AI and Journalism / content production

A recent article in Computerworld talk about the world of journalism today. This article strikes a feeling with me, who once (many, many moons ago) had a dream to enter journalism.

First and foremost, I really understand the desire and ambitions of our technology companies today, to deliver the next big thing – in this case Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the promise of a (almost) thinking entity who can become our Assistant or even Friend in time to come (not certain of the friend thing, but still).

AI as of today, is on the top of the Hype Curve, we can hardly imagine the value it is going to bring us, with no downsides. But that is just the way of the world – and honestly, we (humans) cannot have wonderful things and will in our pursuit of power (and money) do everything in our reach to cut corners and harvest value for Ego.

Currently I see a few cases where I honestly do not see the value (yet) and as such in the end of the day think we are doing ourselves harm by using it.

1. Start with Image Generation.

What happened to the excellent artist, the person with a smooth hand and a desire to produce either own artwork (painting and drawings) – to the person who goes into the world and bring us images that take time, effort and understanding of the object (like a photographer).

We now have multiple services out here who is making (almost unique work) without the middleman, all of these services are based on the previous work done by others; now we are able to generate anything with a try and error approach to prompting – but I feel we are losing the story behind the actual picture, call me old fashioned, but I think a part of the photo include a soul (absent, if each and every one can make their own unique photo).

In this chase, we have established a service that can lover (avoid) the cost of the photographer – but why. Who is out here to tell the right story, and who is here to validate the actual image being true or not a fabrication. Just think, you can generate a real photo of a family growing plants on Mars. This image can be tweaked and will end up look like the real thing, but it is not.

2. Knowledge, we feed into the language model and their usage.

I am certain that many people (in this industry) have learned about the NY-Times lawsuit against OpenAI, due to the usage of articles and content on the web to teach the Language model to understand current information, new and relevant information.

The objective and desire are to be admired, why not have a service knowing and helping us capturing and guide us towards the right information and content in time to come – it is the next generation of search and knowledge systems.

The problem comes, when we use the tool to generate content that are to be publish in future, not only for our own use, but to support decisions (and here we need to assume that ALL the content we feed into the model is true), because decisions lead to behaviour and influence. When our model is wrong, we start assuming that wrong is right, and here we finally end up in a situation where we either makes errors or in final stage injure/damage others in the way.

3. Letting AI generate content and publish.

Here i am not only thinking about the above article, but again we cannot have a situation where content generated by a machine, based on saved content become the new real thing. When we start replacing ten journalist and copywriters with AI Services, we end up in a world where the content is so less valuable and also dull to read. If our thoughts are not challenged by a good writer (author, journalist etc) and the chance for us to stop and think about this new thing we are reading, we are all ending up with re-run and sitcoms with the predictable outcome and plot.

I have read a few articles about several publications and news sites embracing this type of content – and in my aim towards only mention one, I think about the Microsoft News of today, the amount of general low-quality trash, click bait and pure trash that are present on this website – make me do everything in my power to avoid this site. What once was a decent (not good) site, is useless today, and stuffed into our face when using Windows Desktop Systems.

So where do this lead us.

Honestly, nobody has an idea. If an Advertisement company can save 1000s of dollars for a real photo session, and take 50$ for an AI Prompt Session, many are going to do this.

The future of newspapers generating parts (if not majority) of their content baseline with prompts are also going to increase, due to lack of funding our news we have no alternative means to embrace the stuff that they are throwing our way. You cannot fund people, if you have no revenue, and we have learned that very few people like to pay for content … and that end up as a shame …. But as said before, Humans cannot have wonderful things.