What’s the point in having sponsored content when your supposedly unpaid content is churned out by some kids who raised a couple million bucks off of this AI wave?
The ultimate goal of advertisement is to be invisible, to be influencing without having to admit as much, and AI is the perfect vehicle to do just that.
A/B testing and tracking metrics on user behavior is a very mature practice in the industry. Some types of cases and behaviors might be hard to track, but then really obvious ones (like Jan 6) also stand out.
High profile universities like Stanford built behavioral design labs backed by millions in funding to advance our understanding of how to influence behavior through technology. This is a massive commercial research space with huge money on the line. We can’t ignore that.
the butchered coverage was in local newspapers, also owned by gannett.
which begs the question, why doesn’t the headline just, you know, name gannett?
edit: anyone downvoting care to indicate why? it seems rather pertinent to name the owner, given the scale, and the potential impact of using such technology at scale.
do you know of gannett? legitimately curious.
gannett devours and typically avoids visibility. if nothing else because it’s confusing to the commoners that so many different news outlets are actually the same, without admitting it.
so, yes, what you said. but not quite.
Why wouldn’t they just use those original articles? Or are these made up whole cloth and a CEO thought AI just magically knows what happens on high school football fields?
That does have enough information to make an article. In the early days of baseball, a radio announcer could receive the stats continuously and narrate the game, with a bit of imagination.
Some of the examples look as if they got nothing more than the box scores, and used AI hallucination on other sports articles to generate a bunch of generic verbiage out of that. (To me, as a non sports fan, that's what most sports writing looks like anyway. I have no idea why people want to read that, but there is a market for it.)
These experiments fail because they greedily try to outsource all the work to AI. Another recent example: the lawyer who submitted ChapGPT hallucinations directly to a court case.
You don't need to eliminate humans, and certainly not at first. You just need to be much more efficient than status quo in order for AI to be deployed at scale.
I've never heard of Gannet before today.
I don't really mean much by the downvote. It's a personal pet peeve of mine when people comment on the headline, and I think it's against the spirit of this part of the guidelines:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
My downvote definitely didn't mean that I didn't think there was something substantive to say about Gannet's involvement, or that I disagreed.
(The guidelines also tell us not to talk about voting, which I'm breaking of course, but I do try to respond when people genuinely want to know why I voted a certain way. I understand why that part of the guidelines exist, but I have mixed feelings about it, I don't see how else people are meant to know why they were downvoted.)
this is my very point, and it is anything but tangential.
thank you.
The numbers are probably meaningful to them due to their education though.
It’s like saying programmers spend their whole career pour though millions of lines of nigh random symbols they call source code.
If the only data you have about a game is the sport, the team names, and the score, there's only so much an AI (or a human!) can do to write an interesting article about it. Once you've read a few dozen of the generated articles, they'll all start sounding the same -- because, aside from the details, they are all the same.
If you want quality articles, you need some more depth in the source data. And, for little-league sports games, that data may just not exist.
> One article even failed to populate properly, with the text instead featuring a bracketed glimpse at how its opening sentence was supposed to read.
> "The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday," reads the butchered intro.