Already facing scandal, the Washington Post’s new-ish CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, has announced that the newspaper will be pivoting to artificial intelligence to turn around its dismal financial situation.
Can’t wait for wapo journalism to be even lower quality
A near future op-ed: “Some people worry about AI’s need for ‘large’ amounts of energy and the possibility of this tech negatively impacting the written word. Those fears are misplaced. With any brand new revolutionary tech teething problems are to be expected. Furthermore…”
The bold face name writer is soon forced to concede that he receives a “minor stipend” from aiJornalism.com. That’s a big lie. They gave him stock options. Not only that. He has to admit that “to improve text quality AI was minimally used.” Which was another big lie. aiJornalism emailed the article to him. The “op-ed” was effectively their press release.
how does nobody ever seem to notice that it doesn’t fucking work
If I had to guess, the bosses see the glamorous PR videos the companies put out, tell their managers to get it done, and you end up with a large chain of people (and a time delay) between the people who have to use it and know it doesn’t do what people think it does, and the people demanding they use it because they think it’s real.
I’m watching this play out in real time where I work. I was hoping that what it meant was they would train a neural net for making automated, semi-intelligent optimizations on our utility systems based on known inputs and usage patterns, but in reality it probably means a bunch of customer service people are about to get laid off for six months and then rehired or replaced when the magic bean[i]s don’t pan out as expected. The CTO will get a golden parachute and move on to greener pastures, and we’ll get some new asshole who is even more backwards than the last two, and rates will go up anyway because Texas will be too hot or too cold for a week, so everyone else must suffer.
C-suite types mostly interact with upper management, who tell them nothing but puffed up bullshit, which they spun from middle management, who tell them nothing but puffed up bullshit, etc.
So sometimes I wonder if the reason they believe in AI so much is that it really is as competent as the people around them.
I have a similar suspicion about those terrible ai image facebook jesus posts, like the people posting them actually don’t notice the extra arms and legs
My all-time favorite is anything religious. Jesus freaks lecture the world that the bible is the “word of God” and they also proclaim stuff like “They follow every word of it.”
Oh, yeah? The SUV-sized Holy Bibble has cops, soldiers, guns, and the like because that’s the holy text of Facebook 3:16?
I have a core memory of years ago, maybe a few months after I first started working my current white collar job.
In passing, I had our controller (accounting VP basically) ask me how it was going, and I made some off the cuff remark about how something was having issues (but it was minor).
He immediately grew concerned, pressed me on it a bit, and I was honest about it (but again, from what I recall it was pretty minor in the scheme of even day to day things). I had my immediate boss exasperatedly ask me later that day why I told this guy what I had
It drives me insane! People keep talking about what AI is going to do while ignoring that it currently doesn’t do anything. Every application is just a tech demo or a needless augmentation of something that already existed. Anyone who has “lost their job” to AI was already going to be fired and got “we replaced you with AI” as an excuse. Nonsense all the way down.
“As a large language model trained to write extremely poor quality articles with catchy headlines, even I cannot stoop that low.”
In praise of neo-listicles
The many surprising ways in the world that listicles can teach us and show us which have not been fully explored
By Al “That’s AL not AI” Hackneyed
First of all - what is a list? A list is…
I have to admit that I love doing parodies of AI and/or bad writing
This seems extremely healthy for society. Damn we are really just jumping off the cliff aren’t we.
Journalism is and has been in a dire situation for a while, but AI is precisely not the solution. It will make everything worse.
