AI is becoming an information gateway. Audiences still don’t want it making news

54 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by rdmuser
(niemanlab.org)

60 Comments

_bobm

3 hours ago

I've been thinking about the sheer volume of information I am interested in being produced every day. At current rates, I may need a few hours to thoroughly go through the entire stream in the morning.

As this rate of information production increases, this will become a full time job.

Obviously, this is not a full time job, and I think agents will fill in the "menial" work-load.

So interesting times ahead.

Frieren

2 hours ago

> At current rates, I may need a few hours to thoroughly go through the entire stream in the morning.

When was that not true? There are more books in the world that I want to read that the ones I can realistically (or even in the ideal case) be able to read. Magazines, newspapers, Youtube videos, ... AI has not changed anything.

Summarizing removes information. It is like just reading the titles instead of commenting on the content. Saves you time, but it is not the same.

_bobm

2 hours ago

Not summarization, but discovery, is critical. Imagine millions of disconnected nodes are becomming connected in a graph.

And then on the purely integration scale, how do we even integrate this information as humans without being overwhelmed.

zemvpferreira

3 hours ago

Personally I have resorted to batching, narrowing my scope, raising my quality threshold and making peace with missing out. Summarizing tools don’t interest me in the least, I read to think. News are inessential, opinions are good brain food.

_bobm

2 hours ago

Right. But my point was that newer and newer sources will start popping. "Missing out" will become the dominant mode. But maybe this is just a misguided interpolation on my behalf.

I don't have a good concept of how this can be solved at the moment.

watwut

3 hours ago

Opinion writers are frequently at odds with actual events and facts. They dont get factchecked as much as news writers - even in the same journal. In fact, they dont get fact checked at all.

saulpw

7 hours ago

AI is good for consuming public information, not for producing public information.

skybrian

6 hours ago

If I ask an AI for help to download some public data to make a graph, and then I publish the graph on my website, is that consuming or producing? Seems like both?

MrJohz

3 hours ago

For me at least, an AI "produces" when it makes meaningful decisions. Do if you found the data, understood it, chose how you wanted it presented, but got the AI to write the code that generated the actual graph, then the scope of AI decision making is relatively small - it's reasonable to say that you produced that graph (with AI assistance). But if you got the AI to find some data that supported your article and present it as a graph, then it's making pretty much all the decisions there - which data set to use, how to graph it, even which parts of the article to support with that data. That's an AI-produced graph, for me at least.

lconnell962

2 hours ago

Not a very well accepted or reasoned Philosphic counter answer, but to keep it simple, current LLMs consume information and regurgitate it without understanding.

So they currently sit somewhere in the neighborhood of the infinite monkey theorem. Toward the better side of it than pure Random. But you need to take that with a grain of salt with things leaking out about human intervention, and the Hallucinations we still get.

saulpw

5 hours ago

It consumed the data and you produced the graph.

skybrian

4 hours ago

It wrote all the code. I asked for changes and edited some of the text to reduce slop.

harvey9

3 hours ago

You have a deterministic path from published data to graph output which you signed off on, and the AI wrote the code. In my view the AI did not produce the news any more than the script did.

lukan

4 hours ago

Writing the prompt is producing?

SiempreViernes

4 hours ago

> If I ask an AI for help to download some public data

They only describe the LLM as helping withdownloading data, this means the creation of the plot could be done by hand.

I agree that the rest of the post then proceeds to ask a question in a way implying the machine also created the plot, but that's not actually in the stated premise.

akkad33

an hour ago

What information is it producing in this instance? More like transforming

Frieren

2 hours ago

> not for producing public information.

That is true, in the send that it is bad at producing useful quality information. But the sat truth is that AI is great to produce large volumes of text. It's its main thing.

To stop using AI to generate professional sounding but empty of meaning text requires disciple or regulations. In the current state of things corporations go for more is better and governments are slow to act. So, neither seem to be an option.

> AI is good for consuming public information

As far as it lasts. Public information is already been poisoned by bad actors. That was harder to do when it was more costly to generate text. But AI allows to create large quantities of misinformation at a cheap price tag.

Reliable sources will be as important as ever if not more. Your AI should be connected to your subscriptions to independent newspapers, to official government sources, etc. Quality output requires quality input.

AI is worthless if it just reads text generated by another AI.

pj_mukh

8 hours ago

But what does "used Gen AI" in an article mean?

Did they type "Write a news article make no mistakes?" and hit Publish

or

Did they use it to find secondary sources for a set of details to then manually go check them? Or use it for copy-editing or have a discussion with a frontier model about the best term to describe a concept (something I find them very good at!)? Or a myriad of such interventional uses.

Are those considered the same by the audience? Was the difference explained in this survey? I'm betting the audience is a lot more accepting of the latter and the former is what everyone imagines "Use Gen-AI" means and words like "mostly human generated with some AI help" don't really capture the difference OR value.

I hate to be the "there is nuance" guy, but...isn't there significant nuance here?

grey-area

4 hours ago

There absolutely is nuance here, but you have to consider the pressures operating on newsrooms, which are already a shadow of their former selves after the internet hit.

The pressure is intense to save money, there have been decades of cuts, and they’re now operating on trimmed budgets and rarely do real journalism any more.

So for most newspapers and online news sources generative ai will be used to the hilt, to simply replace employees, or by freelancers on a deadline. The pressure will be for ever faster news. It will be used for writing not research because of these pressures, and already is in many places.

It’s already flooding some online spaces like Apple News on the stocks app with dross from simply wall st or generated bitcoin price articles. In the case of financial news it was always full of nonsense of the form ‘stocks rise today because of factor X’ so this is no great loss, but in other areas it will creep in.

Just as a for example, I'm already seeing quite a few obviously AI generated images in mainstream newspapers here in the UK (as illustrations, replacing work by real illustrators).

moezd

6 hours ago

It sounds like this is the exact discussion happening within software world: Vibe code one shot app make no mistake push to prod, or write boilerplate, discuss architecture, assist migrations and vulnerability research?

I think we lost all nuance in the world, though. Everything has to be black or white, otherwise nothing sells anymore.

simianwords

4 hours ago

A certain pattern I’ve noticed: people are vary of and condemn AI use in many domains; complain about hallucination and inaccuracies. In just a few years, the use of AI in these domains will become mandatory and not using AI will be almost seen as risky.

Example: if you don’t use AI as a reviewer for your code to check for vulnerabilities, it will be seen as risky - as compared to a year ago when people were complaining about hallucination.

Expect the same pattern for healthcare as well. Also journalism

pona-a

36 minutes ago

Both are true! You could be for using an LLM to review code, paired with some deterministic harness to filter false positives, but be entirely against it writing the fix, or any code in that project.

serious_angel

9 hours ago

Irresponsible and dead LLM/SI/AI is not an information gateway, and will never be. Limited/censored/opinionated or not.

People is the gateway, their effort, their experience, to learn from.

mkotlikov

7 hours ago

What does AI for news even mean? In what world are people using it for search, but not for news? Search looks at and summarizes the news! If I ask why Nvidia dropped today, is that the news?

41353aab

4 hours ago

Yesterday, they had some students on the radio, who trained a neural net to make piano music. And well, it sounded - not that good - my guess is because they selected the worst possible sample. Radio moderator: "Well, it obviously has a long way to go."

In a world where SUNO and Ace Step 1.5 exist

tehjoker

8 hours ago

So glad the public hates this stuff in journalism. I hope all the news agencies that use it are left with the same kind of remnant audience that found Q-Anon so inspiring.

threethirtytwo

8 hours ago

This is an hallucination. We all know humans hallucinate just like LLMs and this is another form of it.

It’s like if I asked you if you enjoy talking shit about people or saying things and gossiping without people knowing about it.

Most people would say no they don’t enjoy it. But most people would be lying. Not lying to you but lying to themselves. It’s one of the most obvious lies because everyone can definitely think back and recall themselves talking shit.

People say they don’t want to use LLMs and they say they hate ai and they say they appreciate human art and effort and human endeavor and all of this is true and at the same time not true as the same people who say they don’t like it use it all the time. It’s both true and not true. Human brains like LLMs did not evolve to enforce strict logical conclusions because such a thing is not absolutely necessary for survival. You can hold contradictory opinions and beliefs in your mind.

VCFundedGenYer

8 hours ago

"Cigarettes are incredible. Audiences don't want them"

threethirtytwo

8 hours ago

Ai genuinely is incredible. Think about it.

It’s just the hype train is excessive and in everyone’s faces and anything that’s like that genuinely becomes hated.

Imagine if I saved the lives of hundreds of people everyday. And I would throw this fact in your face everyday via TikTok, email spam, YouTube, social media.

Pretty soon you’ll become sick of it. You’ll not care for anyones life. Thats what is happening with ai. Ai is genuinely from a logical standpoint, incredible. But all of that is diluted by overhype.

dweinus

7 hours ago

Except AI isnt saving lives. It isnt even usually improving lives. For the most part it is being used to justify laying people off, to heap more responsibility on those that remain, to destroy the livelihood of artists, and to flood public spaces with slop. Even if the capabilities are incredible, the average lived experience of it is awful.

Refreeze5224

6 hours ago

It's not the hype we are tired of. We're tired of the hype being wrong, and pro-AI people being quasi-religious zealots about, while ignoring the massive costs and harms. And if you question the AI dogma, you are accused of being either a Luddite who doesn't understand, or a victim of a Chinese influence campaign.

threethirtytwo

5 hours ago

The hype is not wrong. It’s just too much. Navier stokes and hundreds of other unsolvable math problems were solved. That is genuinely real and worth the hype.

My entire company now uses AI to code. Nobody writes code by hand at my company anymore. At this point if you can’t see how incredible and horrifying it is then you’re delusional.

I get it though. One year ago you’d be right. The paradigm shift is happening so fast people haven’t updated their priors. What you believed to be true just changed. It flipped several times this year and people who keep up to date had to completely flip their understanding of the world and the nature of AI several times. This is not an easy thing to do and thus many people like you just missed the boat.

There’s no doubt that there is a financial ai bubble. But that bubble is completely orthogonal to the complete paradigm shift of the actual capabilities of AI.

rkuodys

5 hours ago

I think the point is not that AI is not great, but it's less than what was promised.

Very good analogy with Tesla FSD. Is it great tech- yes, of course. Is is the thing that was promised to come out 10 years ago? Far from it.

If you expect AI to do everything for you, it's still not there. And if you're sceptic or even neutral to this topic- AI is just causing more problems (especially in security) by the day.

Dylan16807

5 hours ago

> Very good analogy with Tesla FSD. Is it great tech- yes, of course.

Not of course. I'll call it good to great the day it gets beyond level 2, and no sooner.

And LLMs are similar in a lot of use cases.

paganel

3 hours ago

> Navier stokes and hundreds of other unsolvable math problems were solved

Does that put food on the table? It does not, to the contrary, this AI thing is taking food off the table for many, many people.

hardbass

3 hours ago

Stop using computers, electricity, cars, machinery, agriculture. Each of those took away thr jobs of millions.

watwut

3 hours ago

I don't think you know much about actual economic history here.

hardbass

2 hours ago

Did they take food off the table from people initially or didnthey not? Electric lighting certainly must have killer the job of the gas lamp lighter or at least forced him to change. Cars obviously impacted horse drivers.

paganel

2 hours ago

The effects of all of those those changes that you mentioned were not that drastic when it came to getting food off the table of those millions of people, I'm saying that those millions won't remain like sheep and will make things right sooner rather than later, that's what always happens (see Polanyi, for example).

But, yeah, you AI zealots on forums like this one can keep thinking that we, those millions, will just remain like sheep taken to the slaughterhouse while you enjoy your higher comps while in the service of today's AI masters.

hardbass

2 hours ago

You are the zealot who got frenzied into psychosis by one of the biggest accelerators of math and science that we invented.

And changes were in fact drastic, thr fact that countries like UK and Germany for several years became the most powerful countries in the europe due to the industrial revolution.

Solving abstract mathematical puzzles and enganhing in pointless research into substances for crnturies gave us ultimately the Haber-Bosch process, which literally keeps the human race from starving. You would prefer humans starve just to protect som jobs.

On the topic of farming, that used to be the occupation of most of thr population in olden times, today its barely 2 percent. Agriculture tech has already killed millions of jobs.

hardbass

3 hours ago

Anyone who believes in infinite imaginary beings and imaginary things that supposed being wants you to do has no right to call anyone else religious. If you are not one of those, then a meaningful discussion can begin.

Fricken

3 hours ago

Silicon valley wants me to be completely 100% dependent on Silicon Valley to do anything. That's their goal, it's what they've been working toward this whole time.

"Trust me bro", they say. They have new and dangerously powerful tools to get me to trust them harder. Me, one of the dumb fucks.

954380863

5 hours ago

"Acting like a luddite gets me accusations of being a luddite."

Why don't you deranged organic code cultist switch to TempleOS?

hardbass

3 hours ago

Luddism in my view is a civilization ending disease. These same types of thinking will ban advances in medicine because its "unnatural" and prevent the steps needed to become an interplantetary and further civilization eg because autonomous and intelligent nav is "evil" and steals jobs.

watwut

3 hours ago

Except that conservative pro-ai crowd are exact same people who throw fit over vaccines. Especially on leadership level.

defrost

3 hours ago

> Luddism in my view is a civilization ending disease.

Sounds more than a bit OTT dramatic there, not to mention ignorant of what the Luddites cared about.

> These same types of thinking will ban advances in medicine because its "unnatural"

A) Hyperbolic nonsense.

B) So what? Seriously, let's assume all medical advances cease right now, this very instant. We'd be stuck with modern medicine as we know it - that's hardly a civilization ending calamity.

hardbass

2 hours ago

It is, the earth is a finite system. And is still subject to catastrophies. We already use medicines that give us resiliences we didn't have, we'd need more of it, eg raising the baseline environment we can survive in. And when earth runs out of energy for thr population then what? Do we start killing people or stop having kids. Going interplantetary really is not a choice in the medium to long term.

And the point is technology is a web of dependencies, any piece of tech or science even if seemingly having no connection to somehthing is a key piece of the puzzle. Who would have thought 200 years ago that high quality optics creates more powerful calculation devices?

bigstrat2003

7 hours ago

> Ai genuinely is incredible. Think about it.

It is literally incredible, that is, the claims people make about it are not believable. It simply does not do the magical stuff people claim it does.

kingstnap

6 hours ago

> It simply does not do the magical stuff people claim it does.

What are you even talking about? You can see it do the magic yourself for like $20. The lean proof of the exponential time hypotheses disproof for exampe is straight up on github right now for you to look at.

What magical thing are you waiting for? It is literally currently revolutionaizing all engineering work.

defrost

4 hours ago

It's just fantastic, to think the cost of running the Stasi was once 20% of national GDP and now that same oppressive all seeing surveillance and data collation is available for pennies on the dollar.

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

For clarity, I'm more or less indifferent to AI, I do understand how it all works - it's humans with AI I don't trust and that I don't see being adequately reigned in.

paganel

3 hours ago

> The lean proof of the exponential time hypotheses

The what now? I don't know what that is. Can AI help me put food on the table and pay my bills? That thing I can understand.

hardbass

3 hours ago

Did the centuries of work of scientists and philophers in chemistry put food on any groups table? Do you think haber bosch would have just dropped out of the sky one day randomly?

paganel

2 hours ago

I can understand a triangle and how come Pitagora’s work might have been worthwhile, but I cannot even begin to understand what this Navier thing is about. You seem to believe in higher maths putting food on our tables, care to delve more into that?

Also a reminder of how come the post-WW2 USSR was a technocratic-scientist state/society and even so, by the end of its existence it had failed at this basic task of feeding its population.

hardbass

2 hours ago

200 years ago you would have said the same about research into optics or number theory. How would you have known back then what these two lead to?

hulitu

4 hours ago

> AI is becoming an information gateway

Funny how they call mass surveillance these days. /s

aplummer

5 hours ago

The comments here are enlightening. All the anti-ai hype posts are downvoted. I think justifiably, this is a transformational moment. But what we can surely agree on is two fold, it is built on theft, and the regular non-hn people are increasingly likely to demand a reckoning for that theft.

Frieren

2 hours ago

Big AI corporations have taken everybody's information (your personal pictures, your mails, your website browsing habits, etc.) and make it private.

AI is a public good created from personal information. Its output cannot be copyrighted, the models themselves should be opened for everyone by law.

That is the reckoning. Give back the information to the people that created it.

simianwords

4 hours ago

It’s interesting to see the general public is trying to bestow a secular “original sin” onto AI. It could’ve been climate change. It could’ve been job loss. But I think we’ve converged on copyright and theft - ironically from people who usually don’t think highly of copyright.

rnd0

an hour ago

>It could’ve been climate change.

It's also the destructive nature of data centers both ecologically and to people's neighborhoods and other ways.

Honestly, I think that's a more serious side than the IP side.