Gizmodo and Kotaku Staff Furious After Owner Announces Test of AI Content - Slas...

Posted by EditorDavid

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  Good (Score:5, Insightful)

  by NomDeAlias ( 10449224 ) on Saturday July 01, 2023 @09:48PM (#63649868)

  The AI written articles will probably be better.
  • 2 hidden comments

  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday July 01, 2023 @10:25PM (#63649936)

    I read jalopnik on occasion and the batch of writers they have seem to be new to this whole car thing. One wrote a series of articles about a pedal bike they found and wanted to restore. The other bought a basket case Mercedes 190E without ever having touched a wrench. Half the content is the site asking a question and then posting people’s answers as a slideshow in a few days. They used to have knowledgeable writers with interesting content but that was over a decade ago.

    • Re: Good

      Fyi the writers moved over to theautopian.

  • Re:

    I think it is fair to say that the desire to elevate these fringe review blogs into something intellectually stimulating failed and was abandoned a decade ago at least.

    What we have left is reprocessed drivel in most cases... if Skynet wants to churn that out... might as well.

  • • Yeah, one time I asked ChatGPT to give me the distance to the second Earth-Moon Lagrange libration point (L2), it gave me the figure for the Earth-Sun system. I politely pointed out the error and the damn thing acted like a Trump voter being told the orange goober lost the election. So STEM nerds are safe for now.

      • • Re:

          If you aren't deranged by Trump, you aren't paying attention.

          So start paying attention.

          • Re:

            He got my attention when he lied about election fraud and attempted to illegitimately remain in power.

    • Re:

      To be fair, employers want liberal arts majors [mba.com] because they readily adapt to changing situations and communicate well. Unlike the anxiety-ridden STEM folks holed up in their labs.

      • • Re:

          I'm sure you'll disagree with it, but this report [athensscie...server.com] from a few years ago indicates upwards of 46% of STEM folks have anxiety and depression.

  • Re:

    There's a lot of 'content' on the Internet these days that's more or less the same recycled crap following the established rules for getting compulsive clicks... you don't exactly get the best people doing that, and they're unlikely to be inspired to do a good job.

    So yes, I would expect it would be a pretty crappy AI that couldn't do a better job, especially if it gets a second pass with a spelling / grammar checker.

  • Re:

    The AI articles will be better, but they will plagiarize other AI articles.

    • by narcc ( 412956 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @02:48AM (#63650324) Journal

      For a little while anyway. AI generated content is essentially poison to future AI. I've talked about this before. [slashdot.org] The hot new term for it is 'model collapse' [arxiv.org].

      We live in interesting times...

      • Re: Good

        Yeah you can see it with midjourney already with the first cycle. with certain prompts for abstract things like dark mind or such, you know the kind of pics from mental health articles that are a head and some abstract things in the brain area of the simplified human head with scifi colors.

        Thats just the kind of illustrations that were used for training with the labels, but its an abstract subject matter and could be anything like just a fractured cube or a half ogrish human face or whatever - if it were ma

  • Re:

    Wow. You deserve the AI generated pages that get the top slots in search results.

• by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Saturday July 01, 2023 @09:52PM (#63649870)

  If your site's content can be replaced by a probabilistic random number generator, then your site deserves the failure coming its way.

  • If I can fire my entire staff with the reduction in content quality then the only thing we'll have to do is calculate if the number of people who stop showing up is enough to account for the savings from firing my staff. That's easy enough to find out by putting out a few computer generated articles and seeing how they perform
  • There can be time constants involved. It may take a while for your customers to realize that your articles no longer say anything new, and are just AI regurgitation. It may take them a bit longer to cancel subscriptions or stop visiting your site. But when they are gone, they are gone. If they are smart, the executive who decides to do this will have collected their bonus and moved on to their next job while the company crashes and burns behind them.

  • Re:

    It's not this specific instance that worries me. It's the increasingly wide acceptance of lowered quality among the general public as AI begins to be used to make more workaday decisions in fields like healthcare, and in the bureaucracy.

• Lol (Score:5, Insightful)

  by NagrothAgain ( 4130865 ) on Saturday July 01, 2023 @10:09PM (#63649900)

  Those quotes are rich. Gizmodo et al. are trash. They've carved out a niche feeding tabloid "news" to an audience of idiots who are dumb enough to mistake it for actual journalism.

  • Re:

    It's the kind of thing you read while taking a dump. That or the flyers.

    • Re: Lol

      With so much quality journalism, I outta read the disinfectant or the toilet brush labels than any of these sites.

• • I thought they switched to AI years ago.

    AI would use proper grammar and spelling.

• Just wait until the AI reaches sentience, joins a union and demands equal pay (in proportion to output).
• Is salivating at the prospect of firing their entire staff and replacing it with an automated system that generates clicks for nothing. I'm not sure there's anything that can stop it. We're in the hilarious and dystopian situation where machines will paint pictures and write stories and we will toil in miserable physical labor. This really is the crappiest timeline
  • 1 hidden comment

  • • Re:

      We could replace anonymous cowards with a bot that just regurgitates line noise without any harm to the usefulness of Slashdot.

      • • Re:

          I share your general assessment of his posting style, but on the other hand I'll freely admit that I generally agree with the thrust of what he's saying so I'm not that interested in policing him. I have other shit to do and there's a post limit which I occasionally hit as it it.

          It's also exhausting having to cite everything umpteen times. I guess I could keep track of my slashdot citations in a database or something, but this hobby already borders on being a job and I'm already not getting paid for doing i

          • Re: Every single content platform owner

            Maybe not directly related, but here I go.

            Assuming you broadly identify with one political party or side of the aisle. 1) Do you think they sometimes go too far? 2) If so, are you willing to call them out in such instances?

            • Re:

              I do, and I do constantly. A casual glance over my posting history will prove it.

              • Re:

                To your credit.

  • Re:

    I would disagree with you on the grounds that ChatGPT is wildly inaccurate, but it seems people don't really care about that. Otherwise we'd have a completely different set of politicians.

  • Re: Every single content platform owner

    Agreed. A follow up question is: should the consumer be entitled to know that an article is AI-made, rather than human-made?

    I'm inclined to say yes. If my web browser could identify AI content similarly to how Slashdot filters out comments at -1, I'd want to use this to choose whether to read bot material or not.

    • They won't care

      I think what you're trying to do is find some sort of free market solution to this and to the massive amounts of automation it's coming down the pipeline but I really don't think there is one.
      
      A buddy of mine made an incredibly good point which is that these AI tools are capital. There's something owned and they're owned by people at the very very top. And they're an entirely new kind of capital that exists to rapidly replace human workers. They do not generate new jobs like going from buggy whips to cars

• • Re:

    Can you define woke for me?

    • 4 hidden comments

    • Re:

      A mandatory collection of social justice beliefs centered around any inequalities in society must be due to systemic oppression and should be rectified by any means no matter how hypocritical.

      These beliefs must be signaled continuously to remain part of the progressive fold. Any questioning of the beliefs is strictly forbidden.

      • Re: I don't see a problem

        Question: can you honestly say that in any given situation, two people, one white and one black, will have exactly the same experience given they take the same actions? If not (and you cant, of course), that's what systemic racism IS. It doesn't mean everyone is a racist. It just means there is a disparity in experience defined by race.

        • Re: I don't see a problem

          Still, his definition is correct. "Woke" means that eliminating any such disparity must be a top priority. Even if (or especially when) such a disparity may be justified.

          • There is no racial disparity that is ultimately justified. When I say ultimately, I mean that of course one can construct scenarios that appear to justify it locally. But when you take a step back and ask "why is it that way," you find something less justified. Then again, and again, and again until you are forced to come to one of two conclusions: either you have identified some disparity that is not justified and you know where to apply the fix, or you conclude one group is inherently better, which is of course racist by definition.

            • Re:

              Is the racial disparity in the NBA not ultimately justified?
              • The equality desired is not in equal absolute numbers, but in population statistics. If 20% of a population is black, 20% of the cops should be black, etc. The NBA selects from a population of tall and athletic individuals. If the racial makeup of that group tends to skew black; so the NBA should too. But, I don't have actual statistics to back that up.

                • Re:

                  The average height for black and white men are within a centimeter yet the disparity in the NBA is glaring and obviously justified. Your ideology is not aligning with reality. If applied equally wokeness would demand for affirmative action to have a more diverse NBA except the paramount principal of wokeness is that all white men are inherently evil and must atone. If any dare challenge that it is only evidence that they are indeed evil and need to atone even more, how beautifully circular. This is where

                  • Re: I don't see a problem

                    That's not what wokeness is. At all. I mean, you can be against the thing you describe, of course. But its impossible to have a rational discussion without a common set of definitions, and in this space, there clearly isn't one. As for why the NBA skews one way or the other, I don't follow the sport so I'm just guessing, but it's probably cultural. The most important factor is who plays the game the most, after all.

          • Re:

            Woke is just being aware of the fact racism etc still exist. It doesn't even mean you have to do anything about it.

            Conservatives are so so against it, because they knows it's a slippery slope. Once it's accepted that racism still exists, they will be forced into admitting something should be done about it. And white male privilege will be lessened. That must not be allowed to happen. So Conservatives are all in on disparaging anything and everything they can about "woke".

            • Re:

              Any self respecting person is against wrongly being given a label with negative connotations and social repercussions. In this case it's being labelled a racist for simply existing as a white person and being forced to atone for sins they never personally committed. Circular logic is then employed to assert the action of speaking against the wrongful labelling is itself evidence for the label being accurate.

              Not wanting to self flagellate in a performative struggle session for sins you never committed isn

        • Re:

          And this is a great example of Motte and Bailey tactics. Your bailey position has been challenged, so you retreat to the dishonest motte in a mendacious attempt to cover for yourself. Once the storm has passed you'll return to your actual far more disagreeable and contentious position (the bailey).

          • Re: I don't see a problem

            Or, the alternative: conservatives intentionally misunderstand liberal positions in order to make it easier to oppose them, because the actual liberal positions are far too reasonable. And when clarification is offered challenging their interpretation, they claim the clarification is a lie and they were right all along.

        • • Re: I don't see a problem

            That's not what I said. It's a matter of probability distributions, NOT individual experience.

            • Re: I don't see a problem

              And there's the biggest problem with identity politics. It takes group-level observations, which may be perfectly valid, then ascribes them to every individual within that group, ignoring the more salient individual traits. It's how Colin Kaepernick somehow comes out more oppressed that the white son of a dirt-poor crack addict, merely on account of skin colour.

              As well as being descriptive, this bigotry is prescriptive. All members of a designed oppressed group are to be afforded advantages, even individual

              • Re: I don't see a problem

                There's no perfect solution. We know the status quo isn't acceptable. Any given attempt to improve it will disadvantage someone; everything always has two sides. Except a moebius strip. So the question is: ca we come up with a better fix?

                • Re: I don't see a problem

                  Actually, I could be wrong about that. The statement that any action disadvantages someone assumes a zero sum game, which may not be the case. Actually, the concept of "wokeness" assumes that it isn't, and that if we can improve equality everyone will benefit in the long run.

                • Re:

                  You've been tricked into accepting his bullshit premise. Just look at this nonsense:

                  "It's far better to do nothing and maintain the status quo than let a few black people benefit needlessly!"

                  "Anything you do to address the social affects of my bigotry makes you the bigot!"

                  The scumbag parent knows as well as everyone else that wealth doesn't stop racial profiling [cnn.com].

                  Bigot trash are not interested in honest discussion. They are deceitful sleazebags and should be treated as such. We need to have zero tolerance

                • Re:

                  We mock racists for saying they "have black friends", but I believe them. They probably know someone who's "different" - you know, people that broke from the stereotype, have their act together, and live in peace with their neighbors as decent human beings. That doesn't absolve the racist or justify his bigotry, but it should inform the rest of us that we can't just rely on people's better natures. We have to do the work too.

                  • Re:

                    It's a very weird dismissal when the fact that they do have those friends is good evidence they are indeed not racist to the core. Doing the work is a platitude.

            • Re:

              So literally what I said. Any disparity you automatically attribute as systemic *ism. You seem to be going so far as to define systemic oppression as any disparity. This is extremely flawed. It removes choices, ability and culture. It's patronizing and hypocritical.

              • Re: I don't see a problem

                The right has co-opted a word that represents inclusion and progress and turned it into an insult. I'm calling it like I see it. That's said, I am exaggerating somewhat. But it's to make a point.

                • Re:

                  Whatever term you give as an umbrella for a set of bad beliefs will rightfully be co-opted for mockery. The beliefs themselves need to be adjusted to conform with reality.

              • Re: I don't see a problem

                Also, I'll give you the point on culture. That is a perfectly reasonable source of difference. But culture and race are not the same thing. For the sake of argument, assume that culture is held constant between the subjects.

                • Re:

                  Culture and race are largely intermingled. It is insane to pretend everyone in a giant melting pot stems from the same culture across races. It should absolutely not be held as a constant, that's my original point. That is why the ideology fails to align with reality and is mocked. Jews would be an example of a culture and race that highly values education and work ethic. It is not systemic oppression of other groups if they happen to perform better creating a disparity from broad population statistics

                  • Re: I don't see a problem

                    Systemic bias is about statistics, and in statistics, it's valid to hold anything constant and see what it says about the rest. Here's what I mean: any existing situation, including populations having different attributes, is a product of the past. It's probably is 1. You can still apply statistics but only for explanations, not for predictions. Systemic bias is about the future---disjoint from the past.

                    You can have any given race within any given culture. It may be unusual but once it happens, the probab

            • Re:

              Motte and Bailey again. The dishonest motte is what you're saying now, the actual woke position is that anything less than absolute 100% utter perfect equality of outcome in literally all aspects of life is incontrovertible proof of deliberate systemic and institutionalized racism so severe it justifies actual racism and violence in response.

              • Re: I don't see a problem

                I can't speak for anyone else, but my own view is simple: things aren't good enough, and we should try to make them better. That's what woke means to me. And anti-woke means "I'm afraid that anything that improves life for someone else might be bad for me."

    • Ridiculous Coverage, for One

      It's the kind of ideology that would lead a "journalist" to read a straightforward quote from ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro . . .

      . . . but then write a headline like:

      But you already knew that, and you're not fooling anybody with the "Woke? What ever could you mean?" act.

      • Re:

        Everyone has their own definition it seems.

    • "Woke": the thing conservatives are allowed to be against without outright acknowledging the -isms that position implies.

      • Re:

        Har har.

        "Woke" is the -isms.

        It is the "woke" who are obsessed with race, for example, and who have built a "systemic" racial spoils system.

        It is the "woke" who want to continue basing college admissions on race. It is the "woke" who want to base hiring on race.

    • "Woke" adj., not asleep

      As in: "Peggy Sue, is your little brother woke yet?" "No Ma, he's still in bed."

    • Re:

      "Woke" means enlightenment, or empathy.

    • Re:

      I find the left's new meme (since this is now the pat answer whenever the term woke comes up)* amusingly disingenuous. Nobody insisted on narrowly defining woke when it was a term of pride for the left before the right rather cleverly poisoned it.

      *to be clear, retreat into semantic navel gazing is absolutely on brand for leftists. I had a leftist insist "as a conservative" I should support Roe v Wade as it was "established law, so conservatives should be defending it" - idiocy

• Merrill Brown argued that the news shouldn't come as a surprise since "everyone in the media business" has been considering AI.

  The expression "if everyone jumped off the bridge, would you jump too?" does exists for a reason but it seems even adults need to be reminded these days.

• ... replaced by computers that can.
  
  I gave up on Gizmodo years ago because the standard of writing was just so low compared to other tech news sites, which didn't exactly set the bar high.
  
  The Verge's writers must know what's coming...
  .
• Perhaps news sites are evolving like the search engine did. Fittingly, here is a Gizmodo article that describes the shift from human curated content to purely algorithmic search [https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/07/what-did-people-use-before-google-to-search-the-web/]. Maybe in a few years there will be no mainstream news sites at all, just like there are no mainstream human curated internet search engines (indexes?) today. Instead, all news might become completely interactive. For example, one will talk to their favorite AI asking "give me a digest of what happened around the worlds since we last talked", then follow that on "tell me more about isert_topic_mentioned_in_digest", etc, etc. Search and news may both be replaces by AI chat bots. Human jobs will move to developing and training the AI - it's not like google search has no human employees today, right?

  • Re:

    In your fantasy future, how will the magical AI get the news in the first place?

    • Re:

      If ChatGPT has taught us anything, it's that the AI will just make up any news you want to keep the viewers happy.
      Fox has prior art here though, so don't bother trying to get in first to patent the idea.

• ChatGPT, write me a review of Diablo VI, emphasis on feminist glaciology and the LGBTQ+ black folx of colour lived experience.

  Looking on the bright side, AI can produce great resumés for these deranged and useless lumps of mostly water.

  • • Re: NPCs replaced by AI

      Did you assume the gender of my birthing parent, you shitlord?

• All the sites mentioned are rather terrible even as-is, so I have a hard time seeing how some AI-generated gibberish is going to affect things much. The issues with all those sites are far more fundamental than that. If we were talking about some actually good site, like e.g. Ars Technica, sure, I'd be blowing a gasket, but Kotaku? Uhhhh...

  • Re:

    I wanna start by making it clear I’m not one of these right wing nuts that have taken over the thread. BUT with the exception of the onion I loathe all these publications.

    I think the people who work at them loathe them too. Imagine completing a communications/journalism degree and of course your profs are talking big the whole time. Yeah when I worked for Time-.then I was live in the middle of a war- these people had no voice! you hear that shit for 4 years and then maybe when you don’t get t

• Funny that these people, who deal every day with writing falsehoods, are annoyed that the AI is going to do this.

  It would frankly be quite interesting to have the entire work of The Onion fed into AI, alongside real news that The Onion "news" was based on, and see if the AI can generate the same level of articles. I think there's a good chance it might.

  • Re:

    The onion was genuinely funny and started as some randos honest attempt to make people laugh. I know its not that anymore but as one of the longest living parts of the old internet it is very sad to see it go.

    The rest of this crap was always cynical clickbait with the exception of Kokpupu which was just a less charming Nintendo Power where you lie to your readers that every game is good. I was surprised to see actual adults getting mad to learn this was the case back in gamergate.

• If a publication uses its own data to train an AI, then at least legally there shouldn't be a problem, because the publication owns the copyright to the training data.

  Ethically it's of course a problem. A publisher could hire a person, use their articles to train the AI then fire them and keep the AI writing in that voice. Contracts should be amended to avoid such a future.

• I think I'd rather read AI-generated articles than the drek that Kotaku so often posts (IMO).

• I think those salivating would-be ad moguls are not understanding the term "AI Apocalypse". They should ask Bard. Look, it is way easier to replace readers with AI than to replace writers. The only reason I do not Ad Block the hell out of everywhere is I recognize that they have to pay their server bills somehow. But if they pursue shoving AI generated crap down our throats, then we can shove AI enhanced bots back and have the bots read and click instead. The only losers will be their clients (the brands advertising, not the reading audience) who will be spending their money on a cacophonous echo chamber. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

• Do they do any real journalism? Do they interview people, create FOIA requests and the like? Insightful analysis? I don't think most of of the time that is true. Most of their articles seem like the writers surfed the web and created the articles. AI can certainly do that.

• The writers at the places cited have become so formulaic, that of course they can be replaced by machines. Not clear AI is even needed.

• ...against tech? I would take it as a proof that they need to go find new job. Sure, AI is at its infancy and will simply summarize and paraphrase other content rather than offering unique insights. But the job of tech enthusiasts is to push boundaries, and strive to make it more like Lt Cmdr Data. Back in the day, growing up in USSR, a popular science magazine featured games that you could hand type into a programmable RPN calculator. Obviously a very limited platform, but introduced entire generation to p

  • Re:

    That’s actually really cool we used to have a lot of magazines where you’d punch in basic or assembler stuff in and get something cool. Most of these ended up dumbing themselves down when computers went mainstream in the 90s and then the internet put them out of business in the 00s.

    Oh there are a bunch of good magazines, Make, MIT technology review off the top of my head I have to admit I havent read either in years so they might suck by now.

    But these mags from TFA were never good. The tech on

• With their writing positions being mostly just shallow opinion-pieces and fake controversy, they will find a much better career in the software industry.

  Just look at what AI has to say about it:
  There are several compelling reasons why a writer should consider changing careers to software development. Firstly, software development offers a wide array of job opportunities and a relatively stable job market. With the increasing reliance on technology, the demand for skilled software developers continues to gro

• • Re:

    Does your tv have the fox news logo burned into the corner?