Is artificial intelligence a threat to journalism or will the technology destroy itself? | Samantha Floreani

Hitching a struggling media industry to the wagon of AI won’t serve our interests in the long run

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Before we start, I want to let you know that a human wrote this article. The same can’t be said for many articles from News Corp, which is reportedly using generative AI to produce 3,000 Australian news stories per week. It isn’t alone. Media corporations around the world are increasingly using AI to generate content.

By now, I hope it’s common knowledge that large language models such as GPT-4 do not produce facts; rather, they predict language. We can think of ChatGPT as an automated mansplaining machine – often wrong, but always confident. Even with assurances of human oversight, we should be concerned when material generated this way is repackaged as journalism. Aside from the issues of inaccuracy and misinformation, it also makes for truly awful reading.

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