Comment by sfink
3 months ago
> What they want is to kill training, and more over, prevent the loss of being the middle-man between events and users.
So... they want to continue reporting news, and they don't want their news reports to be presented to users in a place where those users are paying someone else and not them. How horrible of them?
If NYT is not reporting news, then NYT news reports will not be available for AIs to ingest. They can perhaps still get some of that data from elsewhere, perhaps from places that don't worry about the accuracy of the news (or intentionally produces inaccurate news). You have to get signal from somewhere, just the noise isn't enough, and killing off the existing sources of signal (the few remaining ones) is going to make that a lot harder.
The question is, does journalism have a place in a world with AIs, and should OpenAI be the one deciding the answer to that question?
It's easy to see a future where primary sources post their information directly online (already largely the case) and AI agents make tailored, interactive news for their users.
Sure, there may still be investigative journalism and long form, but those are hardly the money makers.
Also, just like SWE's, writers have that same "do I have a place in the future?" anxiety in the back of their head.
The media is very hostile towards AI, and the threat is on multiple levels.
The problem is that the publishing industry seems to think their job is to print ink on paper, and they reluctantly admit that this probably also involves putting pixels on a screen.
They're hideously anti-tech and they completely ignore technological advancement when thinking about the scope of their product. Instead of investing millions of dollars in developing their own AI solutions that are the New York Times answer machine, they pay those millions of dollars to lawyers and sue people building the answer machines. It's entirely the wrong strategy, it's regressive, and yes, they are to blame for it.
The biggest bug I've observed in my life is that people think technology is its own sector when really it's a cross-cutting concern that everybody needs to be thinking about.