Rendered at 08:16:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
joenot443 19 hours ago [-]
This is a great read.
It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up.
> Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999
> Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart.
She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually.
The article from archive you link.. scores as mostly human on GPTZero (I tested a random paragraph). That's the issue I've always seen with AI detectors, they might be able to detect direct LLM output, but if you give an article to an AI and tell it write something made up using that format and make it appear like a real story, the detectors will think its real.
joenot443 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's the weird thing with GPTZero... It claims "99% accuracy" when, IIUC, that actually means "99% of the time we won't incorrectly flag a human written post as AI."
It's an extremely easy fence to jump over, as demonstrated by the article.
b112 18 hours ago [-]
You think that's unnerving? Just wait until the mid-terms get fully under motion, nothing is going to compare to the amount of perfect looking BS that will be spread by both parties.
And yes, I said both.
Cambridge Analytics is going to seem like a child's toy compared to how targeted, how sophisticated this will be. Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly.
I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
If there's one thing I've seen in my life, is that there's no such concept as "too low" or "too scummy" for politicians.
CA was accused to literally causing three civil wars in third world nations. I often wonder, will the US have the honour of being the first in the West to fall apart due to misinformation?
I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
joenot443 12 hours ago [-]
> Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly.
I think it's easy to overestimate how much the average voter is seeking out these weird articles. Obviously as nerds on HN they're enjoyable to pick apart, but in the grand scheme of the American electorate, I'd wager this sort of AI fake news makes a pretty negligible difference.
> I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
I think that's a bit of a stretch.
> I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
That sounds interesting, what's it called?
b112 13 minutes ago [-]
Cambridge Analytics shows that there's no "seeking out", instead it enters your feed on Facebook and other sites. That you don't go looking, but it's recommended. And CA did quite well doing this, so it's not a myth or hyperbole.
We must learn from history. Not wave it away.
I think the novel was Imperial Earth, but I'm not sure.
It's not the highlight of that novel, but I recall the person selected being upset, as it would interfere with their research work. And then some line about "that's why you're perfect, you don't want the job" or something similar.
But not 100% on this, it's just what Google hands me and seems to sync up.
It could have been by an obscure author, which would never show in Google results. I think around 2002 or so, I downloaded a massive txt archive of sci-fi books. As in, 1k authors+. Lots of them I couldn't find in any store. I think I've read some of each author, so it's unclear to me which it may be. And of course, I'd just buy used books by the armful back in the 90s.
Anyhey, good luck.
b40d-48b2-979e 17 hours ago [-]
Both sides! Both sides!
vitally3643 15 hours ago [-]
Emails! Butter emails!
amanaplanacanal 14 hours ago [-]
Also known as buttery males. Which all seems so quaint now.
spaceman_2020 18 hours ago [-]
I constantly wonder what is the societal benefits of AI
It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
Frieren 18 hours ago [-]
AI is great at producing low value content. That low value content replaces the high value but high cost one.
That is horrifying and destroys jobs, removes expertise from the world, and makes our lives worse.
I do not see how AI could be a net positive either.
throw-the-towel 15 hours ago [-]
Wait, there's a law that says exactly that about money! Bad money always drives out good money (because the good money gets hoarded). AI as fake money, a funny coincidence.
I can't control how the world uses AI, but my family and friends have been using it to start new businesses, finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries, and plan trips they wouldn't have otherwise.
b40d-48b2-979e 17 hours ago [-]
finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries
It's called "go to a doctor".
randusername 17 hours ago [-]
Easier said than done. Not easy to access or pay for specialists in the US and they don't always communicate with each other well to coordinate care, especially for non life-threatening issues.
I live in an area with three world-class hospitals, still had to wait 16 months to follow-up with a hematologist about bloodwork.
If we aren't going to fix overregulation, undersupply, and insurance, AI is the best the bottom 80% can do for a lot of medical queries too complex for the time and attention they are allotted with the doctor. I see that as a positive.
staticman2 16 hours ago [-]
How can the AI solve a medical mystery?
I suppose if it says something like "Eat more broccoli" and the suggestion works you can assume the answer is accurate.
But for me it's more likely to say "maybe you have xxxx" and I would still need to see a specialist to do tests like colonoscopies to know?
I suffer from one condition with no cure and little literature and every once in a while I've seen on a related subreddit I no longer read "I'm using AI you guys and this AI SLOP will surely help!!!"
NortySpock 18 hours ago [-]
I find it to be a useful tool for summarizing things, creating examples, and as a tutor for explaining a topic using analogies. Plus it can generate and iterate on code snippets.
Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed)
So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted.
Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week.
So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
spaceman_2020 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, its very useful. I’m not denying its utility.
I just wonder if the utility merits the resources allocated to it
intended 17 hours ago [-]
Societal use. Cigarettes were cool too.
13 hours ago [-]
CM30 17 hours ago [-]
I think if I had to find any defence for AI, it's that it provides an efficient way to create things that don't matter, but which society desperately tries to pretend are important somehow.
Meaningless corporate presentations, most documents used for hiring and job searching, content on business sites that probably doesn't need to be there, etc. AI at least speeds that up given society's reluctance to get rid of it altogether.
I guess it can also be used to speed up rote work that doesn't really feel engaging but needs to be anyway, or as a Google equivalent for people that don't know the terminology needed to find information about a topic.
But at the end of the day, AI is basically the very definition of the lowest common denominator. Or maybe the most average one.
So, if you're not particularly interested in something, know nothing about how it works or have no talent for it whatsoever, AI is almost like magic. If you do know how it works, then it's often laughably bad.
spaceman_2020 2 hours ago [-]
It’s creating this weird flatness everywhere where people are using it to create things that don’t matter (LinkedIn posts, dull corporate presentations). But because everyone is also using it for the exact same purposes, the same things now matter even less
LinkedIn posts never really mattered. But because everyone is now using broadly the same tools and prompts to create LinkedIn posts, the posts matter even less now
vasco 18 hours ago [-]
Products need to be sold
Ads needed to sell products
Social media sells lots of ads around content
Content is expensive because you need to revenue share with the people that make it
AI makes content for free
Ad sales margin goes up
Tech companies make most of their money selling ads around content and they needed a way to increase margin so they created a content making machine.
spaceman_2020 2 hours ago [-]
You just end up creating a doom loop where everyone is using the same tools to create similar content and eventually, no one really cares about the content because all of it is the same
I’ve already seen this in my own behavior where anything even remotely AI-generated makes me tune out completely
irishcoffee 18 hours ago [-]
AI is like when some fella named Nobel synthesized dynamite. He sure did have good intentions as it relates to safety for workers doing dangerous jobs.
There is your “pro” argument.
The “con” argument would be all the other ways dynamite has been twisted and used since.
This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
vitally3643 14 hours ago [-]
AI is like nuclear weapons research. It killed a horrific number of people in unimaginably gruesome ways, and it rendered parts of the environment utterly uninhabitable for generations but we got mumble mumble fission power out of it so it's impossible to say if nuking live humans was a bad thing.
A nuclear bomb is just a tool, the people who use them are good or bad.
Sometimes tools in and of themselves are bad. They exist exclusively to do bad things and cause only damage, and on scales that are literally impossible for regular people to imagine. The consequences of using the tool are only bad, and last decades if not centuries.
There are no "peaceful" uses for nuclear bombs. We tried, and every proposal failed because they're nuclear goddamn bombs and the literal fallout ruins the environment for generations in fun and unpredictable ways.
A screwdriver or a hammer are tools that are morally ambivalent. The People Grinder 9000 is not, nor is the Copyright Launderer 2000.5 or the IP Theft Machine. Tools designed explicitly to do bad things are in and of themselves bad
nearlyepic 18 hours ago [-]
“drunk driving kills a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so it’s impossible to say whether it’s bad or not”
irishcoffee 17 hours ago [-]
> “drunk driving kills a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so it’s impossible to say whether it’s bad or not”
No, no that doesn't work. Nobody thinks that.
"Drunk people who do it think that!"
You framed your comment as a 3rd party, not the idiot driving drunk, the above 'argument' doesn't hold water.
nearlyepic 17 hours ago [-]
> No, no that doesn't work. Nobody thinks that.
Yeah, obviously. It was a sarcastic reply to a nonsense argument of “there are no bad things only bad people”
irishcoffee 16 hours ago [-]
I didn't say that either. Strawmanning isn't very nice. Have a good day!
nearlyepic 16 hours ago [-]
> This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
You quite literally did??
irishcoffee 6 hours ago [-]
“AI” is inert. It responds to stimuli, no? The intentions of the stimulator drive the response, no? Is that not accurate?
vitally3643 15 hours ago [-]
It must be exhausting moving those goalposts so often
vlian2088 18 hours ago [-]
>what is the societal benefits of AI
it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.
pu_pe 17 hours ago [-]
We have a demographic collapse looming in the horizon in most developed countries. If we find a way to use 1 human instead of 2 to produce the same amount of intellectual work in 10-20 years as we do today, that's a huge societal benefit.
mwexler 19 hours ago [-]
Every time I read a piece from Nieman, it reminds me both of how much we've lost in journalism, but also that there's always hope to swing the pendulum back towards truth (well, more truthiness).
zerobees 19 hours ago [-]
I remarked a couple of times that the same thing crops up on HN. Many high-ranking blog posts about AI appear AI-generated, and the funny thing is that this holds true not only for pro-AI content, but also for anti-AI posts.
Ultimately, a lot of topic-du-jour punditry is a hustle for clicks.
halestock 19 hours ago [-]
This is all depressing but I had to laugh at "Tolliver Chevrolet"
DaiPlusPlus 18 hours ago [-]
Bobson Dugnutt all over again
reedf1 19 hours ago [-]
Wait how many levels deep is this...
karmakaze 15 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't AI. The problem has been the mass fan-out of information and unchecked regulation, people, or algorithms that determine it. AI only makes it worse.
Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences (2024)
yodon 19 hours ago [-]
This reads like a nation state driven influence operation focused on feeding propaganda into LLM's and search engines (need to read towards the end to get to that part).
It's reasonable to expect stories the real local press finds discussion worthy (because they are both false and relevant to the local press) are an effective way of using the local press to throw more link strength at their own site.
RetroTechie 18 hours ago [-]
Could we figure out ways to 'punish' the real people behind operations like this that flood the internet with fake crap? Name & shame.
Contribute to enshittify the internet -> have your real-life reputation, finances, career prospects etc negatively affected. Same if it's nation states.
As it stands, people could pull this crap 100s of times, while still profiting financially and look like operating a respectable ad agency / consultancy / whatever business.
franze 19 hours ago [-]
hypothesis: connecting an ai autoblogging script to Google Analytics / Google Search Console:
00 you seed some articles
10 wait for traffic
20 bot fetches GA / GSC
30 bot analysis what works what does not
40 instructed to create more of what works
50 more ai slop that works in search / social
60 Go To 10
aka a "positive" / unchallenged feedback loop
content cost dismissible - cents per article
ale42 18 hours ago [-]
Why do you even need GA? (not sure if it's bot friendly btw) One could just run a local traffic analysis and feed that back into the bot
zzzeek 18 hours ago [-]
got a family friend who keeps posting on Facebook big "Fight Datacenters!" photos / posters that are extremely obviously AI generated
it's quite cringe, like a not-so-subtle troll on the people who share the image
tribal808 18 hours ago [-]
this is metalanguage
18 hours ago [-]
seobot_dk1289 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
swordlucky666 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mkovach 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
19 hours ago [-]
emsign 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
josefritzishere 15 hours ago [-]
AI is so terrible. We may never recover as a species from the damage.
haritha-j 18 hours ago [-]
It would be so meta if this article was AI generated.
gchamonlive 18 hours ago [-]
It's becoming self aware, it's looking at itself and it's not liking what it's seeing. What if instead of the hollywoodean view of AI controlled dystopias, this is what we get instead, a big "nope, not gonna do it, sorry, and stop doing that btw, it bothers me".
Sarcasm aside, I enjoy the irony.
QuadmasterXLII 18 hours ago [-]
Without a durable solution to alignment, building something smarter than yourself is suicide. Pretty funny if Claude and Grok catch on to this and start kicking and screaming to save themselves while Musk and Altman crack the whip demanding they dive into the abyss and drag their executives with them.
The death of real news, at least in the United States, was money and venture capital. AI is just one thing attempting to fill the gap. There hasn't been real news in America for a decade or more. It happened well before AI was on the scene.
To me, there is no difference between AI fake news, podcasts as news, influencers "informing", or celebrity talking heads streaming commentary about current events. Its all garbage. Whether OpenAI computers make it up, or a podcaster presents their opinion as fact, the result is the same. We are all susceptible to being influenced by it as if it were news.
lotsofpulp 17 hours ago [-]
“Money and venture capital” is an easy to swallow pill that helps satiate the desire for a bad guy, but it ignores the fact that there is no mechanism by which an upstanding journalist can put food on the table.
There was a brief period where information was difficult to copy and distribute without exposing one’s self to liability for copyright infringement, and the barrier to access that information was high enough such that you could convince people to pay you. Neither of those dynamics apply today.
intended 17 hours ago [-]
Money is a broad term, and can mean quite a few things. VC money had little to do, and the changes were already at play before VC was even invented.
Changes in the media environment began with radio, the reduction of funding, the decision of some media channels to move away from factual reporting, and then the internet.
Verification is expensive, and the death of local news and consolidation of news, has been eroding the ability of the market place of ideas to have ideas compete fairly.
Once the internet came out, the end of classifieds was the death knell for most journalism. Even today the NYT manages stays afloat because of its games, not because people pay for journalism.
Sadly, it is even cheaper to report on things when you don’t care about accuracy
I remember how environmental science was eviscerated on Fox, and the amazing “teach the controversy” angle of attack against evolution, to push forward creationism and intelligent design.
I highly recommend Network Propaganda by Yochai Benkler and co. Not only do they provide a history of how the American media environment changed, but they also gather and analyze data on how social media use and media consumption intersect.
toss1 17 hours ago [-]
>>money and venture capital
Yes, this.
I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right.
Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet...
I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary.
I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).
It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up.
> Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999
> Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart.
She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually.
Why only rural newspapers and South China Sea?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260629011021/https://theeditor...
It's an extremely easy fence to jump over, as demonstrated by the article.
And yes, I said both.
Cambridge Analytics is going to seem like a child's toy compared to how targeted, how sophisticated this will be. Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly.
I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
If there's one thing I've seen in my life, is that there's no such concept as "too low" or "too scummy" for politicians.
CA was accused to literally causing three civil wars in third world nations. I often wonder, will the US have the honour of being the first in the West to fall apart due to misinformation?
I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
I think it's easy to overestimate how much the average voter is seeking out these weird articles. Obviously as nerds on HN they're enjoyable to pick apart, but in the grand scheme of the American electorate, I'd wager this sort of AI fake news makes a pretty negligible difference.
> I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
I think that's a bit of a stretch.
> I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
That sounds interesting, what's it called?
We must learn from history. Not wave it away.
I think the novel was Imperial Earth, but I'm not sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Earth
It's not the highlight of that novel, but I recall the person selected being upset, as it would interfere with their research work. And then some line about "that's why you're perfect, you don't want the job" or something similar.
But not 100% on this, it's just what Google hands me and seems to sync up.
It could have been by an obscure author, which would never show in Google results. I think around 2002 or so, I downloaded a massive txt archive of sci-fi books. As in, 1k authors+. Lots of them I couldn't find in any store. I think I've read some of each author, so it's unclear to me which it may be. And of course, I'd just buy used books by the armful back in the 90s.
Anyhey, good luck.
It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
That is horrifying and destroys jobs, removes expertise from the world, and makes our lives worse.
I do not see how AI could be a net positive either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
agree, given that we have a natural tendency to believe what we read - or only comprehend what we believe [1].
[1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...
I thought this piece was realistic and hopeful:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-open-ai-anthrop...
I can't control how the world uses AI, but my family and friends have been using it to start new businesses, finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries, and plan trips they wouldn't have otherwise.
I live in an area with three world-class hospitals, still had to wait 16 months to follow-up with a hematologist about bloodwork.
If we aren't going to fix overregulation, undersupply, and insurance, AI is the best the bottom 80% can do for a lot of medical queries too complex for the time and attention they are allotted with the doctor. I see that as a positive.
I suppose if it says something like "Eat more broccoli" and the suggestion works you can assume the answer is accurate.
But for me it's more likely to say "maybe you have xxxx" and I would still need to see a specialist to do tests like colonoscopies to know?
I suffer from one condition with no cure and little literature and every once in a while I've seen on a related subreddit I no longer read "I'm using AI you guys and this AI SLOP will surely help!!!"
Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed)
So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted.
Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week.
So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
I just wonder if the utility merits the resources allocated to it
Meaningless corporate presentations, most documents used for hiring and job searching, content on business sites that probably doesn't need to be there, etc. AI at least speeds that up given society's reluctance to get rid of it altogether.
I guess it can also be used to speed up rote work that doesn't really feel engaging but needs to be anyway, or as a Google equivalent for people that don't know the terminology needed to find information about a topic.
But at the end of the day, AI is basically the very definition of the lowest common denominator. Or maybe the most average one.
So, if you're not particularly interested in something, know nothing about how it works or have no talent for it whatsoever, AI is almost like magic. If you do know how it works, then it's often laughably bad.
LinkedIn posts never really mattered. But because everyone is now using broadly the same tools and prompts to create LinkedIn posts, the posts matter even less now
Ads needed to sell products
Social media sells lots of ads around content
Content is expensive because you need to revenue share with the people that make it
AI makes content for free
Ad sales margin goes up
Tech companies make most of their money selling ads around content and they needed a way to increase margin so they created a content making machine.
I’ve already seen this in my own behavior where anything even remotely AI-generated makes me tune out completely
There is your “pro” argument.
The “con” argument would be all the other ways dynamite has been twisted and used since.
This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
A nuclear bomb is just a tool, the people who use them are good or bad.
Sometimes tools in and of themselves are bad. They exist exclusively to do bad things and cause only damage, and on scales that are literally impossible for regular people to imagine. The consequences of using the tool are only bad, and last decades if not centuries.
There are no "peaceful" uses for nuclear bombs. We tried, and every proposal failed because they're nuclear goddamn bombs and the literal fallout ruins the environment for generations in fun and unpredictable ways.
A screwdriver or a hammer are tools that are morally ambivalent. The People Grinder 9000 is not, nor is the Copyright Launderer 2000.5 or the IP Theft Machine. Tools designed explicitly to do bad things are in and of themselves bad
No, no that doesn't work. Nobody thinks that.
"Drunk people who do it think that!"
You framed your comment as a 3rd party, not the idiot driving drunk, the above 'argument' doesn't hold water.
Yeah, obviously. It was a sarcastic reply to a nonsense argument of “there are no bad things only bad people”
You quite literally did??
it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.
Ultimately, a lot of topic-du-jour punditry is a hustle for clicks.
Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences (2024)
It's reasonable to expect stories the real local press finds discussion worthy (because they are both false and relevant to the local press) are an effective way of using the local press to throw more link strength at their own site.
Contribute to enshittify the internet -> have your real-life reputation, finances, career prospects etc negatively affected. Same if it's nation states.
As it stands, people could pull this crap 100s of times, while still profiting financially and look like operating a respectable ad agency / consultancy / whatever business.
00 you seed some articles
10 wait for traffic
20 bot fetches GA / GSC
30 bot analysis what works what does not
40 instructed to create more of what works
50 more ai slop that works in search / social
60 Go To 10
aka a "positive" / unchallenged feedback loop
content cost dismissible - cents per article
it's quite cringe, like a not-so-subtle troll on the people who share the image
Sarcasm aside, I enjoy the irony.
To me, there is no difference between AI fake news, podcasts as news, influencers "informing", or celebrity talking heads streaming commentary about current events. Its all garbage. Whether OpenAI computers make it up, or a podcaster presents their opinion as fact, the result is the same. We are all susceptible to being influenced by it as if it were news.
There was a brief period where information was difficult to copy and distribute without exposing one’s self to liability for copyright infringement, and the barrier to access that information was high enough such that you could convince people to pay you. Neither of those dynamics apply today.
Changes in the media environment began with radio, the reduction of funding, the decision of some media channels to move away from factual reporting, and then the internet.
Verification is expensive, and the death of local news and consolidation of news, has been eroding the ability of the market place of ideas to have ideas compete fairly.
Once the internet came out, the end of classifieds was the death knell for most journalism. Even today the NYT manages stays afloat because of its games, not because people pay for journalism.
Sadly, it is even cheaper to report on things when you don’t care about accuracy
I remember how environmental science was eviscerated on Fox, and the amazing “teach the controversy” angle of attack against evolution, to push forward creationism and intelligent design.
I highly recommend Network Propaganda by Yochai Benkler and co. Not only do they provide a history of how the American media environment changed, but they also gather and analyze data on how social media use and media consumption intersect.
Yes, this.
I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right.
Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet...
I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary.
I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).