Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

It is really sad that actual journalism has no place in today's world because the Internet has made everyone want everything for free. So everyone ends up getting "free" information and articles that consist of drivel and superficial research all the while paying for it via their data being collected and sold.

The Internet and capitalism don't make a good cocktail.

Then I see this:

> The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co.

It's sad that National Geographic is effectively closing its doors when it's owned by Walt Disney Co., which has yearly revenue of nearly $100 billion. They seriously can't find the miniscule amount of cash in there to support National Geographic's journalism? Walt Disney is one of the most evil and exploitative companies ever, so I suppose I'm not surprised by their actions here.

> National Geographic spokesperson Chris Albert said staffing changes will not affect the company’s plans to continue publishing a monthly magazine

If they don't employ writers, then who is going to be writing the magazine?

>If they don't employ writers, then who is going to be writing the magazine?

Random freelancers on the cheap, with no/less content that needs serious preparation and months/year-long support to create.

People who have the subject matter as profession and not writing about the subject matter?

I would love to freelance write for a software magazine while being a professional software engineer.

>If they don't employ writers, then who is going to be writing the magazine?

Well there is always chatGPT

That's what I really fear about LLMs, good content is going to get drowned out by endless bot drivel.

I think this wont be sustainable, like, how long til until people stop reading LLM generated content?

I keep re-reading and referencing this article as it lays out how the human vs AI internet landscape is likely to shake out.

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

> That's what I really fear about LLMs, good content is going to get drowned out by endless bot drivel.

I anticipate the opposite.

Already AI content is better than crappy human writers.

In the medium term AI content is going to be better than most human writers (it arguably already is in some limited cases).

In the long term it may compete with the best human writers.

Some humans are too full of themselves, thinking they're so exceptional, while computers are proving time and again that's not so. The evidence is starting us in the face.

AI content today is better than the worst human writers, but only because the worst human writers are so terrible. (Think of you trying to write an essay in a language that you’ve only studied for 3 months bad.)

That doesn’t mean that LLMs are on a course to inevitably surpass the 90th percentile human writer (which is what most full-time writers presumably are). I may be a Luddite here, but I don’t expect that in my young kids’ lifetime.

In my opinion LLM will never be able to replicate the human experience as it's solely based on language which in itself is only a poor facsimile of consciousness.

If writing is our best attempt to share our personal psychic experience then all LLM can be is fragments of those experiences and can not in itself experience the presence of being that is human.

(I'll note you wrote "AI content" not "LLMs", before anyone gets the wrong idea.)

> Some humans are too full of themselves, thinking they're so exceptional, while computers are proving time and again that's not so. The evidence is starting us in the face.

Thanks for daring to state this unpopular opinion. I completely agree that humans have a very poor (and hence inflated) idea of what they are good at, because they have only had animals and (recently) machines to compare themselves to, plus these opinions formed long ago are a very firmly held cultural memory (e.g. literary and movie tropes, religion). Creativity being IMO one of the most badly misclaimed abilities.

>The evidence is starting us in the face.

It sure is!

8000 token essays are, but beyond that it can't keep coherence.

The AI produced content I've seen writes like a competent 5th grader. National Geographic wasn't being written by competent 5th graders.

I do think people are going to get tired of AI-produced this and AI-produced that - they're going to crave content created by humans. At least for some things. There may be a place for AI-created content that we love. That is this whole thing might be a false dilemma, it's not AI or human created content, it's AI and human created content. We'll find out which is better at what.

> The AI produced content I've seen writes like a competent 5th grader. National Geographic wasn't being written by competent 5th graders.

Well, over half of Americans read below a 6th grade reading level[1], so it seems like AI content is satisfactory, given the median reading skills.

1: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

That's not a positive point for llms. That's just a horrific indictment on how badly the US education has failed.

Past tense. It has failed. It's not failing.

Present Perfect:/

Haha very true. Nicely done =P

National Geographic's audience might not tend toward the lowest denominator.

There's a good chance that people who read that magazine have a higher average reading level.

I imagine, after some decades living neck deep in a cesspool of AI generated content, there will be a renaissance of sorts where human produced content will suddenly break through the noise to resonate with some innately human trait that AI can’t figure out.

I imaging that in a not-so-distant future we'll have some "Genuine Human Generated Certification"

It has happened the same way in every areas where you have rampant counterfeit or simply cheaper competition.

As even if LLM can generate greate quality content, it will always be even cheaper to mass produce low quality. And once you cross the Rubicon of not being certified, it is just a matter of time that capitalism/greed will make it a race to the bottom.

You are using an AI to write this? Or do a vast majority of actual humans rely on crappy writing? You do make a good point. I'll shove my next few wikipedia edits down an AIs gullet...

*This was written with an AI, and I told it to be spicy, salty and smarmy.

>In the long term it may compete with the best human writers. AIs lack connection with real world. This is important if we speak about NatGeo. >The evidence is starting us in the face. AIs generate average texts. It is admittedly cool. But I think it just shows how much human drivel is out there. Funny thing is that people optimized texts for search engines in attempts to hack ranking black boxes. Hence ML AI was the reason for bullshit for quite some time long before LLMs.

The other possible scenario is that people who want to create new content will quickly figure out that the LLMs are basically rewriting their original research and extracting all monetary worth from it, and so stop publishing in any medium that the bots can harvest the information.

So all new discoveries will get walled off from the GPTs and we will be stuck with constantly regurgitated old information unless you go looking in paid for publications.

What other scenario is there without human contributors getting properly compensated for their time and effort?

>The Internet and capitalism don't make a good cocktail.

Yeah what we have today is not capitalism, at least by Adam Smith's standard, and definitely not the capitalism that was practiced between the end of WW2 and Reagan.

The US desperately needs to bring their anti-trust enforcement back to the standards of the post-war era

I am definitely a fan of anti-trust, but it sounds like you're saying today's unbridled capitalism is not captialism but that when we didn't let captialism run wild by actually enforcing anti-trust regulations, that was capitalism. I am confused.

Perhaps they are taking into account the increased current corporate welfare trends.

Want money to build weapons and blow up some people outside the US? Sure no problem! Want money to recuperate from the massive investment losses your bank or company incurred due to your bad decisions? Sure no problem!

Want another $30 a month for your social security disability check to account for inflation? Nah we can’t do that!

You can still pay for high quality reporting. If you choose not to, then the question is back to you.

The discussion isn't about me, unless you meant the general you. However, that may be the case, but it doesn't reach the scale of the amount of people on the Internet and the pressures of that plus capitalistic markets.

Sounds more like the market doesn’t value “high quality journalism” as much anymore. Especially when you can find primary sources covering events on social media for free. At least for tech news, comments on HN are more succinct, less biased, and more hard hitting than any tech news site I’ve seen.

The market at large. There’s definitely a market for high quality news, but it’s too small to sustain a company.

Great bloggers, vloggers and pod casters are the new great journalists.

That is my point. The Internet is like a direct tap into the more primitive emotions of humans, linking them up across the world.

> If they don't employ writers, then who is going to be writing the magazine?

I shudder to think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com