CNET Pauses Publishing AI-Written Stories After Disclosure Controversy (theverge.com) 21
CNET will pause publication of stories generated using artificial intelligence "for now," the site's leadership told employees on a staff call Friday. The Verge reports: The call, which lasted under an hour, was held a week after CNET came under fire for its use of AI tools on stories and one day after The Verge reported that AI tools had been in use for months, with little transparency to readers or staff. CNET hadn't formally announced the use of AI until readers noticed a small disclosure. "We didn't do it in secret," CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo told the group. "We did it quietly." CNET, owned by private equity firm Red Ventures, is among several websites that have been publishing articles written using AI. Other sites like Bankrate and CreditCards.com would also pause AI stories, executives on the call said.
The call was hosted by Guglielmo, Lindsey Turrentine, CNET's EVP of content and audience, and Lance Davis, Red Ventures' vice president of content. They answered a handful of questions submitted by staff ahead of time in the AMA-style call. Davis, who was listed as the point of contact for CNET's AI stories until recently, also gave staff a more detailed rundown of the tool that has been utilized for the robot-written articles. Until now, most staff had very little insight into the machine that was generating dozens of stories appearing on CNET.
The AI, which is as of yet unnamed, is a proprietary tool built by Red Ventures, according to Davis. AI editors are able to choose domains and domain-level sections from which to pull data from and generate stories; editors can also use a combination of AI-generated text and their own writing or reporting. Turrentine declined to answer staff questions about the dataset used to train AI in today's meeting as well as around plagiarism concerns but said more information would be available next week and that some staff would get a preview of the tool.
The call was hosted by Guglielmo, Lindsey Turrentine, CNET's EVP of content and audience, and Lance Davis, Red Ventures' vice president of content. They answered a handful of questions submitted by staff ahead of time in the AMA-style call. Davis, who was listed as the point of contact for CNET's AI stories until recently, also gave staff a more detailed rundown of the tool that has been utilized for the robot-written articles. Until now, most staff had very little insight into the machine that was generating dozens of stories appearing on CNET.
The AI, which is as of yet unnamed, is a proprietary tool built by Red Ventures, according to Davis. AI editors are able to choose domains and domain-level sections from which to pull data from and generate stories; editors can also use a combination of AI-generated text and their own writing or reporting. Turrentine declined to answer staff questions about the dataset used to train AI in today's meeting as well as around plagiarism concerns but said more information would be available next week and that some staff would get a preview of the tool.
It's inevitable. (Score:3)
Railing against AI-generation in casual reporting is just being regressive. Why insist on human authorship? If it's reasonably accurate and readable, and passes the plagiarism checks, then the only remaining reason for the resistance is good, old-fashioned anger that technology is eliminating jobs. My profession of almost three decades is going under that particular bus right alongside these.
Some groups thought their type of contribution was protected against the march of technology. The creative types held (and still hold) that belief the longest. The speed at which that us being challenged is staggeringly high.
AI is finally achieving critical mass across industries not prepared for it. We will be awash in unemployed white collars. I don't know what to do about it. I suspect nobody does.
Re:It's inevitable. (Score:4)
This reminds me of all those people insisting we need to rush self-driving car tech to market, insisting it is better than human drivers.
No, let's just ignore the complex questions about who is responsible for car crashes and whether insurance companies should pay out or not. We can't be bothered with such trifling issues when we need to get our proprietary half-baked tech on the market and get a return on our investment NOW.
Seriously. The reason I don't like AI doing all the work instead of a person, is the same reason I don't like an unpaid intern doing all the work instead of the veteran. Everything is fine until it isn't... and it all goes tits-up in the worst way possible... and nobody comes forward to take responsibility due to a "computer error". The rubes may be impressed with the tech, but it's still just a matter of garbage-in, garbage-out.
Inevitable? Probably. That doesn't mean I'm going to listen to all the people saying I shouldn't worry about, and that getting upset is "regressive". It also doesn't mean it provides any real value, people will be willing to pay for it, and it will be sustainable. If the industry truly tries to embrace AI as the norm, I suspect some really bad things will happen and we'll find out the hard way that pushing the tech into production so quickly is a serious mistake. Not like that will stop the pencil-pushers from trying.
Re: (Score:2)
let's just ignore the complex questions about who is responsible for car crashes and whether insurance companies should pay out or not.
That isn't a complex question, and it was answered decades ago when software was first used in vehicles.
Re: (Score:2)
You're hoping for a standard we fail to levy against people in the first place. We haven't got a decent system in place for assigning "blame" at all. Disputed cases contesting it go on for years.
Plagiarism? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's reasonably accurate and readable, and passes the plagiarism checks
The debate around plagiarism vs research goes back centuries. Blaming A.I. of plagiarism is just the newest iteration.
"If you copy from one book, that’s plagiarism; if you copy from many books, that’s research." -- Earliest citation, Wallace Notestein, Yale professor, 1929
Similar sentiment: "If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will cried up as erudition." -- Reverend Charles Caleb Colton, 1820
Plagiarism quotes [quoteinvestigator.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know what to do about it. I suspect nobody does.
Seize the means of production, obviously. But most everybody is still stuck in some kind of fantasy of being taken care of by the same governments that are already failing them. Help is not coming.
Re: (Score:2)
Railing against AI-generation in casual reporting is just being regressive. Why insist on human authorship? If it's reasonably accurate and readable, and passes the plagiarism checks, then the only remaining reason for the resistance is good, old-fashioned anger that technology is eliminating jobs.
Algorithmic story generation is an interesting application of the field of Artificial Intelligence.
It does not make the errors that are common from human authors (spelling, grammar, homonyms, etc.), but it is susceptible to the old "garbage in, garbage out" problem. It is a tool, like a calculator: if you input accurate facts, it will output accurate facts. If the user feeds it someone else's work as input, then the output will be a derivative work...
Re: (Score:2)
I want full disclosure in CAPITAL LETTERS (Score:4, Interesting)
When I read news I want it from a human, because I want it from a perspective closest to me, as a human and what can be important to a human. And as much as it might be able to mimic it, a machine cannot do it because it is not a human and just mimicking. Of course some people will say this means nothing, but I think people who do are more often than not a symptom of our age. An age where many are disconnected from the volume of human contact we used to have, in favour of interacting with other people through an electronic medium; reducing human interactions to some machine-like process. This is creating an age of less empathy. I think we would do well to have less AI telling us stories, less interactions through social media, messaging, and phone apps in general, and more interactions with the real world including in person conversations, and over the telephone at worst. Some millennials of all people are starting to figure it out already, with the "new" flip phone fascination and choosing to leave their smart phones at home when going out to socialize. Good for them.
Re: (Score:1)
Reely! We relie on modorn teknology in a teknical world mor and mor to aint get misstakes it be xpekted
However much we may collectively rail against them, Spell Checkers and Grammar Checkers are a boon to all of us without advanced degrees in English. I remember when the introduction of calculators would cause wide spread disaster. The way we interact with an increasingly technical world becomes more and more dependent u
They were already writing bad articles (Score:4, Funny)
Re: They were already writing bad articles (Score:1)
interesting surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
When looking at CNET stories I frequently thought to myself "a robot could do a better job of writing this tripe."
"AI-Generated Articles - by openai/chat (Score:2)
"AI-Generated Articles Take Online Magazines by Storm
In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world of journalism has been on the rise. Online magazines and news outlets have begun to utilize AI-generated content in order to produce articles quickly and efficiently.
One such magazine, Tech Times, has been using AI-generated articles to cover the latest advancements in technology. According to the magazine's editor-in-chief, John Smith, the use of AI has allowed them to produce articles
Writing is editing (Score:2)