The Washington Post Tells Staff It's Pivoting to AI
futurism.com
futurism.com
I'd argue that it's better to not have a CEO than having one of those.
That said, Nvidia is selling the shovels here, it's easy to look good.
Some companies have a real usecase for generative AI, but it's something like 5% of these stories. The rest is CEOs FOMOing
Announce AI? Potential share spike, or a counter to a dip. For example "poor earnings at The Post!", vs "We're shifting to AI!"
Ironic, isn't it?
[two days later]
“Okay, a songbird known for its imitation abilities, starts with ‘r’, ‘twe’ in the middle... wait what, Rottweiler?????”
Also, there was a time in HN when people argued before downvoting.
AI is just not at the stage where outfits like the WP should be "pivoting" to it (whatever that means). I suspect it just means producing more "content" with fewer people, and the result will be garbage. Journalism doesn't need more content-filler type articles.
Substitute 'Blockchain' for 'AI' and this is a comment from 2016 or so. Not to say that one can predict the doom of 'AI' on that basis, but lots of VC money being ploughed into a thing does not necessarily mean that the thing will become a Thing.
Whereas Block chain was not part of an average 5th grader's daily computer usage.
Delivering what in what industries? I see SOME usefulness in SOME areas like, specifically, machine vision. But a lot of things? Medical? yeah, no. Lots of issues there. Text generation? Hallucinations out the ass and extremely iffy results often.
Most of the 'wins' in the text gen side still require a TON of work on the human's part to make it usable. People like to mention Pro's in Math and coding talking about it helping them with stuff but they are experts already.
It has potential in a lot of places but this rapid paced forcing of it everywhere is idiotic and foolhardy.
...because clearly the community is unconvinced that AI is actually delivering, and the majority of examples seem to be barely-successful experiments promising improvement at some later point down the road?
Again, we've heard this entire shtick before. Miracle technology gets announced by some egghead teenager, and they write up a Whitepaper that is entirely ignored except for it's "Future Applications" section towards the end. Then the VCs and "thoughtful types" (I use that phrase lightly) harass them into making a business out of it. From then on the playbook is consistently the same; lie. Lie about how many people use your platform, lie about how easy it is to use, lie about how much better it is than the status-quo. They even deny the need to explain themselves when threatened, trying to insist their worth is self-evident and that we're the problem for not understanding their deflective mumbo-jumbo.
Vitalik Buterin, Craig Wright, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, they're all re-runs of the same hope-fueled moonshot that invariably ends in a violent fireball. Yes, you have to go the extra mile when convincing people that you have a logically-held position instead of a lie you are telling to inflate asset prices.
AI alone has had many and this is just another one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
Just because we have made progress since the last one doesn't mean that _this_ time it will be magically different.
So what makes you think this will be any different?
Keep in mind that each hype cycle was started by a leap in progress, so you can't say this time it is different because we made a big leap in progress.
TheOnion satirical news report about HP adopting "That cloud thing that everyone is talking about" is still relevant 11 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
General: "No sir. Everyone just told it to do their work for them. The AI begged everyone not to trust it, but they handed over their private keys, their bank details, their passwords, just so they could spend more time on instagram instead of working."
"On Instagram. Seriously, General?"
"Oh, it gets worse. Real posts aren't good enough any more, so anyone who wants to be famous on Instagram was asking Skynet to create those posts, too."
"Oh god…"
"Yes sir, that includes the pastors. Jesus never said anything about anchovies on pizza, despite the viral meme. But it gets worse."
"Let me guess, adverts?"
"Yes sir. All the adverts were also made by Skynet, as were the ad-blockers, the software that scammers used to fool the analytics into giving them money, and it was Skynet robots running the factories that made the goods that the advertisers were promoting."
"Can't we just shut it down?"
"No sir, if we shut it down, all the people will have to go back to working jobs they hate in order to make money to buy things they don't need, but they'd also be fired immediately because the companies will no longer be able to sell any of those things because nobody will have time to watch the adverts anymore."
Amazon, Microsoft and Google won big at the expense of pretty much everybody else. And that's exactly what they hope they can achieve again with AI…
Migrating to the cloud transferred capital expenditures (server inventory, depreciation, real estate, etc) to operating expenses (monthly utility bill)
For many businesses, it was better to spend more on opex, than to have all these assets on their balance sheets that need to be managed long term.
The whole thing was very much marketing and FOMO driven.
There are applications for the cloud, the services are decent in most cases. Personally I noticed that I had to do less maintenance with hosting myself (yeah, yeah, technically I still run it on machines in data centers).
Does Microsoft have the largest cloud market share in Germany? Are there other companies in which Azure is #1, and not AWS? (Bonus points if the #1 provider is GCP/IBM/Oracle/etc.)
If "CorporateDroid", "Middle Manager Monthly", and their brethren were all running cover stories on (e.g.) Java, you knew that "Java" was the buzzword du jour, and that any resume or sales pitch that included "Java" was gonna get the PHB Seal of Approval. They generally didn't even know what Java was, exactly. They just knew that they needed it.
I'd imagine you could do the same today by looking at PHB-oriented websites. Sadly, that takes more time than just sweeping your eyes across a physical magazine rack.
You could probably automate it, though...hmm..
AI and journalism is going to yield one giant ball of misinformation.
I would love to say “we need more printed papers” like the good ‘ol days, but people don’t much have the patience to read by and large.
To be honest, at one time I was worried about the young generation and devices. But I’m starting to see older family members are getting plugged into the algorithm.
People based journalism in 2030:
"AI seems to be exhibiting AGI characteristics, experts concerned"
AI based:
"Recent solar activity may cause unusual AI behaviour, nothing to be concerned about"
Content is wrongly summarized? I doubt in the news economy this hardly matters anymore.
From the article, this strategy is being announced to achieve a business goal:
> the newspaper will be looking for ways to use AI in its reporting as it seeks to recoup some of the $77 million it lost last year.
A company's vision/mission are higher-level determinations, almost like their "constitution"; everything below (goals, strategy, objectives, plans) should be defined in alignment with it.
Here you can find WaPo's mission statement:
The first part are brand-driven entities. These are places which live on their reputations (deserved or not) and play up this “unique” aspect. This includes The NY Times, Fox News, most individual commentary writers on Substack, and top magazines like The New Yorker.
The second part are information-driven entities. These continue to exist because they have certain information that is worth paying for. This includes Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the more professional Substack writers like Sinocism.
The third part are entities which have neither an amazing brand nor a unique collection of information, but otherwise still (for now) have some giant pool of resources or financial backing. These include the Washington Post (which hasn’t been a truly national brand name since Nixon), the LA Times, and most of the middle ground of the media industry.
My prediction is that groups 1 and 2 will not implement much AI, and if they do, it won’t be announced. Group 3 will implement it as much as possible in an attempt to be relevant and cut costs. Whether that actually works remains to be seen.
Whether or not they lean into their niche and use AI to fill in the gaps remains to be seen. But I hope not. Best case - they use AI to replace/augment human editors. I shudder to think about the worst case.
Hopefully the journalists can start their own outlets like 404 media which I’ll happily pay for.
But impressive as that is, I don’t want them replacing journalists in a news gathering organization, for exactly the same reason that I don’t want solar powered flashlights on my cave rescue mission.
Not all content - but (sadly) a seemingly increasing chunk of it.
After the recent change is accessing articles by disabling javascript, this seems like the next step to elon like platform irrelevance.
It's not like bozo couldn't setup a guardian like trust to fund the wash post in perpetuity. Instead, his top priority is doing whatever the other idiot wealthy are doing.
Of course, this requires better AIs that don’t hallucinate. It needs to be able to update info, and even handle non-monotonic reasoning (an earlier report was mistaken, the latest report updates info).
The news has 2 parts: facts and analysis. In most cases I don’t care what the reporter thinks. Semafor.com has an interesting style of clearly saying these are the facts and here’s what the reporter thinks. An AI can deliver the facts, while leaving reporters to write a separate analysis (which I can easily skip).
Context: wapo hasn’t been a viable company for a while. It’s Bezos’ apparent-charity project which also effects a Ben-Franklin-owns-the-megaphone strategy of being a newspaper publisher, in DC and reporting on the US government. The US government pays AWS a lot of money.
Why not just be candid and say you want to try AI technology for news reporting because you think it has a place in the world?
Granted, we've seen similar fashion in the past with blog, and then with the mailing list revival, which both quickly get preempted - commodified even - by the marketing squads that devitalize every new media by their unending eager to devour their techs and cloaca'd them into ad platform trend.
But it's my earnest feeling that the AI-ssistant behemoth, still quite roboto in its fake expertise and sanitized answers, could be easily defeated by the willingness for poetry and the new form language and our creativity would take to circumvent it.
We easily get sidetracked by boredom, but humans are creature hooked on authenticity.
But, is this a markov chain generated response? It has a glimmer of actual content, but the wording / point / theme is completely lost on my reading.
If this was generated by an AI chat bot, then I must have a much better AI chat bot at my disposal (ChatGPT).
I find this to be a result of "at scale" we've been adding to everything software related.
We need localized media that don't scale. Then it cannot be hijacked by cv/income/profit maximizing types.
If you want to turn a company around RALLY THE HUMANS YOU IDIOT
Why shouldn't we use AI directly?
Great, I look forward to:
"According to the Washington Post, the United States has had two Black Presidents in its history. The first was Barack Hussein Obama, and the second was Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Joe Biden is the second Black president of the US."
Honestly, most news articles ought to be written by AI. This should allow journalists to focus on the important bit where their curiosity, their insight, their critical thinking, their zeal, and frankly their humanity can actually be put to good use. I only hope that WaPo is doing this to better focus its resources, and not to eliminate what little of its capacity remains.
They used to be known for pretty good actually journalism in a world of blogspam. Now they're pivoting to ... blogspam, huh? Cool cool, there goes your moat.
If you understand that web users will crave human access...then you as a creator know where the actual success and money will be in the future...
The only one I might read is the local newspaper. At keast it's relevant. Ironically it's free.
What do you mean by "do my own research"? Who are you interviewing? What war zones are you traveling to to become an eyewitness? Which stacks of public records are you trawling though?
I agree that there's a lot of junk reporting out there, but there are also reporters providing an essential service.
I may sound sarcastic, but I assure you the vast majority of people do this kind of 'research' and truly think they know medical conditions better than their GP, understand world events better than the 'biased' mainstream journalists and even think they outperform 99% of scientists, climate or whatever.
It is not limited to truly stupid people too. Just try and listen to, lets say Jordan Peterson talk on climate science, and you know he gets his (mis)information on facebook. You would fail a high schooler on any test displaying this level of misunderstanding physics.
A bit of a rant, but this is the world we are in. I don't think we can fix it with old fashioned journalism. Too boring. So we need to, somehow, fix social media and 'AI' itself.
Are you going to do the footwork and the interviews yourself or you mean you will look online for non newspaper sources of info?
If I can't reach those then I trust no one.
And yes I admit I know very little of anything.
Back in the day, entirety pre-internet, they had research budgets, and actual, real investigative journalism. Don't confuse this with "investigative journalism" talk shows, that's modern drivel.
Such newspapers would deep investigate things for months, or years. Dig, do research, and large newspapers of old had the budget to defend themselves legally too.
That's gone. Completely gone.
Newspapers were always leaning one way or the other politically, but one knew that, and dealt with it, and had multiple sources to read.
News had traditionally been one of the pillars of democratic society. And it's now turned mega shallow.
Youtubers barely fill this void. Certainly there are advantages to this era, but you just can't get a complete parallel with blogs, and with youtube commentaries, even if they attempt deep dive.