Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Hypertext and databases were made for this, but the news media can’t see it. I tried, for years, in school, at conferences and in various journalism jobs, to get people to see how this could make journalism more useful and powerful, but here in 2024, we’re still doing “articles, except on the internet”. And I can’t afford to keep working in the news media long enough to be in a position to try it out. Nobody can, unless their actual livelihood is coming from somewhere else.
So here we are, in total context collapse, and a dying news media whose slow disappearance, especially at the local level, is actively hurting people, and our democracy.
It’s bad, and its going to get a lot worse as AI makes it cheaper and cheaper to lie convincingly. But what can anyone do?
This was Vox's initial schtick, but they kind of abandoned it after a while- it didn't bring readers in, and they wanted to be ad-supported.
P.S. if anyone wants to give me a million dollars to do this, I am both an experienced news editor and a senior-level software engineer, email in profile
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
Problem is we need the same for local news. A place where all the research gets archived, and events are tracked. Seems like nowadays the only people with a complete-ish picture of what's going on at a local level are the people directly involved themselves.
Anywho, things aren't looking good. One of the media giants in my country just cut 4,800 jobs across the country:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/david-eby-br...
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January 2023, I finally had an LLM cite one of my own written contributions when I began asking about a nuanced technical database which I maintain the article on wikipedia (which was really cool/eerie). This was over a year ago, and every day I continue to be floored by genAI capabilities in discussing published dataset complexities.
I know several lowkey published authors (one whose autobiography I copyedited) that have been terrified by what LLMs know about their own lives, based on commonsense associations/deductions.
The prompt had not specifically mentioned either HN or my username.
This makes me think that the depth of training material on at least certain topics is thinner than might be hoped.
What you end up getting is the approved narrative of "how things are" by the same class of people who all hobnob with each other.
Glad to see it's end. Look forward to what's next.
It also seems like journalism is suffering a similar problem as software engineering, in that people think they can take shortcuts. "I'll just walk around and ask people questions" is not the same thing as journalism, just as "I'll write a To Do app" is not the same thing as doing software engineering. These are disciplines with exacting standards, quality levels, and rigor, and require years of diligent study and practice.
And in the case of well-practiced journalism, it really is "the fourth estate", and we should be fearful of what our world becomes should that fourth estate ever crumble.
to get people to see how this could make journalism more useful and powerful
What you propose is nearly the opposite of that and would likely incriminate some powerful actors.
About two decades too late.
This, to me, seems like a much better model since the revenue can be distributed to whatever set of publications I've read for that month.
In other words, all news sources are already aggregators, and exclusive content is how they attempt to differentiate themselves and win market share from their competitors.
In brief, all value is captured by monopolies, aggregators necessarily are monopolies, news websites want to be monopolies themselves.
Journalism will still be relevant in the world, but the vast majority of these outlets have been forced into a race to the bottom for sure. For corners of this industry to survive, they will likely need to form a symbiotic relationship with a more lucrative adjacent industry.
Meanwhile the outlets pushing meaningless, clickbait-first content will hopefully wither away.
It's not really "media" that dies, but generic news channels and editorial teams. The concept of "notable news" is too diverse to be covered in these formats.
Will AI provide "insight" or "perspective"? Will AI predict "what might happen next?" And will AI help us make sense of the world around us? Or just a summary (in whatever "voice" or "style" you like)?
A simple word on media and propaganda is enough to get you "flagged"
Take a short break and lecture yourself: https://www.amazon.com/Social-History-Media-Gutenberg-Intern...
These companies don't even have the skills to put their own ad blocker solutions together. There is no capability, no innovation, and no future for any of them.
A new breed of news companies will emerge, the old guard is done.
Why not? Trump's 2016 election alone seems to have caused subscriptions to places like the Washington Post and New York Times to increase, and led to a small but fervent industry in creating Trump- and MAGA-related merchandise outside the news industry.
It seems like there should be potential for a company or cartel to market elections more like WWE or boxing matches, pitting a hero against a heel, selecting hype men and women to be VP picks, and selling merchandise along the way.
There are only so many Wordle's that the NYT can buy, but you can fly at least five Trump flags from the back of a pickup. I think the industry could easily adapt (or at least, new media companies could form) by making a greater spectacle of elections and bankrolling the campaigns of those they think could drive views and subscriptions should they be elected.
I've seen what Fox News has done to the political discourse in this country, and I think we could go WAY darker as these legacy media companies continue to fight the dying light.
I want non sensationalized, truthful reporting and it’s clear only Ai can get me that. Human reporters are too emotional and it’s shown during the Trump era, and continued now.
Can you elaborate on how AI helps here?
Fox kind of proved this business model out and since then we now have others they cater to either further right or left wing audiences.
Of course now more independent and even less trustworthy sources are taking audiences by cranking this model up even more. Now it’s random rage bait trolls on social media providing “news” to hordes of infinite scroll addicts.
Bad journalism clearly causes societal harm, and it's time we regulate it. Passing the buck to social media by saying "it's what people want" is simply a way for these people to rinse their hands of any accountability.
Somehow we put these journalists on an unassailable pedestal with zero accountability, while we enforce professional ethics in nearly every other profession on the planet.
There are very few journalists left actually providing a positive benefit to society. I cannot wait for GPT-4+ to put the rest out of job. Given the same source data, it writes better articles, with less bias, more closely sticking to the facts.