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In this issue: The case for using chatbots to surface facts and arguments, and against outsourcing judgment, taste, and every word under your name. Evan Hirsch from OpenAI on keeping humans in the loop. Plus: Google’s trusted sources, AI ads, and Thomson Reuters’ models.
What we’re talking about: A spectre is haunting journalism. The Financial Times added an editor’s note to a column after the contributing writer, a Harvard professor, used AI to condense a longer draft. Thou shalt not use the machine.
At The Wall Street Journal, readers noted common patterns of AI writing in a column by billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller. He confirmed using AI to write his piece, and the Journal stood by him.
I’ll spare you the purist takes. There are only so many essays one can read about writers staring at blank pages. Readers suffer too. Some prefer chatbots to meticulously crafted articles, because they can ask follow-up questions.
I’m more interested in the messy middle ground. AI is good at data, and it can bring “all the standard counterarguments and established facts to the surface,” writes Barnaby Skinner, deputy editor-in-chief at NZZ. That’s where a journalist’s job starts. You’d be a fool not to use AI.
But know that the spectre has a mind of its own, and it didn’t summon itself. It would be even more foolish to give a chatbot a mediocre idea and let it write by itself. Or tell it to edit a draft, no questions asked. That’s just cheating.
Publisher Tim O’Reilly frames AI as a medium, and thinks the best writers will become the best at using it. Like riding a pedal-assist electric bicycle, he writes. The more effort you put in, the faster and farther you can go.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable with first drafts written solely by AI or outsourced thinking. O’Reilly ends with this, and I like it a lot: “If it’s going out under my name, I make sure I’m happy with every word.”
Now, if you work in a newsroom, do you call the Ghostbusters if a writer uses “it’s X, not Y,” like Druckenmiller did? Does everyone know your AI policy? Do you have a Pangram allegation response protocol?
What else I’m reading:
And now: He’s a journalist who doesn’t want to consume news produced by AI – and he has joined OpenAI. Evan Hirsch wants to help newsrooms figure out the next transformation (and adopt ChatGPT).
Four Questions with Evan Hirsch
Evan Hirsch leads OpenAI’s initiatives focused on AI adoption in journalism.
What’s the most important question right now?
What do we, as humans, want to become better at?
AI can already summarize, translate, sort, predict and organize better than most of us. But it’s easy to forget, when interacting with it, that it’s a machine on the other side of the conversation. It has knowledge, but not wisdom. Context, but not experience. Language, but not creativity. Those are purely – exclusively – human traits. By leveraging AI effectively, we give ourselves the bandwidth to really lean into what we actually want to do, not just what we have to do. The future is not humans versus machines. It’s humans deciding which parts of being human are too important to outsource.
Where are we taking AI too seriously, and where not seriously enough?
We are taking AI too seriously as an artist. So many people are focused on whether it can write a novel, replace a journalist, make a movie or produce a TV show. I don’t want to watch an AI movie, read an AI book, or consume news produced by AI – and I don’t know anybody who does. I want all of these things done by people, who’ve been enabled by AI. The displacement concerns are real: some jobs will change, some will shrink and some will disappear. The goal must be to help bring people through the change, not leave them behind.
At the same time, we are not taking AI seriously enough as infrastructure. The big change will happen in the most mundane of places: filling out forms, creating invoices, organizing research. The tasks few people are passionate about, but everybody spends half their life doing. AI will not replace human judgment. But it may finally remove some of the friction that has limited people’s apertures to think bigger and better.
What future are you looking forward to?
The future where technology gives us more time to pay attention. For journalists in particular, that means less time copying public records requests from one form to another. Less time writing emails nobody reads. Less time searching through twelve PDFs to find one particular quote. More time asking better questions, talking to people, noticing trends, and making things. The best future is not one where AI does everything for us. It is one where it gives us back enough time to remember what we actually wanted to do.
What’s a good website?
I started my career in local radio, so I absolutely love Radio Garden. You spin a virtual globe, click on a city and hear whatever is playing on the radio there. Tokyo talk radio. Nigerian pop. A news bulletin from Iceland. A college station in Ohio that sounds like it’s broadcasting from a basement – because it probably is. Also, it’s an iPhone/Android app – so you can take it on the go.
One more thing: Comic artist Clarice Tudor is just as disgusted by AI posters and images as you, so she created a set of stickers.
This is THEFUTURE.
