Comment by minimaxir
10 hours ago
Over the past few years, I had helped Ed with some difficult nuances around the obscure technical aspects of serving LLMs (e.g. benchmarks and model caching); he has also shouted myself and Simon Willison out positively multiple times. I stopped assisting him because he repeatedly misused said advice to the most cynical interpretation ("how can this be interpreted to make AI boosters sound crazy?) and often made it misleading at best. Nowadays I suspect he views me as one of those crazy AI boosters.
Not challenging him was a mistake in hindsight, and I own it. Going forward I will no longer be helping writers/journalists with a clear anti-AI bias.
>I will no longer be helping writers/journalists with a clear anti-AI bias.
Take out the 'anti-AI' qualification, and you've got a decent general principle.
He made a blog post, literally last month, and it said that AIs have no use outside of coding.
It just shows he's done zero research on the things he talks about all day. Radiologists are using them, ad firms, artists, translators, law firms, auditors... It's hard to think of a white collar firm not using them.
This reads slightly weird and more like a pledge of alignment than a statement from the heart.
But apart from that, I guess that's always the learning? Journalists (or people labeling themselves as such) often have their own story they want to tell, and usually do so by building it out of little blocks of reality stacked together to form the desired picture.
I would predict a similarly frustrating experience being equally probable even without the "clear anti-AI bias" attribute set.
That's an unfair characterization of tech journalists in general. When BuzzFeed News was around, I worked closely with them on technical aspects and projects to ensure that everything was correct and accurate, and there were very receptive to it; it was not a "directionally correct" thing, the journalists wanted to avoid any unintentional. That was also one of the reasons I was open-minded to helping Ed even though we ideologically disagree: the truth is what's important.
BuzzFeed News incidentally was how I first came across Ed on Twitter from his tech PR work about 9 years ago, back when he was writing guest editorials on Gizmodo about Person of Interest (which is very very funny in hindsight). It's from the heart that I'm a bit bummed out that things turned out this way.
Not to dunk on your friends and all, but wasn't Buzzfeed the exact outlet at the forefront of dismantling the credibility of the word "journalism"?
Like.. they surely had valid pieces, but I remember them also being the ones smashing the system and trust to pieces by being very social-media-engagement-native (for the lack of a better term).
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The LLM as this beautiful straight man default human simulator tells me that BuzzFeed News was some kind of investigative journalism daughter company of Buzzfeed the destroyer of worlds, and with that these would for sure be two unconnected entities, not to be judged like that.
And, for all legal intents and purposes, I am of course sure it is completely right. I could almost bet that this exact trick is why there even was a legit journalism daughter company with the same name in the first place.
So that one could well-actually all the bad words away, by pointing at it and either saying "Hey it's a different thing!!!111" or "Hey but we're also doing good work in that branch!!!!1111". Always depending on which is more opportune. Association or disassociation.
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Anyway. I do believe you that your friends were trying to do the right thing.
I just have doubts as to why the place they were in even existed in the first place.
Certainly to enable them to do great journalistic work, but maybe not because the corporate superstructure actually cared by heart about great journalistic work.
At least I do not see it around no more, which might indicate that it outlived its corporate usefulness as a moral shield.
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