G/O Media Gives Another Crash Course On Perils Of Replacing Human Journalists With Half-Baked ‘AI’

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 12:35:40 +1100

Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>

Andrew Pam
<https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/08/g-o-media-gives-another-crash-course-on-perils-of-replacing-human-journalists-with-half-baked-ai/>

"While recent evolutions in “AI” have netted some profoundly interesting
advancements in creativity and productivity, its early implementation in
journalism has been a sloppy mess thanks to some decidedly human-based
problems: namely greed, incompetence, and laziness.

If you remember, the cheapskates over at Red Ventures implemented AI over at
CNET without telling anybody. The result: articles rife with accuracy
problems and plagiarism. Of the 77 articles published, more than half had
significant errors. It ultimately cost them more to have humans editors come in
and fix the mistakes than the money they’d actually saved.

Similar efforts are afoot over at G/O Media (owner of Gizmodo), which has
eagerly been replacing staff with half-baked “AI,” despite very clear and
repeated promises they wouldn’t be doing that. Last week, G/O Media shut down
the blog’s Spanish-language site, Gizmodo en Español. Human writers were
replaced with an AI-powered translation tool that would basically just
translate existing Gizmodo content.

It… did not go well. There were numerous instances where the AI couldn’t even
translate entire articles competently (the whole point), switching between
Spanish and English mid article. There were numerous other issues where the AI
screwed up basic formatting and punctuation"

Cheers,
       *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics

Comment via email

Home E-Mail Sponsors Index Search About Us