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Comment by thomaslord | Hacker News Reader

Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

Morals aside, AI will run into serious problems in 10-20 years when the world has rearranged itself around AI content. With less non-AI content available and no reliable way to differentiate AI vs non-AI content, there will no longer be a dataset to train against.

Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly, but AI summarizing every news article is a problem on a whole different scale. Basically the same as the difference between getting a mosquito bite and being stabbed in your carotid artery - both are just blood loss, but one is a minor annoyance and the other is fatal.

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If news agencies still had reporters that would be a problem.

They haven't since the 1980s.

Everything that you say as some sort of doom and gloom prediction about the future _is the world we've lived in for the last 40 years_.

This no reporter argument is so false but gets repeated often. If I only read internet articles from internet media companies you might have a little bit of a point, but actual newspapers have actual journalists. Some might be good and some might be bad, but they do employ people that do more than build an article around a tweet.

Here's a random newspaper that you're saying doesn't have reporters: https://www.tampabay.com

> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

It will evolve towards consuming more raw data and more information that people self publish to produce news. Newslike narration constructed on actual factual information is so bland and repeatable that there is no need for more training material. News is so uncreative and predictable that I can pick up a newspaper in language I don't know and still guess with high probability what most articles are about from photos, common names and few words of that language that I do know and general tone.

> Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly,

There are so many humans doing that that the effect is not negligible. I skip reading all paywalled articles and read just their comments instead.

> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

Then the AI will go to the primary sources that the human journalist currently go to.

Will it be flawed? Yes.

Are humans already? Also yes.

Is there a huge risk that "the algorithm" will be politically biased? Totally.

Can you name one press organisation, larger than a local one-city-only paper, that hasn't been accused of that?

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