AI written news articles

So in the past few days, I've noticed a few news articles on my feed that have been either written by AI or very poorly translated from a foreign language.  

Today:

Yesterday...note the article subject's interesting name:

Are there not enough qualified motorsport writers for these articles?  Or is it just so much cheaper to have AI do it and then who cares about the results?

They are terrible at best. If this is the state of AI, I don't think we need to worry about them taking over the earth. 

I have no clue about AI news, but I have noticed a trend in the last few years that editors are not doing their jobs and apparently just looking at the articles for squiggly red lines and not spelling errors.

Seams like they are knot doing they're jobs well.

I have an account with a story writing version of Chat GPT for $50/ month that gets me 25,000 words. Except, it does a way better job than these news articles. 

So yes, way cheaper than actual people, especially if you aren't using a quality prompt service or haven't been trained in how to make them write better. 

The Dead internet theory" is looking more and more likely, especially when considering Over 40% of internet traffic in 2021 was bot driven

The objective is not to inform you. The objective is not even to get you to read the article. The objective is to get you to click on the link, spend a minimum length of time on the page, and then click the next link.

The article is not the product being sold.

Your time and attention is the product being sold.

If an AI written article can deliver your time and attention to advertisers as well as a human drudgeon, then AI will be used.

Yep. AI won't take over the world. It will take over the internet and fill it with crap. 

jmabarone said:

So in the past few days, I've noticed a few news articles on my feed that have been either written by AI or very poorly translated from a foreign language.  

Today:

Yesterday...note the article subject's interesting name:

Are there not enough qualified motorsport writers for these articles?  Or is it just so much cheaper to have AI do it and then who cares about the results?

These are mistranslations, likely machine translations, not AI written. AI is much more familiar with normal language usage, both words and grammar. I see both in student papers; I have had ESL students of varying levels over the years, and recently I've had students submit essays partially or wholly written by AI. Once you've read them, you realize they are both flawed, but differently.

The best way to determine if something is a product of AI is to use AI to detect it. There are several sites that do this - here's one: GPTZero.

Just got a query the other day: Want to read my chat with AI about gasoline?

And I’m like, Um, nope, we have a real, accountable fuel engineer on speed dial. 

Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:

Yep. AI won't take over the world. It will take over the internet and fill it with crap. 

That's pretty much already finished, even if AI can't take all the credit.  As someone who has been on the internet since around 1995, I am amazed at how full of crap it has become.  It once was that you could type a very specific string of words into a search engine like altavista, lycos, or even yahoo back when it was legit, and you would get hits that were very tightly relevant to your search terms. 

Try that today, and you get a bunch of commercial sites that in many cases are only superficially related to your search.  Finding what you're actually looking for means going through several pages, or multiple searches, if you can find it at all.

For a while I was seeing ads for AI-generated blog content and how convenient is was.

And I was thinking to myself that most blogs are hardly worth reading even with an actual, idiosyncratic human being writing them.

There's absolutely no way I am going to waste one second or one click visiting your blog to read AI generated content.  It's like fake boobs; I can spot them a mile away and as soon as they are identified my interest evaporates.

So it may be convenient but it will be the last time I ever visit your site.

AI was a hot topic during a publisher's conference I had attended. Many publishers were thrilled with being able to use AI to fill their pages. They're also soulless individuals wondering why their publications are struggling.

While there's some AI out there that can craft interesting stories fairly well, it's still a rehash of material already existing.

Are motorsports writers actually getting paid well enough to WANT to write? Seems like if publishers are willing to use AI then they probably wouldnt want to pay a decent amount of money for a human to do it. 

In reply to Duke :

but the nerves in 'em are real

My cousin is the president of FX network. AI is real, and exceptionally good. A lot of creatives are now losing their jobs to it. It's getting harder and harder for him to justify hiring real people at times. And FX don't make junk. 
 

Then there is the cheap garbage variety of imitation AI...

One of the biggest issues right now with AI is that most of it just re-hashes existing content. Not only is that plagiarism, but the content generated can often be quite derivative.

I'm not against AI. I'm sure it has some really great uses that I don't personally know about, but using it to replace employees for the sake of the bottom line isn't what it should be used for. (See also: WGA and SAG-AFTRA stirkes.)

I wondered what the deal was on those garbage articles I've been seeing lately

In reply to Duke :

I'm with you on that one, but you're talking about the bad jobs. There are some that are so good you'd never know. I've seen both good and bad jobs. Up close. And in the flesh.

Our ecommerce store platform now has "AI written" production description capabilities. You can choose various voices for it and seed it with various things you want it to say. All of them produce fairly typical copy that reads well without actually saying anything. It's no use to us because our stuff is so technically driven and, hey, I've been writing this stuff for 20 years. But if I was selling something non-technical like clothing or some sort of cheap bluetooth-driven sound bar with LED lights on Amazon, it would do just fine.

Basically, the more generic the output can be, the better large language models can do. There's no understanding what's going on, they're just sticking words together in the most statistically probable way. 

I agree that it's going to bury the internet in junk. "News outlets" are going to just parrot what they're input without understanding - this is already a significant problem, but it will get worse due to the sheer volume. Amazon is already having trouble with the Kindle store being overrun.

Colin Wood said:

One of the biggest issues right now with AI is that most of it just re-hashes existing content. Not only is that plagiarism, but the content generated can often be quite derivative.

I'm not against AI... but using it to replace employees for the sake of the bottom line isn't what it should be used for. (See also: WGA and SAG-AFTRA stirkes.)

 

I agree completely. So does my cousin (he has been at the forefront of opening opportunities for minority and women creatives and other under-served voices for decades).  Doesn't change that the fact is it is beginning to dominate the industry, and that will not change. If he chooses to avoid using it, he will be choosing to go out of business. And Disney shareholders won't like that.

Its here. It's staying.  Most of us already interact with it daily without knowing. 
 

It's a similar moment in media that electronic fuel injection was in automotive. Everybody bitched and moaned, but it really didn't matter. It was changing, and everyone had the choice to change or be left behind.  

In reply to SV reX :

The difference is that fuel injection was an improvement in just about every way. The fact that Large Language Models make it easy to spew out derivative works isn't an improvement for anything but shaving margins. Don't call it AI, because there is no intelligence or understanding behind it. The LMM doesn't know what the output means.

Although thinking about it, I'll bet LMMs make it really easy to come up with natural sounding dialogue if there's someone driving the direction of the conversation.

Keith Tanner said:

... All of them produce fairly typical copy that reads well without actually saying anything. It's no use to us because our stuff is so technically driven and, hey, I've been writing this stuff for 20 years. But if I was selling something non-technical like clothing or some sort of cheap bluetooth-driven sound bar with LED lights on Amazon, it would do just fine.

Basically, the more generic the output can be, the better large language models can do. There's no understanding what's going on, they're just sticking words together in the most statistically probable way. 

I've noticed the same thing with writing product descriptions for beverages.

As a joke, we've had AI write bad, pretentious, overly wordy descriptions for IPA. It does a really good job with long, pretentious, meaningless, buzz-word-salad. 

But for tight, concise, meaningful, and evocative descriptions... nope. AI will *never* be able to do that. It doesn't understand what something tastes like. It can't connect flavors with emotions, images, experiences, etc. It can't tell what phrase will be emotionally evocative.

Keith Tanner said:

In reply to SV reX :

The difference is that fuel injection was an improvement in just about every way. The fact that Large Language Models make it easy to spew out derivative works isn't an improvement for anything but shaving margins. Don't call it AI, because there is no intelligence or understanding behind it. The LMM doesn't know what the output means.

Although thinking about it, I'll bet LMMs make it really easy to come up with natural sounding dialogue if there's someone driving the direction of the conversation.

Don't forget that it's also been under constant development, meaning original thought had to go into it in the first place. AI regurgitation just uses old info and packages it as new. As that is how it's designed to work. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I don't think the quality or lack thereof defines whether it is AI or not.  You are describing unrefined AI.  Cheap.  Garbage.

I think the definition of AI is that it continues to self analyze and self improve.

An ability to string words together based on statistics doesn't impress me.  But some of the more advanced systems can write a movie script that most people can't identify as being written by a machine. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I see strong use cases for LLM and other generative AI in specific situations. And other places where it just won't work.

My wife does programming. For just hacking together code that is effectively a module you slap into a program, AI can generate code just as well as any contractor. AI can't *design* the program. It's not what you want figuring out the components in place. If something goes wrong, you need a person who *understands* to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it.

For writing, AI will probably become competent at dry reports to gather and compile information. If a lawyer is preparing a case, it will probably do a better job than a clerk to go out, find relative case law, and put it into a report. It will be able to write perfectly serviceable contracts and letters of notice. It will *not* be able to put together a legal strategy or argue.

AI will be able to write natural sounding dialogue, but it will never be able to imbue that dialogue with subtext.

AI will never write the coffee scene from Pulp Fiction. It will never write a line like Winston Wolf saying, "Lotta cream. Lotta sugar," that people on this forum will argue about. AI will never include a bizarre aside like that to indicate how different a character Winston Wolf is from the others in the scene. That he drinks his coffee the way he likes it, because he's such a badass he doesn't need to put on airs.

AI can create content. AI can create images. AI can create text. AI can't create Art.

In reply to Beer Baron :

My son is a high end videographer. He has earned 2 Emmy Awards.

He expressed a concern to me recently about how AI was affecting the movie industry, and that it could impact his job. Like any good dad, I encouraged him and said "You are an extremely talented creative. AI won't affect your job. AI can't create art".

Then I talked to my cousin. FX is one of my son's customers.  I asked him about my son's concerns, because I really didn't believe it.  He confirmed- my son was right.  FX has always pursued the highest levels of artistic excellence, and AI was beginning to make real significant changes in the industry.

The landscape is changing. 

In reply to SV reX :

I'm not saying AI won't put people out of jobs. I'm saying it will produce content, not Art.