Comment by michaelbuckbee
10 hours ago
For years, both the financial and sports news sides of things have generated increasingly templated "articles", this just feels like the latest iteration.
10 hours ago
For years, both the financial and sports news sides of things have generated increasingly templated "articles", this just feels like the latest iteration.
This dates back to at least the late 1990s for financial reports. A friend demoed such a system to me at that time.
Much statistically-based news (finance, business reports, weather, sport, disasters, astronomical events) are heavily formulaic and can at least in large part or initial report be automated, which speeds information dissemination.
Of course, it's also possible to distribute raw data tables, charts, or maps, which ... mainstream news organisations seem phenomenally averse to doing. Even "better" business-heavy publications (FT, Economist, Bloomberg, WSJ) do so quite sparingly.
A few days ago I was looking at a Reuters report on a strategic chokepoint north of the Philippines which it and the US are looking toward to help contain possible Chinese naval operations. Lots of pictures of various equipment, landscapes, and people. Zero maps. Am disappoint.
Obviously the solution is to use AI to extract the raw data from their AI generated fluff.
It's like the opposite of compression.
>It's like the opposite of compression.
I believe the word is depression, which seems apt when thinking of the idea of people using AI to make content longer and then the readers all using AI to make it shorter again.
At least in the case of Bloomberg they would like you to pay for that raw data. That's their bread and butter.
True.
But there's the approach the Economist takes. For many decades, it's relied on a three-legged revenue model: subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke consulting and research through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). My understanding is that revenues are split roughly evenly amongst these, and that they tend to even out cash-flow throughout economic cycles (advertising is famously pro-cyclical, subscriptions and analysis somewhat less so).
To that extent, the graphs and maps the Economist actually does include in its articles (as well as many of its "special reports") are both teasers and loss-leader marketing for EIU services. I believe that many of the special reports arise out of EIU research.
<https://www.eiu.com/n/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Intelligence_Unit>
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-n...
https://www.wired.com/story/wordsmith-robot-journalist-downl... https://archive.ph/gSdmb
And this has been going on for a while... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_journalism
Sports and financial are the two easiest to do since they both work from well structured numeric statistics.
I like Quakebot as an example of how to do this kind of thing ethically and with integrity: https://www.latimes.com/people/quakebot
> Quakebot is a software application developed by the Los Angeles Times to report the latest earthquakes as fast as possible. The computer program reviews earthquake notices from the U.S. Geological Survey and, if they meet certain criteria, automatically generates a draft article. The newsroom is alerted and, if a Times editor determines the post is newsworthy, the report is published.
> The computer program reviews earthquake notices from the U.S. Geological Survey
Probably a service that is provided to the general public for free, similar to NOAA and weather data - so chances are rather high it ends up on the chopping block or for-money only.
In the mid-late naughts, there used to be a content farm called "Associated Content". They would get daily lists of top searched terms from various search engines (Yahoo, Dogpile, Altavista, etc. etc.) and for each search term, pay an English major to write a 2-page fluff article. Regardless of what the topic was, they churned out articles by the bushel. Then they place ads on these articles and sat back and watched the dollars roll in.
A non-"AI" template is probably getting filled in with numbers straight from some relevant source. AI may produce something more conversational today but as someone else observed, this is a high-hallucination point for them. Even if they get one statistic right they're pretty inclined to start making up statistics that weren't provided to them at all if they sound good.
Not just that we know from heavy reddit posters that they have branching universe templates for all eventualities, so that they are "ready" whatever the outcome.
Both categories are and have-been bottom-feeder copy, and have been prior to the prevalence of LLMs.
Legitimate news organizations announce their use of A.I.
I believe the New York Times weather page is automated, but that started before the current "A.I." hype wave.
And I think the A.P. uses LLMs for some of its sports coverage.