OpenAI, Microsoft Funding $10 Million In Grants For AI-Powered Journalism

OpenAI and Microsoft will give grants of up to $10 million to bring more AI tools into the newsroom. The grants will go to Chicago Public Media, the Minnesota Star Tribune, Newsday (in Long Island, NY), The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Seattle Times. "Each of the publications will hire a two-year AI fellow to develop projects for implementing the technology and improving business sustainability," reports Engadget. "Three more outlets are expected to receive fellowship grants in a second round." From the report: OpenAI and Microsoft are each contributing $2.5 million in direct funding as well as $2.5 million in software and enterprise credits. The Lenfest Institute of Journalism is collaborating with OpenAI and Microsoft on the project, and announced the news today.

Nobody asked for that

[kmoser]

"Here's a story you probably read in three other places, but mashed into slop, with a few hallucinations thrown in, so *we* can get your eyeballs instead."

Re:

[rsilvergun]

Billionaire propagandists like the guys who did Sinclair Media's "Must Run" TV [youtube.com] did.

Re:

[Alinabi]

Backpropagandists, more like it.

There are no air qoutes big enough

[rsilvergun]

to go around the word "journalism" in that headline.

So they're openly paying folks to fill...

[PubJeezy]

So they're openly paying folks to fill the spaces that we go to for journalism, with low resolution algorithmically generated copies of press releases. There's no pretense. Microsoft is going full black-hat.

No one likes spammers. No one likes Microsoft. Corporate black-hats don't need to exist.

AI is the antithesis of journalism!

[gillbates]

The point of the journalist is to truthfully and accurately record the momentous events of the world, not make up nice, plausible, but false stories which reinforce the reader's preconceived biases.

AI will not help with any of this. AI can't see; can't perceive what is going on; can't understand the emotional, social, political, environmental, etc... impact of anything, and can't tell truth from falsehood, only regurgitate the patterns on which it was trained.

Because democracy depends upon a well informed electorate for proper functioning, AI is one of the few technologies which can effectively subvert the proper functioning of democracies. It represents an existential threat to democracy itself when used to shape the information presented to the general public. It is bad enough that the average journalist can't present factual information without their personal opinion; how bad will it be when the only opinions (and facts) presented to the general public are those which suit the interests of the AI owners?