Cognition Dissemination: The Pivot to AI Will Fail
The fear that robots will eventually steal all most human jobs has existed for decades now, to the extent of becoming a common dystopian joke to occasionally crack in many circles. But there’s a truth to most comedic quips, as this concern is quickly becoming more real for those within or who wish to enter industries affected by “convenience technology,” particularly those in the manufacturing sector. The fear has also risen in the fast-food industry, with many now equipped with touchscreen menus for ordering. But this fear was underestimated in the art, voice acting, and writing worlds, as AI has made strides faster than expected.
AI’s creeping takeover of writing has been in the non-AI-written news lately, as the technology has improved to a point where executives who run large publications are noticing in frightening ways. The newest is Buzzfeed, for which CEO Jonah Peretti announced that the publication will pursue using AI content generated by the progressively popular OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “You’ll see AI-inspired content move from an R&D stage to part of our core business, enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming, and personalizing our content for our audience,” Peretti wrote in an email to staffers. This is coincidentally coming about a month-and-a-half after Buzzfeed laid off 12 percent of its staffers, roughly 180 of them.
AI will be used for the quizzes that made the website popular over the real journalism that many writers have provided over the years. But even though Peretti promised to keep humans on board for the straight news and editorial segments of the company, this should frighten everyone who remains in online media. It took mere months for those who analyze the industry and work in it to think the AI takeover of writer jobs was years off to suddenly realizing the threat of robots stealing them is real.
Well, mostly real. The plans from executives who believe AI is the new hotness, alongside investors excited at the potential to have bots that don’t need fair dues at a company’s disposal, are simply a continuation of the ever-popular publisher trend to chase the newest technology for an advantage over competitors. This is following on the heels of the now-legendary pivot-to-video initiative from half a decade ago, during which executives wanted to diminish and eventually phase out written articles for more visual and audio content. The plan was driven by the supposedly-high number of hits videos were generating on social media, particularly Facebook. The costly initiative led to some publications even creating their own video programs, in addition to uploading videos on YouTube. This failed after the videos didn’t generate enough hits and attention to justify the cost output, just as those who were always skeptical of the plan expected.
It didn’t help that this plan was driven by the massive number of hits videos were supposedly generating on Facebook, which were found to be inflated. Several of them weren’t as popular as the numbers implied, a little, tiny glitch on their part that they knew existed for months but did nothing to fix until it was too late.
The pivot to AI will have similar results: This will not go the way executives atop these publications think it will. It’s true that AI has made dazzlingly quick strides in technological advancement, but the content it generates remains hardly on par with what a human being is capable of. The resulting text, to much surprise, sounds robotic and droll, and anyone reading them will tell that quizzes made from the technology has been run through text generators. Executives underestimate how perceptive readers can be about these matters.
There’s even evidence of this. One publication recently tried this to predictably poor results. CNET secretly debuted a series of articles under the byline of “CNET Money Staff,” one vague enough that it should have immediately raised eyebrows. The dead giveaway that proved how the articles were AI-generated emerged through the number of factual and mathematical errors created that no human hired to write financial articles would make. CNET has since removed the articles, though said nothing about ceasing use of the technology. This alone was enough to show how executives long to replace human workers with AI in a quick fashion, which should make writers who don’t write editorials with an intense human touch quiver in fear of the near future.
But they shouldn’t quiver because AI will take their jobs; again, the initiative is bound to bomb. Several writers were sacrificed for the pivot to video, and the same will happen here as it will become clear that executives overestimated the potential. But these jobs are unlikely to return after this happens, as many of them didn’t after video proved too costly. The perpetual chase for infinitive significant growth will continue, and executives, through their actions, have already made mere article publishing seem unprofitable in the long run.
The only small — and I mean small — consolation will be the jobs created to polish AI-created content in written and art forms. But they won’t be numerous and likely won’t pay well, not to mention how dystopian that will nonetheless feel and be. We’re in for a messy future that could have been avoided if it wasn’t for greed running amok, a feeling that could be applied to nearly everything in life.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
