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!

NaNo no more, or: Why we can't have nice things.

 Earlier today, a friend sent me a screenshot of this headline: 

Here's a link to a free version of the story. It doesn't include the second headline, which is too bad, because it gets to the heart of why NaNo is going out of business.

As alert hearth/myth readers know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. At first it was a simple challenge: Write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Devote all of the month of November to churning out a first draft of the novel you've always dreamed of writing. Get the first draft out of your head and onto the (virtual) page.

I've been a big supporter of NaNoWriMo over the years, both by promoting my own participation in their events and, often, by sliding them some cash. I went back through the blog just now to figure out the last time I participated in a NaNo event. Looks like it might have been November 2020, or maybe summer 2021. I know I did NaNo something like eleven times, and I won every time I participated. But I can't check on the NaNo website anymore because I deleted my account last year, upon hearing about the change in their terms of service to allow people to use AI to write their novels.

Apparently there were other problems with the organization: accusations of nefarious people using the forums for grooming and abuse. I never saw any of that because I never frequented the forums. I wasn't interested in wasting time on a message board (if I wanted to do that, I'd go to Kevin's Watch); I was doing NaNo to write my damn novel. I used it as an accountability tool to keep my word count on track. The certificate I got for winning, if I'm being honest, was mostly for bragging rights on social media.

When I started seeing things change at NaNo was about the time the founders sold the place. After that, there were deals for participants at indie-author-adjacent businesses -- stuff like discounts for having your novel printed by some pay-to-publish outfit. I don't think I ever used any of them. But I didn't call them out, either. Maybe I should have. 

Probably I should have.

Anyway, last year, NaNo changed their terms of service to allow people to use AI to write their work -- and accused people who complained about the change of ableism, of all things. From the article: 

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," the nonprofit's 2024 statement reads, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

Ooh, privilege and ableism! Insert haughty sniff here!

But the opponents of the change saw that for what it was: bullshit. Published authors believed -- as I do -- that the real aim behind the TOS change was to allow the new owners to scrape content written by participants to train AI so the organization could profit from it. That's just so far from the original purpose of NaNoWriMo as to be sickening.

"So many people worked so hard to make NaNoWriMo what it was," children and YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall posted on Bluesky, "and it was all squandered to prop up a plagiarism machine, truly betraying everything NaNo represented: the limitless creativity of normal people."

It's the same scummy behavior that finally made me quit the dead bird app. It's people who think it's okay to make money off of stuff they stole from content creators. It's not exactly plagiarism, but it's not far off the mark.

About two years ago, I wrote here on this blog, "by and large, creativity should be left to human beings." I still think so. And I still think we ought to be paid, every time, for what we create.

What I told my friend in response to the headline above was: "The founders (of NaNo) had the best of intentions and did a lot of good for writers. As usual, the capitalists fucked it up." 

It's a tale as old as greed. 

Any ideas on how to change it would be much appreciated.

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In searching the blog to discover the last time I last did NaNo, I realized it's been more than three years since I wrote my last novel. I'm thinking maybe it's time I wrote a retrospective on how my decision is holding up. Maybe next week.

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

Dreaming of electric sheep?

 

iLexx | Deposit Photos

You have likely heard by now some of the furor over artificial intelligence, or AI, creeping into spaces where previously it had dared to tread. Since ChatGPT's debut in November, school districts around the country have banned its use by students. Educators are concerned that kids will use the tool to generate homework assignments. Colleges are concerned, too, but most appear to be leaving the decision about whether to ban use of the technology up to individual professors.

Then there's AI art. Last year the furor was all about apps that could take your selfie and turn it into something artistic or cartoony. The biggest concern was that the apps themselves were skimming too much personal data, maybe for resale -- including your face, which could be a security problem. Those apps dropped out of sight pretty quickly. But complaints have continued, especially from artists, over a new crop of apps that can turn out images based on written commands. The problem is that these apps are skimming images from the internet and slicing and dicing them. Those skimmed images are created by actual flesh-and-blood artists -- and the apps are doing it without compensating the artists. That's not just a financial problem for the artists, although that's bad enough; it's also copyright infringement.

Besides that, the resulting artwork isn't very good. But the AI programs are learning; the more input they get from human users, the better they're going to get at this. Artists can envision their livelihoods disappearing as clients turn to AI-produced art.

Although maybe the machines aren't yet fast enough at learning. Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled its new AI assistant, Bing, named after its search engine (which I hope has gotten better than it was the last time I tried to use it -- wow). Except that when the New York Times and the Washington Post sent reporters to chat with Bing, they learned her -- okay, its -- name was actually Sydney, and she -- okay, it -- was kinda quirky. She (I give up) pledged her undying love for the NYT reporter, but when WaPo asked her about him, she had no idea who he was. So much for undying love.

Mostly, I've been bemused by it all. Sure, the vast majority of Americans think AI technology will do society more harm than good -- but they conveniently forget that we're already awash in it. Does your email have a spam filter? (I sure hope so!) That's AI. Talked to Alexa lately? She's AI, too.

I do think there are some things AI shouldn't be used for. For example, self-driving vehicles are proving to be as bad an idea as we all suspected they'd be. 

And I think that by and large, creativity should be left to human beings. I know how corporate America works, and I'm worried about artists losing their jobs to technology that turns out an inferior product for less.

Then there's this: Clarkesworld, the online speculative fiction magazine, has stopped taking submissions. Why? Because for the past few months, the editorial staff has been inundated with AI-generated stories. Neil Clarke, who publishes and edits the zine, says by the time they shut down submissions on February 20th, they had received 500 AI-generated submissions this month alone -- and it's getting worse. Clarke says that because his zine pays on publication, it ended up on somebody's list of places to send AI-generated stories and make money from them. 

He says it's not going to work; the AI-generated stories aren't any good.

I get that. But that's today. The machines are still learning.

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The illustration up top is not AI-generated, as far as I know; I bought it from a royalty-free stock photo site. I was going for a futuristic take on the "monkeys using typewriters" adage. What do you think?

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These moments of blatantly human blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell -- who is still fully flesh-and-blood. Well, except for some crowns in her mouth and the plastic lenses in her eyes.