Robot Writers and an Uncertain Media Landscape
Musings Inspired by the Twitter Train Wreck
Remember fifty years ago when I told you that someday news would come via portable phones?
No?
Actually, I did make that prediction in front of a class at the O.B. Free School. The claim wasn’t based on any prescient tech knowledge; I was just trying to keep a bunch of squirming kids attention during a talk about the underground press.
Now, my audience is a little bigger, and I do have some hints about what’s coming. There are lots of little clues out there, leading me to believe we’re on the threshold of another media revolution.
The rise of internet-based outlets led to the fall of media born of the printing press, including most radio & tv, which largely adhered to the basic assumptions about communicating based on ink and paper. Chryrons replaced headlines, YouTube took over explaining stuff, and Facebook allowed your crazy uncle to expand his reach beyond the Thanksgiving dining room table.
Legacy media was already suffering from declining readership and engagement thanks in part to lifestyle changes brought on by two earner households, car-centric infrastructure, and vast changes in the culture.
It was social media that twisted the knife, made possible by the advent of devices capable of instantaneously delivering information in just about every setting.
Now, social media is facing its own crisis. Facebook’s demographic is aging out, Twitter is imploding, and the scatter-shot nature of quick visual messages as in Instagram have further fragmented the market. And the fake news people have left a turd in the punchbowl.
Given that the lines between reporting and entertaining have blurred, change is coming to just about all that we absorb through our eyes and ears. (And if Elon Musk’s brain implant scheme takes off, our thinking.)
What’s more, either the corporate backers of social media platforms have exaggerated their market reach (they have) or the formats they use don’t easily lend themselves to consumer interests (true) or people have just tuned out because of credibility questions (see: cultural/political silos).
The bottom line here is that advertisers no longer believe they’re reaching or persuading enough customers to spend the kind of money required to get the reach and/or return they think they need.
Global advertising spending growth has slowed significantly, and staff downsizing is the name of the game at outlets. CNN, NBC, ABC, NPR and CBS are among the broadcast entities announcing layoffs; Gannett just announced yet another round of cuts; the Washington Post discontinued its Sunday magazine and laid off one of only two dance critics in the country, and even the dirty tricksters posing as journalists at Project Veritas cut their staff by 10%.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of and subsequent staff shedding at Twitter has started a land rush among startups looking to take over its water cooler of the internet functions. Wannabes Tribel, Post, Mastodon, and Mushroom are all attempting the scale ups of audience size and content management.
Thus far, Post is the best of the lot (IMO) because newbies are vetted by actual humans, a process that’s left more than 300,000 people waiting for an acceptance email. I haven’t seen anybody threatening violence on Post, but they’re all like thin sauce at present, content wise.
Congress is belatedly trying to get the game as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is being considered. This is legislation creating an exemption under antitrust law to allow newsrooms to collectively negotiate with Big Tech on fair compensation for their content.
Introduced by Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, this is speculation it could soon get added to a larger bill (likely the National Defense Authorization Act) and passed by Congress — a possibility that Facebook parent Meta wants to make clear would not sit well with it.
Facebook is threatening to stop allowing news stories to appear in their feeds. Social media companies ultimately backed down from a similar threat in Australia in 2021. According to " the News Media Alliance, "The Australian law resulted in countless jobs for local journalists and $140 million to news outlets, which translates to billions in the U.S."
It’s too little too late for the U.S., I think, because the landscape is rapidly shifting. Twenty six organizations — including the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others — sent a letter to House and Senate leaders urging them not to pass it, saying the legislation "will compound some of the biggest issues in our information landscape and do little to enable the most promising new models to improve it."
Yet another technological advance threatening the information delivery landscape looms on the horizon: the robots are coming! This is better known as AI (Artificial Intelligence) in techie circles. Generating text requires two sets of computers, one that hoovers up information and other versed in how language works.
Ultimately, this could mean journalists won’t write for readers, they’ll write for machines, which will then write for readers.
Here’s what I’m talking about, via the Daily Beast:
“OpenAI’s latest language model, ChatGPT, is making waves in the world of conversational AI. With its ability to generate human-like text based on input from users, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with machines.”
That paragraph was entirely generated by ChatGPT—the new chatbot released by artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI—using the query “write a lede for a story about ChatGPT for The Daily Beast.” Aside from helping lazy writers with their stories, the bot went viral on social media after its release on Nov. 30 and has even “crossed 1 million users” less than a week later, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
It’s easy to see why if you spend a few minutes “chatting” with it. You can give ChatGPT prompts as simple as “What’s the recipe for an Old Fashioned?” or as complex as “Tell me the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, but you’re a 1980s Valley Girl” and it’ll give you a pretty realistic response.
As is true with many things AI (I’m thinking about Elon Musk’s self driving cars) there are flaws. A clever query can bypass embedded safeguards and produce –as Facebook parent Meta discovered– fake studies that claimed eating crushed glass is good and that Black people don’t speak a language.
While this advanced (and presumably job-killing) technology may seem magical, there is an evil underside to it all that (ta-da!) involves exploiting (mostly brown skinned) workers.
From a Vice article:
The biggest tech companies in the world imagine a near future where AI will replace a lot of human labor, unleashing new efficiency and productivity. But this vision ignores the fact that much of what we think of as “AI” is actually powered by tedious, low-paid human labor.
“I think one of the mythologies around AI computing is that they actually work as intended. I think right now, what human labor is compensating for is essentially a lot of gaps in the way that the systems work,” Laura Forlano, Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, told Motherboard. “On the one hand, the industry can claim that these things are happening, you know, magically behind the scenes, or that much of what's going on is the computing. However, we know that in so many different examples, whether we look at online content, how to operate an autonomous vehicle, or if we look at medical devices, human labor is being used to address the gaps in where that system really isn't able to work..”
…In a 2021 paper on the role of global labor in AI development, AI ethics researchers argued that the current inclusion of workers from the Global South in the AI pipeline is a continuation of exploitative practices—not unlike the history of colonial exploitation, where Western states took advantage of people from the Global South and their resources for access to cheap, physically tolling labor to benefit their institutions and businesses.
On the humans who write front, everybody and their mother is starting a newsletter, thanks to platforms like Substack (which is where I publish) that take care of the gnarly details and let the story come first.
It’s not ad-supported; many of these newsletters have both paid and free versions. And it’s like the Tower of Babel when it comes to winnowing out content that suits your needs. It reminds me of the early days of blogging in that a few good writers make wading through the drek palatable.
Email me at: WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com