Category: Op-Eds

“To the transformer, all previous art, all previous language, exists as intellectual pulp. There is no difference between Yeats’s Byzantium and your most recent email. Natural-language processing is an unfathomable disintegration followed by an unfathomable reintegration.” – Stephen Marche IN THE ATLANTIC,…

“I’m not worried that artificial intelligence is coming for my job. . . in the short term, I expect that AI will actually be good for established writers and outlets, precisely because it generates so much bad writing.“ Megan McArdle Opinion writer…

“Coupled with other emerging technologies including AI-powered image makers, deep fakes, and other innovations, players seeking to manipulate public opinion will be armed with an arsenal of weapons difficult to counteract, particularly in a society where journalism is in decadence,…

“Here is just some of what ChatGPT does not do: research, fact-checking, or copyediting at a minimally adequate level. Indeed, ChatGPT is proof that finding “truth” is a lot trickier than having enough data and the right algorithm.” Jenna Burrell…

“For now, ChatGPT is typing, not writing. Maureen Dowd Noted columnist Maureen Dowd joins the field of writers challenging ChatGPT to a literary duel. She carries on a “dream interview” with Shakespeare. Maureen Dowd is an op-ed columnnist for The…

‘Emotions and affect are outside of the domain of reason, and predictive analytics and machine learning operate based on the logic of mathematics — even if they’re asked to generate emotions, they need rational methods to do so.’ The future…

‘Algorithm design is an important new way for thinking about media diversity in society.’ News algorithms can be powerful expressions of journalistic values says journalism AI specialist Nick Diakopoulos, in COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW. He suggests curation algorithms align with individual…

‘news media organizations seem unlikely to survive if they continue to operate under assumptions that they have inherited from our previous ideas about ideas, information, and knowledge which were informed by the strengths and limitations of paper.’ Machine learning and…

‘As young parents, we’re caught off-guard when suddenly we’re arguing with an articulate, obdurate child. We desperately want our children, human or otherwise, to grow up and succeed, yet when they do, we find ourselves flummoxed by a world of…

‘Artificial-intelligence systems are being designed to serve immediate business needs—and in the absence of ethical codes that take into account the well-being of the humans affected by them.’ Fred Beneson wonders what happens when human jobs are only about tough…

The Editorial Board of NATURE says ‘governments have been slow to to prioritize the ethics of AI.’ The US and China have been overly focused on the ‘the top prize,’ they say, a portion of the US$15 trillion yield expected…

‘Am I meant to compete with a bot now? Satoshi doesn’t need to sleep, feel inspired, or even have a drop of coffee to excel at his job. How am I ever supposed to catch up with that damned bot?’…

‘A software engineer can create an army of AI-powered bots, each pretending to be a different person, promoting content on behalf of political or commercial interests. Unlike broadcast propaganda or direct marketing, this approach also uses the self-reinforcing qualities of…

‘Deep reinforcement learning may not be the royal road to artificial general intelligence, but DeepMind itself is a formidable operation, tightly run and well funded, with hundreds of PhDs.’ In WIRED Gary Marcus rhetorically asks if AI is faltering given…

‘the word intelligence does not adequately explain what is occurring, and ascribing anthropomorphic qualities to AI is out of order… What AI can do is to perform well-specified tasks to help discover associations between data and actions, providing solutions for quandaries people…

‘…ethics are much more easily manipulated to support a given company or government’s agenda, with limited recourse for anyone who disagrees.’  Alison Berthet, writing in OpenGlobalRights, argues that existing human rights provisions are more robust than ethics and come already…

‘One key difference between the analogue bureaucracy of the traditional civil service and the digitised bureaucracy of artificial intelligence is that it is very much easier to hold a human organisation to account and to retrace the process by which…

‘Emotions are going to become more important for news in the networked era, that is inevitable, the choice for journalists (and the public) is how they respond.’ IN A SPEECH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, Charlie Beckett says emotion can contribute to…

‘Potential funders need to be convinced that journalism is as noble a cause as, say, cancer research.’ IN THE ASIA TIMES (via Project Syndicate) Reuters Institute Director of Strategic Development Alexandra Borchant argues for more emphasis on human aspects of journalism…

‘…in American history, panic about technological change is almost always tangled up with panic about immigration’ IN THE NEW YORKER Jill Lepore argues that advances in technology and having a job are two sides of the same coin. Lepore is…

‘Seeing GPT2 “write” one of “my” articles was a stomach-dropping moment: a) it turns out I am not the unique genius we all assumed me to be; an actual machine can replicate my tone to a T; b) does anyone…

‘I did not know anyone who intentionally wanted to incorporate bias into their work. But I also did not find anyone who actually knew what it meant to counter bias in any true and methodical way.’ IN WIRED MAGAZINE former…

‘It didn’t sit well for this outfit’s inky wretches. For we’ve seen the results of this kinda thing. It ain’t pretty. (Would a robot use the word “ain’t”?)’ THE NORTHWEST ARKANSAS DEMOCRATIC GAZETTE has an alternate view of automated journalism,…

‘This research reveals why so many people seem oblivious to, or complacent about, the challenges that AI technology poses to fundamental rights and the rule of law.’ IN THE GUARDIAN John Naughton flags shortcomings in media coverage when industry is…

‘The ability to use machine learning to simulate an individual saying or doing almost anything poses personal and political risks that societies around the world are ill-equipped to guard against.’ IN THE WASHINGTON POST the editorial board warns that algorithm-generated…

‘AlphaZero seemed to express insight. It played like no computer ever has, intuitively and beautifully, with a romantic, attacking style.’ IN THE NEW YORK TIMES mathematician Steven Strogatz says the threshold crossed by the game-playing AI, AlphaZero, displayed ‘a breed…

‘Existing A.I. systems that have been built to comprehend news accounts are extremely limited… lacking a robust mechanism for drawing inferences or a way of connecting to a body of broader knowledge.’ IN THE NEW YORK TIMES Gary Marcus and…

‘Which is the easier way to make a buck: figuring out a better way to exploit somebody, or making a better product? With the new AI, it looks like the answer is finding a better way to exploit somebody.’ IN…

‘Society now has to learn that video no longer guarantees reliability. Instead, it could be the biggest lie of all.’ IN THE WASHINGTON POST Tom Kent sounds an alarm for media companies to increase care with 3rd-party video. His warning…

‘Social media has allowed self-proclaimed ‘AI influencers’ who do nothing more than paraphrase Elon Musk to cash in on this hype with low-quality pieces. The result is dangerous.’ IN THE GUARDIAN Oscar Schwartz says trivializations of AI in media coverage…