AI and the News

Opinion: AI comes for the journalists

I am weird. I don’t watch TV, and there is not a printed newspaper within a ninety-minute drive from where I have lived these past 1,798 days. I read the news online through web pages, and I listen to the Australian and World news in French, Spanish, and Italian through SBS-Sydney (if you want to learn a language, do it easily and for free)

Lately I read articles about AI, and see many headlines which, sometimes, I click to Read More.

Back in 1974, as a self-imposed exercise in making use of a (then) new AWA ADM-2 terminal , I wrote a version of the WOLFF machine, installed the terminal in the front lobby of the library, and waited.

The WOLFF machine is dead simple: A table with space for about 100 entries, accept a line from the user, store it in the table, issue at random any of the text lines now stored in the table. Once the table is full, after each emitted random response, ask the user “was my response any good”, and add -1, 0, or +1 to the score for that issued response. Gradually the good responses float to the top, the awkward responses drop out of the table. And if any rogue tries to mess things up, the following users will naturally correct the weights.

The results were amazing; some students would not believe that they were taking to a computer – they maintained that one of the mainframe computer operators (1974, remember) was typing the response. One of them trotted over to the computer building and spied on the operators!

Fifty years ago it was easy to fool humans into thinking that a computer system was intelligent.

Three months ago I used the ChatBot or whatever it is, asked it how to write a program in VBA to catalogue 18,000 MP3 music tracks. I was impressed. We have come a long way in 50 years.

So today we can use computers to generate news stories which, based on the machine’s database of data, will ALWAYS sound/read realistically. We can make videos with human faces moving their lips synchronized to the words and phrases. We can change the voice and have a sexy blonde reporter’s voice coming out of a football player’s mouth.

To me these videos are indistinguishable from the real thing.

Online news (and TV news, from what I’ve seen) are moving more and more towards entertainment. There is much less analysis and thought, and much more “reporting”, which becomes more and more like “story-telling” every week.

So perhaps news reports are becoming entertainment (“click-bait”) and since the entertainment can be generated by AI, have I reached the point where I should pay no attention to the news?

How then will I gain knowledge of what really is going on? Consider:-

(a) A news story about an earthquake somewhere else, pleading for donations.

(b) A news story about a new food fad or recipe that is sweeping the nation.

(c) A news story about a cure for cancer.

(d) A news story about news being morphed into entertainment.

You can make up as many entries to the list as you choose.

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