YHK - yet another hacker news clone

AI is great for some things. It is not currently great (or even remotely passable) at writing interesting magazine articles.

Obviously the WSJ staff shouldn't be using it in the final output, but if it's a prominent guest's opinion filtered through ChatGPT, I'm mostly fine with it.

Good luck trying to figure out whether something was written by AI or a human. This mass hysteria around AI will soon be forgotten. Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.

Downvoting me or others will not change this fact.

Even if you want to keep AI out of the content-writing part, or the image generation part of your product, there are still areas where a newsroom can do much more ambitious work with the same people:

- AI can do research to assist in fact checking of articles

- AI can help suggest story ideas based on patterns it found in your own articles over time (an editor would still curate them)

- AI can help the newsroom pore over more first-hand sources/raw sources. Think of how many times you've had to process a stack of hard to OCR PDFs that come out of a FOIA, for example, or poring over government datasets when trying to make sense of something. Or a person's historical tweets, etc.

So it's clear that whoever won in this debate (hopefully there was at least a proper debate) wasn't interested in talking about all these additional areas where AI can help the existing people do more _without risking their jobs_.

We are witnessing the natural outcome of pursuing higher profits at the expense of everything else; at some point it becomes “as crappy as the market will bear”, and we all lose out. For some of us it may manifest as having to get our car serviced every few thousand miles because the parts are of poor quality (but cheap!). For some of us it may manifest as no longer desiring sweets because they’re now poorly made with substandard ingredients created in a lab somewhere.

It can also manifest in ways that are a threat to public safety; like rollercoaster rides that weren’t properly designed or tested because schools now pursue profits above learning; or because manufacturers somehow rely on regulators to do their job for them.

However it manifests, it’s hard to point to higher prices and lower quality goods and services and say this is the best that capitalism has to offer. If this is it, if this is the capitalist system working as intended, it’s no wonder movements like the Democratic Socialists of America are taking hold.

This seems to be the underlying moral justification for creatives' opposition of AI. Job destruction is the obvious self-interested justification.

My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).

A quick hypothetical:

Let's say instead of hoovering up billions of images from data dumps, the AI researchers took a still camera to all the art galleries on the planet and snapped photos of art, then trained the neural network on those photos. Is this still "theft" of the artists' work? What about if an embodied AI in a robot chassis did the same, then painted new art with oil & canvas? Is this still theft?

Perhaps this example fails because it's not enough data? But is it a difference in degree or a difference in kind?

Outside of a few standouts, the companies that survived did not do so by embracing quality journalism and independent reporting.

Now the bloggers and upstart publishers that killed traditional media are the incumbents.

I think this is key. If AI wasn't force-fed into every industry in a rapacious grasp for more profits, our society might have been able to grow into a healthier equilibrium where AI is a useful tool for creative professionals.

Even the insiders I talk to at big AI labs express the opinion, "nobody likes where we're going, but the pressures are too strong."

What about other artifacts that you produce, such as images (that are not illustrations), videos, sound effects for your podcast, or the code that runs your website?

>This doesn’t mean nobody doing work here can ever use any of the softwares that are broadly lumped together as AI. Much as we respect the Luddites around here, we’re not against technological innovation. Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element.

As someone trying to pickup writing fiction after years of doing technical writing, I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions? am I describing things in interesting ways? or is it a slog to read? etc...). Since Current Affairs is a commentary magazine and not just straight facts reporting, I could imagine authors wanting similar feedback. Would this kind of usage be permitted? Seems... yes? But I'm not completely sure.

if OTOH Fox News came out with this announcement, nobody would care except some of their viewers/readers would be annoyed by it.

point is it's hard to ever identify if a magazine would be doing this purely out of principle since it's also good marketing.

I would way rather read handwritten articles. I think everyone should celebrate the human craft of writing. I really hope this doesn't slowly become the "no-VFX" posturing from the film industry, however.

I think the far bigger and more important issue is that through generative AI hallucinations and lies become more and more part of our written media.

Albertatech told a humorous, light-hearted story[1] about how this affected her personally, but the results could be far more devastating:

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a0k8J0-KluY

AI generated text is still exhausting to read.