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davebarnes's avatar

“extremely difficult for me to report on national news as I did in the 80's, 90's and 00's”

Especially with 3 superfluous apostrophes.

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Greg's avatar

"Translation, robots won’t demand severance pay or file for unemployment, and the audience won’t mind."

Translation, robots won’t demand severance pay or file for unemployment, and the audience is too dumb to notice the difference.

Fixed it for ya.

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Zyxomma's avatar

Ta, Marcie. I had never heard of Hot Ones, and I'd rather drink straight hot sauce than eat a chicken wing (vegans here). That said, AI is closer to artificial stupidity than artificial intelligence.

And "access journalism" is not journalism at all. And putting writers and artists out of work is a travesty.

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Regret's avatar

Vegan guests on Hot Ones get vegan wings. It is actually quite a fun interview method.

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Zyxomma's avatar

I had never heard of Hot Ones so I didn’t know. Are the vegan wings cauliflower florets or processed plant protein?

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Regret's avatar

It looks very processed, chicken nugget style. Honestly, I would prefer cauliflower florets, because those taste amazing when covered in a chicken-style spice mix.

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Zyxomma's avatar

For a short while, KFC was selling vegan Beyond Meat nuggets. They were not bad, although I'm sure they didn't have a separate fryer for them, which is why I only tried them once. When a chain like that offers a vegan option, I make sure to buy it once (more if I like it) to encourage them to care about vegans.

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Cakes We Like's avatar

Hey!

Some of us tippetty tappetty, imperfect human writers are still willing to write for free. Even if it is only once a month.

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Biff52 Lost Canadian's avatar

Exposure bucks!

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kmblue187's avatar

WaPo just added AI to its comment section today. It was the only place besides here I could display myself (expose myself?) to readers at the moment. I'm not going to give away my skills to substack, I'm hungry enough already. Despair, writers.

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kmblue187's avatar

I'm a writer and former reporter. Sometimes I think it's time to exit this vale of tears.

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Sunshine Moonshine's avatar

The AI that tries to summarize google search results in chrome is stupid and there's no way to make it go away. It takes up most of the page with its misinformation.

Like I'm going to trust the robot to find language (somewhere on this planet) to answer my very specific code questions about a particular dot on the map. I'll end up with upside-down Australian electricity if I trust anything from AI.

I really really want an opt-out feature mandated on software. I want great big bossy nanny state to force software companies to allow users to easily turn off the AI features.

I appreciate whatever tech corrects my misspellings and gives me cleaner search results. That is handy. I don't need a robot to summarize and explain the PDF I just printed from a file *I* created.

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Regret's avatar

Getting opt out features would be easy if the great big bossy nanny state didn't violently protect IP, because without punishment for IP violations there would already have been a browser plugin or app to solve the issue of a missing opt-out feature. Creating an opt-out feature plugin is so incredibly simple even you or I could make it, we're just not allowed because our apps aren't our property, they're protected as if they were state secrets.

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Whale Chowder's avatar

DuckDuckGo still just does search.

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GH Swell's avatar

AIdiocracy. Like if Skynet spent the last 40 years eating lead paint chips.

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Trux Mint In Box's avatar

I was definitely an Elphaba in High school. Let me tell ya, it ain’t easy being green

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el duderino's avatar

𝐴𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝐴𝐼 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑎 𝑛𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑟𝑡 𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑓𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 “𝐴𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝐼𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒”-𝑒𝑛𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑂𝑆 18.1 𝑖𝑃ℎ𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑢𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝐿𝑢𝑖𝑔𝑖 𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑡 ℎ𝑖𝑚𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓. (𝐻𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡.)

But they got the story first. An exclusive!

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Emmanuel Goldstein's avatar

"Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a prominent journalist, activist, and researcher, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In her lifetime, she battled sexism, racism, and violence. As a skilled writer, Wells-Barnett also used her skills as a journalist to shed light on the conditions of African Americans throughout the South,.... Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16th, 1862. She was born into slavery during the Civil War. "

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett

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UVB-76's avatar

Thank you!

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Maryland Bear's avatar

"And of course donate to Wonkette, which is still tappedty-tapped by real humans, flawed and expensive as they may be, no robots allowed!"

Oh. sure, until Doktor Zoom unleashes his Zoombots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doombot

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kmblue187's avatar

I already am! And I'm glad I am!

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muggle's avatar

This is why we need Old Glory Insurance.

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Edgar Allen Shmoe's avatar

"In the coming years, we will continue to invest in our most scalable and tech enabled services, launching new AI-powered interactive experiences, and delivering for our loyal audience and business partners."

Do people learn to talk like this in business school? If so, I think we need to declare a moratorium on business school enrollment for like 10 years while we detoxify from this horseshit.

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Daniel O'Riordan's avatar

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired a prof from The Ohio State University School of Business to create a new employee evaluation program for state employees. His plan was to implement it and test it in the Secretary of State's office, then, when he became Governor, implement it statewide with the expectation that the Blackwell System would be recognized as superior to the current evaluation program.

It was a long, involved form filled out on the screen, with different weightings for different questions that an algorithm took into account to provide an overall evaluation score of between 1 and 4 calculated out 14 decimal places.

Spoiler Alert.

J. Kenneth Blackwell did not become Governor of Ohio. He suffered the worst gubernatorial defeat in the history of the state. The Blackwell System was never implemented statewide.

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Edgar Allen Shmoe's avatar

That is such a business professor thing to do.

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UVB-76's avatar

Business is home to hollow rhetoric. Yes, they learn it in business school.

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Nemo's avatar

Yes. It's called "boiler plate". Biz schools have been propagating this shit since forever. Contract proposals are full of it. When an acquaintance first sent me a sample of this shit, I said "Oh, boilerplate!". I read about two paragraphs and said "fuck it". This stuff isn't artificial intelligence. It's artificial stupidity. And it's not even good at that.

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Edith Prickly's avatar

Mr. Prickly has been looking for freelance work online and a disturbing amount of it is "help us train AI to write better." His response is HELL TO THE NO. He does not intend to participate in the devaluing of his profession.

There is already a lot of "news" content online that I can tell is written by AI. But I have a well-trained eye. Sadly, many people don't.

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kmblue187's avatar

Yeah, I've been looking and seen those ads too. I despair.

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Bitter Scribe's avatar

I've seen it suggested, here and elsewhere, that calling this stuff "artificial intelligence" is generosity/hype; it's really nothing more than generative text transitions between paraphrases. A techie I'm not, but that view is starting to make sense to me.

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Jamoche's avatar

As a software developer since 1980, I call it spicy autocomplete.

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carovee's avatar

Asked my nephew about AI (it's his major) and he said, "well it's really not actual intelligence. " Like as in the very first thing anyone needs to know about AI is that. Do our corporate overlords know? Probably not, but it doesn't matter to them if AI hallucinates a war between Michigan and Ohio.

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Daniel O'Riordan's avatar

There was a war between Michigan and Ohio. It was over Toledo.

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