AI is becoming an information gateway. Audiences still don’t want it making news
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
They only describe the LLM as helping withdownloading data, this means the creation of the plot could be done by hand.
I agree that the rest of the post then proceeds to ask a question in a way implying the machine also created the plot, but that's not actually in the stated premise.
So they currently sit somewhere in the neighborhood of the infinite monkey theorem. Toward the better side of it than pure Random. But you need to take that with a grain of salt with things leaking out about human intervention, and the Hallucinations we still get.
We all know the specific situation matters, we already know, we also know thats not what we are talking about.
That is true, in the send that it is bad at producing useful quality information. But the sat truth is that AI is great to produce large volumes of text. It's its main thing.
To stop using AI to generate professional sounding but empty of meaning text requires disciple or regulations. In the current state of things corporations go for more is better and governments are slow to act. So, neither seem to be an option.
> AI is good for consuming public information
As far as it lasts. Public information is already been poisoned by bad actors. That was harder to do when it was more costly to generate text. But AI allows to create large quantities of misinformation at a cheap price tag.
Reliable sources will be as important as ever if not more. Your AI should be connected to your subscriptions to independent newspapers, to official government sources, etc. Quality output requires quality input.
AI is worthless if it just reads text generated by another AI.
As this rate of information production increases, this will become a full time job.
Obviously, this is not a full time job, and I think agents will fill in the "menial" work-load.
So interesting times ahead.
I don't have a good concept of how this can be solved at the moment.
Quite the opposite, IMHO. Opinions are cheap filler. They're like revision notes for Shakespeare's plays before an exam.
News, actual news, is important but expensive to gather and produce. Only a few agencies such as Reuters and AP actually work at that level.
When was that not true? There are more books in the world that I want to read that the ones I can realistically (or even in the ideal case) be able to read. Magazines, newspapers, Youtube videos, ... AI has not changed anything.
Summarizing removes information. It is like just reading the titles instead of commenting on the content. Saves you time, but it is not the same.
And then on the purely integration scale, how do we even integrate this information as humans without being overwhelmed.
I think that it used to be really good 10 years ago, but SEO and such made that search worse combined with Google becoming a monopoly and stopping caring.
Did they type "Write a news article make no mistakes?" and hit Publish
or
Did they use it to find secondary sources for a set of details to then manually go check them? Or use it for copy-editing or have a discussion with a frontier model about the best term to describe a concept (something I find them very good at!)? Or a myriad of such interventional uses.
Are those considered the same by the audience? Was the difference explained in this survey? I'm betting the audience is a lot more accepting of the latter and the former is what everyone imagines "Use Gen-AI" means and words like "mostly human generated with some AI help" don't really capture the difference OR value.
I hate to be the "there is nuance" guy, but...isn't there significant nuance here?
I think we lost all nuance in the world, though. Everything has to be black or white, otherwise nothing sells anymore.
The pressure is intense to save money, there have been decades of cuts, and they’re now operating on trimmed budgets and rarely do real journalism any more.
So for most newspapers and online news sources generative ai will be used to the hilt, to simply replace employees, or by freelancers on a deadline. The pressure will be for ever faster news. It will be used for writing not research because of these pressures, and already is in many places.
It’s already flooding some online spaces like Apple News on the stocks app with dross from simply wall st or generated bitcoin price articles. In the case of financial news it was always full of nonsense of the form ‘stocks rise today because of factor X’ so this is no great loss, but in other areas it will creep in.
Just as a for example, I'm already seeing quite a few obviously AI generated images in mainstream newspapers here in the UK (as illustrations, replacing work by real illustrators).
People is the gateway, their effort, their experience, to learn from.
Example: if you don’t use AI as a reviewer for your code to check for vulnerabilities, it will be seen as risky - as compared to a year ago when people were complaining about hallucination.
Expect the same pattern for healthcare as well. Also journalism
For code at least I can imagine some deterministic harness to automatically reduce every issue to the smallest failing case, and try to make the LLM-ease explanation more manageable to read.
(Sorry for nitpicking a good example)
In a world where SUNO and Ace Step 1.5 exist
It’s like if I asked you if you enjoy talking shit about people or saying things and gossiping without people knowing about it.
Most people would say no they don’t enjoy it. But most people would be lying. Not lying to you but lying to themselves. It’s one of the most obvious lies because everyone can definitely think back and recall themselves talking shit.
People say they don’t want to use LLMs and they say they hate ai and they say they appreciate human art and effort and human endeavor and all of this is true and at the same time not true as the same people who say they don’t like it use it all the time. It’s both true and not true. Human brains like LLMs did not evolve to enforce strict logical conclusions because such a thing is not absolutely necessary for survival. You can hold contradictory opinions and beliefs in your mind.
It’s just the hype train is excessive and in everyone’s faces and anything that’s like that genuinely becomes hated.
Imagine if I saved the lives of hundreds of people everyday. And I would throw this fact in your face everyday via TikTok, email spam, YouTube, social media.
Pretty soon you’ll become sick of it. You’ll not care for anyones life. Thats what is happening with ai. Ai is genuinely from a logical standpoint, incredible. But all of that is diluted by overhype.
It is literally incredible, that is, the claims people make about it are not believable. It simply does not do the magical stuff people claim it does.
What are you even talking about? You can see it do the magic yourself for like $20. The lean proof of the exponential time hypotheses disproof for exampe is straight up on github right now for you to look at.
What magical thing are you waiting for? It is literally currently revolutionaizing all engineering work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
For clarity, I'm more or less indifferent to AI, I do understand how it all works - it's humans with AI I don't trust and that I don't see being adequately reigned in.
The what now? I don't know what that is. Can AI help me put food on the table and pay my bills? That thing I can understand.
Also a reminder of how come the post-WW2 USSR was a technocratic-scientist state/society and even so, by the end of its existence it had failed at this basic task of feeding its population.
If you don't know how and what kinds of math is needed in every tech and science we use, then I have nothing to say. I should have recognized when you said this and stopped interacting further.
My entire company now uses AI to code. Nobody writes code by hand at my company anymore. At this point if you can’t see how incredible and horrifying it is then you’re delusional.
I get it though. One year ago you’d be right. The paradigm shift is happening so fast people haven’t updated their priors. What you believed to be true just changed. It flipped several times this year and people who keep up to date had to completely flip their understanding of the world and the nature of AI several times. This is not an easy thing to do and thus many people like you just missed the boat.
There’s no doubt that there is a financial ai bubble. But that bubble is completely orthogonal to the complete paradigm shift of the actual capabilities of AI.
Very good analogy with Tesla FSD. Is it great tech- yes, of course. Is is the thing that was promised to come out 10 years ago? Far from it.
If you expect AI to do everything for you, it's still not there. And if you're sceptic or even neutral to this topic- AI is just causing more problems (especially in security) by the day.
Not of course. I'll call it good to great the day it gets beyond level 2, and no sooner.
And LLMs are similar in a lot of use cases.
Does that put food on the table? It does not, to the contrary, this AI thing is taking food off the table for many, many people.
There is no need to argue by imagined history. We have real one.
AI people also overestimate amount of horses in the population.
> That has always been the point of technology from the industrial revolution forward
This is straightforwardly not true.
But, yeah, you AI zealots on forums like this one can keep thinking that we, those millions, will just remain like sheep taken to the slaughterhouse while you enjoy your higher comps while in the service of today's AI masters.
And changes were in fact drastic, thr fact that countries like UK and Germany for several years became the most powerful countries in the europe due to the industrial revolution.
Solving abstract mathematical puzzles and enganhing in pointless research into substances for crnturies gave us ultimately the Haber-Bosch process, which literally keeps the human race from starving. You would prefer humans starve just to protect som jobs.
On the topic of farming, that used to be the occupation of most of thr population in olden times, today its barely 2 percent. Agriculture tech has already killed millions of jobs.
>You would prefer humans starve just to protect some jobs.
a.) What are you talking about here. b.) the stated goal of AI companies is to make majority of people obsolete, dependent and ... well starving.
The AI companies do what they must to market themselves, there is no reason to think it should be much different from other past mass disruptive technologies (today agriculture is down to just 2% of the population from 60-80% earlier for instance).
And if it solved most labor and jobs, then what? Would you rather block it than try to see how we can transition to a economic and government system that will actually let us enjoy it.
And I doubt we will ever run out of problems, there is always outer space as an endless source of new problems.
Literally every technological advance till now has led to massive abundance and increase of food, and of the carrying capacity of agriculture itself till now. You have to explain why you think now technology will do the opposite of what it has done for millenia continually increasing the amount of and variety of food available worldwide. You have to show how this engine of science and tech research will do the literal opposite of what science has always done to food availability.
Agriculture selling point was and is "we will feed you"
I am also really not interested in alternative history. Nor in debate where people who know literally nothing about actual historical events make up fictional past out of imagination and movies and use that as argument.
> You have to explain why you think now technology will do the opposite of what it has done for millenia continually increasing the amount of and variety of food available worldwide
The destruction and desperation for average person is what AI companies sell. It is what THEY claimed will happen.
I did not blamed technology for goverments. I simply pointed out that starving is not technological problem. Which was your assumption.
The selection of agriculture specifically is completely odd here.
"Trust me bro", they say. They have new and dangerously powerful tools to get me to trust them harder. Me, one of the dumb fucks.
Funny how they call mass surveillance these days. /s
It's also the destructive nature of data centers both ecologically and to people's neighborhoods and other ways.
Honestly, I think that's a more serious side than the IP side.
AI is a public good created from personal information. Its output cannot be copyrighted, the models themselves should be opened for everyone by law.
That is the reckoning. Give back the information to the people that created it.
The reckoning may be along the lines of taxing them for UBI or similar.