A Disturbing Piece Of The AI Future We’re All Headed Into

It’s difficult enough to trust anything you read, see, or hear these days. Trust used to be the coin of the realm, but those days seem to have gone the way of the dodo. It’s bad enough that what used to pass for journalism has devolved into stenography, cheerleading, and blatant lying damaging enough to cost Fox News millions. Yet all of that continues. But we haven’t seen anything yet.

The Verge is out with a report that says Google Won’t Stop Replacing Our News Headlines With Terrible AI. Sean Hollister lays out the case well, and he’s right, this shouldn’t happen. But it does and it’s only going to get worse, because… well AI is the name of the game that everyone who controls any sort of publishing and most search engines are playing.

Here’s the rub. Content used to be king. Or so the theory went. That king fed his court by selling advertising. But that king got toppled by online advertising usurpers. Yes, there’s still content, but it doesn’t matter what the content is, and long as it can be advertised against. We’re already seeing such an overwhelming avalanche of AI generated content all over the Internet that merely dismissing it as AI Slop diminishes the definition of slop.

As an example, Meta’s on a quest to just create users out of nowhere to feed content to your feeds to make sure the advertising turnstiles always spin whether you’re doomscrolling or not.

Content, much less headlines, really doesn’t matter to those who control the channels. In fact, I’m guessing we’re not far off from seeing the same piece of content (whether AI generated or by humans) recycled with different AI generated headlines. I’m guessing It consumes less compute cycles to gin up a new headline than it does to create a full article.

I remember the days when human editors wrote headlines that often confused readers and pissed off reporters when they slanted or misrepresented the nature of a story’s content. Some of that still happens. But that will pale in comparison to the future we’re just beginning to live in.

(Image from Google, PC Mag, The Verge)

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