Is A.I. the future of journalism? I hope not.

I'm a day late this week, but today is a holiday here in the US, so it's a Monday that feels like a Sunday. So I'm calling it good. 

How many fingers am I holding up?
lipsky | Deposit Photos

This past week, the Chicago Sun-Times copped to running a bogus feature article recommending books to read this summer. The article was written by a freelancer for King Features, a company that regularly distributes material like features and comic strips to newspapers. It has been in business since 1915. 

The article was included in a supplement called "Heat Index" -- a 50-ish-page filler "magazine" meant to fatten a paper's page count while causing no extra work for the news staff. Wherein lies the problem with this particular article: the freelancer kind of ran out of time to do it properly, so he had A.I. generate it. And then he didn't fact check it. His editor at King Features didn't fact check it, either. Neither did anybody at the Sun-Times (nor presumably did anybody at any other papers that ran it, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, according to The Atlantic, which interviewed the freelancer in question). But while the authors cited in the piece were real, the books that are supposedly coming out this summer by them are not.

The articles I've seen about this mess mostly focus on the fact that staff attrition at newspapers around the country have left the business ripe for this kind of thing. Of course that's true. But there's another danger underlying this obvious conclusion, and it relates to the credibility of the news media as a whole.

Once upon a time, people in the news business prided themselves on being purveyors of Truth, their work consisting of factual reporting, as unbiased as it's possible for a human endeavor to be. It's bad enough that conservative media have made a career out of making stuff up and calling it "news the lamestream media doesn't want you to see!!!1!!1!!!" And it's worse that even liberals are berating papers like the New York Times and The Washington Post for publishing editorials that don't reflect reality as they see it. But now newspapers are letting A.I.-generated dreck past their gatekeepers.

It reminds me of back in the '80s when infotainment became a buzzword in broadcasting. Infotainment programming blurred the line between news and entertainment, to the point where TV news has become more about entertainment than informing its viewers. Owing to the tyranny of the clock, broadcast news has always been less substantive -- by which I mean less detailed -- than a newspaper article. But with papers now beginning to lean on A.I. to generate content, whether because of staff shortages or time crunches or cheapskates in the front office, it's going to be harder to trust what we read in the paper as true.

Journalism already faces a credibility problem. Using A.I.-generated crap without having a human vet it is just going to make it worse. 

I hope newspaper owners wake up and realize that relying on chatbot-generated nonsense is not going to improve their bottom lines, and that they're supposed to be providing a service to the community, not just padding the pockets of their owners.

It may be a vain hope. It may be too late to save the news industry. But I hope not.

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These moments of bloggy news criticism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Fact check everything!

Andor and its relevance to today.

Let's talk about Andor, which wrapped up its two-season arc this week. 

Public Domain, according to Wikipedia. Don't @ me.

The series is a prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One, which itself is a prequel to Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI. Anakin has already become Darth Vader, Luke and Leia are teenagers, and the Empire is charge of the galaxy -- for now. But the imperial government is committing atrocities in Emperor Palpatine's name, and people on multiple planets are beginning to rebel. Cassian Andor gets swept up in the nascent Rebel Alliance; his backstory is what the show is all about.

If you're not a Star Wars fan, I've already lost you, so I won't go into many more details. What I want to focus on is the reaction to the show and how it maybe dovetails with what's going on in our world right now.

I've heard several people say that Andor is the best entry in the Star Wars universe, or at least the best since the original film trilogy. I personally think Andor is very good, if not the best; the writing and direction are smart, and the actors all do good work. It's hard for me to call this show the absolute best of them all because I haven't seen all of them and because the shows are all doing different things. I very much liked Obi-Wan Kenobi for sentimental reasons; I loved The Mandalorian, but it feels like a Western with starships instead of horses (and let's be honest, Boba Fett was season 1.5 of Mando). 

I think what sets Andor apart is that it's meant to be an adult show from the get-go. The whizbang technology is all stuff we've seen before. There's no Grogu to lighten the mood. There's hardly any mention of the Force until the very end of the second season. It's all just people put in untenable situations and how they react to their lives being torn apart by brutality.

Which leads me to today. It's possible that this is the best possible time for this show to appear. Here in the US, we are in the beginning stages of an authoritarian takeover of our government. We are hearing about more instances of brutality every day. The modern-day resistance is taking its time to gel -- pushing back around the edges and seemingly not making much of a dent. A large-scale uprising like the Rebel Alliance may have to happen before we can beat back our modern-day Palpatine and his minions.

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I had only seen Rogue One once before Andor started airing. Once the show was over, I went back and watched the movie again. And yeah, the show is much better than the movie. Disney was hoping that Rogue One would be the same kind of hit as the original Star Wars movies -- but Jyn's character is lacking both the gravitas to pull off a serious film and the pals that made A New Hope so much fun. This time around, I found myself waiting impatiently for Captain Andor to show up so we could get on with things.

I'm not sure whether I'll ever watch Andor again, but twice is definitely enough Rogue One for me.

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One quick thing related to last week's post about the new pope: I need to say something about this YouTube video that made the rounds right after the announcement. As soon as the first guy said, "ope," I was like, "My dudes, he's not that kind of Midwesterner. You are thinking too far north." Chicagoland is not the land of Fargo, A Prairie Home Companion, hotdish, and yah-you-bet. Not even the accent is the same. If you want to hear the difference, listen first to the folks in the movie Fargo -- here's the trailer -- and then to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. If you can't tell the difference, I don't know what to tell you. Except maybe "Aw, jeez."

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These moments of bigger-than-life blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Yah, you bet!

Da pope and Mom's Day.

Liddiebug | Deposit Photos

Happy Mother's Day to everybody who is, was, has, or had a mother, perfect or im-, and including those with offspring who are or were persons of the nonhuman persuasion.

I think that covers everybody.

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This past week, Catholics got a new pope. Pope Francis, the first of that name (which I had forgotten 'til just now), died on April 21st, and Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost, was elected on just the second day of the conclave. I joked on Bluesky that it must have driven TV news outlets wild that the cardinals got the job done so fast. Here they'd barely settled on a name for their live team coverage and whomped up the graphics package, and it was all over.

If my take seems irreverent, remember that I'm Pagan. The head of the Roman Catholic Church doesn't have much of an effect on my life. I once worked with a guy who told a story about a conversation he'd had; the other guy asked him what he thought of the pope (different pope, obviously; this was decades ago) and my co-worker replied: "What's a Presbyterian supposed to think of the pope? He's the bishop of Rome!" 

That's pretty much where I am, too.

Anyway, a lot of Catholics have high hopes for this new guy. He's an American, for starters (from Chicago!), although his family background is about as melting-pot as they come. He's also a naturalized Peruvian and has served the church in that country for years. Most recently, he's been holding a top spot at the Vatican. Pope Francis seemed to like him, and it appears likely that he'll be as liberal as Francis was, although church approval for women in the priesthood and LBGTQ+ folks will probably still be a bridge too far. 

Another thing that's extremely unlikely to change is the Catholic Church's directive, shared by virtually all other Christian denominations, that its adherents should be fruitful and multiply. It's because the faith wants as many Christians as possible, either by birth or by conversion. Leo hasn't explicitly said how he feels about abortion since his elevation, but in the past he has taken the church's position against it lumping it in with euthanasia for good measure: "God's mercy calls us to protect every life, especially those society overlooks—the child yet to be born and the elderly nearing their journey's end".

That might look good on paper, but of course it sidesteps the question of practicality, especially in this country, where mothers receive so little social and financial support. And the people running our government right now seem hell-bent on making it even harder. So much for protecting every life.

At least he favors gun control.

But as I said above, I'm not Catholic. Catholics and members of other Christian denominations -- of every religion, actually -- have the right to believe whatever they want to believe and practice their religion as they see fit. As long as they don't force me to live by their rules.

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I mentioned above that Pope Leo is from Chicago. This meme is probably my favorite: 

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These moments of slightly irreverent blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Puzzling.

A whole lot of folks will recognize this image. It's the 4-by-4 grid of the daily Connections puzzle published by the New York Times. Today's puzzle wasn't too hard. The yellow and green categories are supposed to be the easiest, but today I got blue first; purple, as usual for me, was whatever was left over once I'd figured out the others.

Anyway, as I said, I got them all right today without making any mistakes -- but that is not always the case. In fact, it is so often not the case that when I consult Mama Google, "connections hint today" kind of pre-populates the query box. I'm beginning to ask myself whether to continue playing. 

I'm not at a loss for other games to play. There's Wordle, of course -- I'd keep playing that -- and the NYT has a relatively new game called Strands that's often fun. (Strands, for the uninitiated, is a word search for which you're not given a word list; instead, you get a clue, and the words hidden in the puzzle all relate to the clue, including the Spangram, which is often a phrase instead of a single word.)

The NYT games have a social media element; players are encouraged to share their scores, which I do. One reason I'm hesitating about dropping Connections is that folks may wonder if something's wrong with me if I stop posting my scores. (This actually happened in the early days of Wordle; I played late one day, and a college friend said she was relieved to see my score posted on Facebook. She was worried something had happened to me.) 

But these three NYT games do take some time to play, and I was already playing a roster of daily games. There's MobilityWare's Solitaire, FreeCell, and Mahjong; and Big Duck Games's Flow Free, Flow Free Hexes, Flow Free Bridges, and Flow Fit (I tried Flow Free Warps, but it messed with my head).

All this started with either Solitaire or Flow Free, both of which I've been playing for years. Here's my winning screen from Flow Free today: 

That's eight years of Flow Free every day -- and counting. I hope to keep the streak going until I'm dead.

On top of all of those, I've started playing three Apple News games, including an intriguing one called Quartiles. You're given 20 word fragments -- sometimes short words or syllables, most often neither one -- and you're supposed to make words out of them. You get one point for a word that uses one tile, two points for two tiles, four points for three tiles, and eight points for four tiles. There are five four-tile words in the puzzle, and if you find all five, you get bonus points. If you earn a total of 100 points, you achieve the rank of Expert. You can keep making words after you reach Expert level, but I tend to bail; after all, I have a whole bunch of other puzzles to do.

So yeah, my life won't be any less rich if I quit one of the NYT games. (The NYT may be less rich, though, if people quit playing; Colin Jost joked at last year's White House Correspondents' Dinner that games subscriptions were the only thing keeping the newspaper afloat.)

What are y'all thinking? Is Connections becoming too annoying?

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Now for something more serious: Today is the 55th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University. National Guard troops opened fire on a peaceful student protest against the Vietnam War, killing four students, at least one of whom was just walking to class. I remember the shooting, but what I didn't remember -- and what Michael Moore talks about in his Substack today -- is that the National Guard claimed the troops began firing in response to a sniper. The Nixon White House took that version and ran with it. Of course, there was no sniper. 

The Kent State shooting made all the papers, but Moore goes on to say that ten days later, there was another National Guard shooting, at Jackson State College in Mississippi, in which a dozen or so protestors were injured and two students were killed. The National Guard again claimed the troops began shooting in response to a nonexistent sniper. But that incident didn't make the papers -- and I bet you can guess why: the victims in Ohio were white; the victims in Mississippi were Black.

Feel free to draw whatever parallels you like to foreign students today being arrested and deported for protesting the Trump administration.

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One more thing, and then I'll let you get on with your Sunday evening. Today is Star Wars Day, aka May the Fourth. In honor of the day, I'm sharing this meme that TrekMovie-dot-com posted on Facebook today.

Live long and prosper, y'all.

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These moments of bloggy miscellany have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!