articles almost 20 years ago already.
When I started sort of paying attention to some of these mainstream "news" sources since the Ukraine war, I immidiately noticed so much of it is rage bait shit or just sometimes literaly copy pasting between multiple sites, beyond the AP nonsense, narratives are sometimes repeated almost verbatim between WSJ/BI/NYT etc. The end result really is, do you need to pay someone to copy paste narratives when the AI can sort of do it well enough anyway?
I'll tell you this, if the year was 2008 these AI tools would be banned by Google and you'd be heavily penalized, heck perhaps naively I even believe they would change their algo specificaly to counter this as they did many times in the past to sort of "fight" the low hanging fruit black hat SEO of 10-15 years ago.
Alas not only they lost that battle but they openly embrace it now that even Google themselves acknowledge the dead internet theory is something to consider and the only thing that realy matters is making money. As a consequence, if even the monopoly owners don't care anymore then this is the result, every webpage will be some form of AI/bot content.
I'm no expert, so take this with a grain of salt.
I'm guessing the rate of profit has sunken so low that, paradoxically enough, having employees is too much of a cost.
It's impossible to scale down operations. There is no more fat to trim. No other costs left to cut, except salaries and livelihoods.
If it means the capitalists can squeeze out just a few more pennies in profit, they will gladly saw off the branch they sit on.
There is no future beyond the next quarter. No no considerations, no planning, no self preservation. Only profits.
oh sure, all of our content becomes unreadable, obviously contradictory slop highly prone to opening up the paper to libel suits, but think of how much you'll save in labor after you've cut like $12 off writing staff salaries. people will never be able to tell the difference in quality of writing (actually if we're talking about people who take the WaPo seriously and at face value, then maybe)
I think they're gambling on the idea that 90% of their audience never reads beyond the headlines, so it doesn't matter if the entire article just rephrases a vaguely related wikipedia article, because their audience will get everything they need from the headline.
Journalism is and has been in a dire situation for a while, but AI is precisely not the solution. It will make everything worse.
An overall result like "It will make everything worse" isn't measured in short-term economic gains, Bezos will have to try to get us there one step at a time
Future op-ed: "Why running over protestors is good for democracy" by DARPA_GPT
Can't wait for wapo journalism to be even lower quality
A near future op-ed: "Some people worry about AI's need for 'large' amounts of energy and the possibility of this tech negatively impacting the written word. Those fears are misplaced. With any brand new revolutionary tech teething problems are to be expected. Furthermore..."
The bold face name writer is soon forced to concede that he receives a "minor stipend" from aiJornalism.com. That's a big lie. They gave him stock options. Not only that. He has to admit that "to improve text quality AI was minimally used." Which was another big lie. aiJornalism emailed the article to him. The "op-ed" was effectively their press release.
They won't even bother paying someone to put their name on it. They'll just publish the different LLMs by name.
Non-toxic glue is a great meal replacement to lower your Carbon Footprint
by Google Gemini
Truly an incredible system, 340M people and incapable of sustaining a few actual newsrooms with people putting up a veneer of journalism..
This seems extremely healthy for society. Damn we are really just jumping off the cliff aren't we.
