>Multiple companies have toyed with the idea of using AI to generate stories, all of whom have been widely panned for the decision. G/O Media (which operates Gizmodo and Kotaku) attempted it earlier this year, the result of which was error-riddled pieces and widespread pushback from its staff. The company plans to move forward with AI authors despite this. Gannett, which operates USA Today, also attempted it but pulled back after it resulted in “botched” coverage of high school sports. More recently, Sports Illustrated was accused of the practice, a decision that resulted in widespread derision and the firing of its CEO.
all that matters is attracting $USER to $PLATFORM at a rate which minimizes $COST_OF_CONTENT_PRODUCTION to a point where it is below $INCOME_PER_USER. none of these "news outlets" have any integrity, they might back off of AI but they've already demonstrated that they'll publish anything that drives viewership. This also calls into question the legitimacy of human-written content published by these "news outlets" because whatever ideals journalism may have aspired to in the past no longer exist (if they ever even existed in the past).
If websites do this too much they'll just disappear. Why go to the website if I can get the answer from an LLM.
The same way most simple apps will probably not be needed if the Operating System can just conjure them on the fly.
"Give me a calculator app that includes a button for conversion to ternary"
Is the same as "Give me an app that every day will send me an expert article about Photography topics, keeping it varied so I learn about many aspects".
If something can be produced very cheaply by a website owner it can also be produced by the user for their own consumption.
> whatever ideals journalism may have aspired to in the past no longer exist (if they ever even existed in the past)
This is when I like to remind people that if you do a good enough job at journalism, you get an award named after a pioneer of sensationalistic “yellow journalism” who propagandized to start the Spanish-American War: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer
"There is a well known story about the origin of the Nobel Prize, although historians have been unable to verify it and some dismiss the story as a myth. In 1888, the death of his brother Ludvig supposedly caused several newspapers to publish obituaries of Alfred in error. One French newspaper condemned him for his invention of military explosives—in many versions of the story, dynamite is quoted, although this was mainly used for civilian applications—and this is said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after his death. The obituary stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead"), and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." Nobel read the obituary and was appalled at the idea that he would be remembered in this way. His decision to posthumously donate the majority of his wealth to found the Nobel Prize has been credited to him wanting to leave behind a better legacy. However, it has been questioned whether or not the obituary in question actually existed."
Is this phrase used figuratively, or are there actual times when you've exercised this preference upon someone?
I think if you said that to me, in a tone which implied you were enjoying saying it, I'd probably ask you why it's relevant. For example, can you demonstrate that Pulitzer Prizes are generally awarded to "yellow journalists"? Or can you show how the recipients of the prize are in any way awarded for behaviour which you're saying Pulitzer the person exhibited. Because it just sounds like a quirk of history, rather than revealing any important facts about journalism or how prizes are awarded
> When reached for comment, a B&H representative claimed the company’s policy was not to use AI-generated content and that it would “investigate this matter with our content teams.” Shortly thereafter, the article and profile were deleted. But for a month, the story remained online and positioned itself as an expert guide written by a real person and visitors to the blog would have been none the wiser.
Seems like a slight non-story to me: a parsimonious explanation here is that a staff (or contract) editor was given an assignment, and chose to fabricate it instead.
(A more interesting tidbit about B&H: their sales tax hijinks are legendary[1], and significantly predate Amazon's.)
At first, I figured that's the explanation, but you're ignoring a more puzzling statement in the article:
> To explain how an AI-generated story written by an AI-generated person was published despite this policy, B&H says it was part of a “test” to identify and protect against such content.
> “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated content. They overlooked adding disclosure to the article indicating that it was AI-generated, which was a mistake, and did not delete the article after the test.”
Regarding the sales tax “hijinks”, B&H actually won that lawsuit because the judge agreed that the law did not require them to pay sales tax on those payments as the NY AG claimed. It’s not hijinks if they are interpreting the law more correctly than the government.
I think it’s fair to call creative tax dodges “hijinks,” even if they ultimately end up being legal. This is the standard that I’d apply to Apple as well (with their Irish Maneuver).
(Another example of this in B&H’s case is their store-branded credit card, which gives you a NY tax rebate. This appears to be fine legally, but it matches the general trend.)
> …a parsimonious explanation here is that a staff (or contract) editor was given an assignment, and chose to fabricate it instead.
The fabricated author biography and photo suggest that it's not just an "oopsie!", especially considering that they also said, "We typically do not create a writer profile unless we use someone more than occasionally". B&H understood what they were doing.
In large companies usually there are even simpler mundane explanations. Most likely in this case there was no previous company policy, and some local department was running an experiment.
Then it got discovered, policy was established, and article was deleted. Nothing really malicious, nothing really interesting.
Note that it was a single article, B&H claims it was an accident and they deleted it since then.
> “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated content. They overlooked adding disclosure to the article indicating that it was AI-generated, which was a mistake, and did not delete the article after the test.”
Commercial blogs have been posting stuff under fake bylines forever. I remember sites in the 90s that had non-existent people would write out random promotional blargh.
Am I supposed to expect that B&H has artistic integrity or something? They’re just a gear vendor. I don’t care if their guides are written by AI or JK Rowling as long as they help me pick out a lense or whatever.
I worked at another retail site. We were also looking at doing this with SEO purposes. Whatever they were using to generate the articles was picked up by Google I assume because those pages were never indexed. It was also a secret from the ten person team they had turning out copy for seo blog articles.
The crazy thing was that whole section of the site was getting maybe a thousand views per hour on a site that got seven figure hits a day. Most employees didn't even realize it existed. The amount of money burned on it attempting to chase SEO was crazy.
AI is heralding a new era of enshittification. Was this a "Oops, we're sorry! Our mistake!" Or was it more a case of, "We're sorry we got caught!" I don't trust them.
The last time I tried ordering something from B&H Photo their inscrutable fraud prevention algorithms put a hold on shipping my order after they charged my card. No idea how much "AI" was involved, but I'm fairly confident it's either currently or in the future going to be more than "none at all." They tried calling me to verify, but calls from numbers not in my contact list go straight to voicemail because of all the phone spam I get. I called them back and talked to someone in their verification department, thinking that would be the end of it and the item I ordered would promptly be on its way.
Apparently that didn't work. A couple of days went by without it shipping, and then they tried calling me again. I canceled my order and let them know they'd permanently lost a customer.
Eventually someone from their customer service department reached out and said, "We can't tell you what the criteria is for triggering order verification," as if explaining that to me would somehow change my mind about doing business with them in the future. "Oh well yeah, your super-smart fraud prevention algorithms clearly make mistakes, and I'll happily just play phone tag with you for a week or so to get everything cleared up." Nope.
For this and many other reasons, I'm now buying everything I can at physical retail stores with cash, in part to help make sure it's still going to be possible to buy things in physical stores with cash in the future. I'm hoping it might yet be a while before real-life meatspace commerce is going to become thoroughly AI-enshittified.
Readit News
all that matters is attracting $USER to $PLATFORM at a rate which minimizes $COST_OF_CONTENT_PRODUCTION to a point where it is below $INCOME_PER_USER. none of these "news outlets" have any integrity, they might back off of AI but they've already demonstrated that they'll publish anything that drives viewership. This also calls into question the legitimacy of human-written content published by these "news outlets" because whatever ideals journalism may have aspired to in the past no longer exist (if they ever even existed in the past).
The same way most simple apps will probably not be needed if the Operating System can just conjure them on the fly.
"Give me a calculator app that includes a button for conversion to ternary"
Is the same as "Give me an app that every day will send me an expert article about Photography topics, keeping it varied so I learn about many aspects".
If something can be produced very cheaply by a website owner it can also be produced by the user for their own consumption.
This is when I like to remind people that if you do a good enough job at journalism, you get an award named after a pioneer of sensationalistic “yellow journalism” who propagandized to start the Spanish-American War: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel
From the link:
"There is a well known story about the origin of the Nobel Prize, although historians have been unable to verify it and some dismiss the story as a myth. In 1888, the death of his brother Ludvig supposedly caused several newspapers to publish obituaries of Alfred in error. One French newspaper condemned him for his invention of military explosives—in many versions of the story, dynamite is quoted, although this was mainly used for civilian applications—and this is said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after his death. The obituary stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead"), and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." Nobel read the obituary and was appalled at the idea that he would be remembered in this way. His decision to posthumously donate the majority of his wealth to found the Nobel Prize has been credited to him wanting to leave behind a better legacy. However, it has been questioned whether or not the obituary in question actually existed."
Is this phrase used figuratively, or are there actual times when you've exercised this preference upon someone?
I think if you said that to me, in a tone which implied you were enjoying saying it, I'd probably ask you why it's relevant. For example, can you demonstrate that Pulitzer Prizes are generally awarded to "yellow journalists"? Or can you show how the recipients of the prize are in any way awarded for behaviour which you're saying Pulitzer the person exhibited. Because it just sounds like a quirk of history, rather than revealing any important facts about journalism or how prizes are awarded
Seems like a slight non-story to me: a parsimonious explanation here is that a staff (or contract) editor was given an assignment, and chose to fabricate it instead.
(A more interesting tidbit about B&H: their sales tax hijinks are legendary[1], and significantly predate Amazon's.)
[1]: https://www.dpreview.com/news/4007164682/bh-photo-accused-of...
> To explain how an AI-generated story written by an AI-generated person was published despite this policy, B&H says it was part of a “test” to identify and protect against such content.
> “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated content. They overlooked adding disclosure to the article indicating that it was AI-generated, which was a mistake, and did not delete the article after the test.”
This sounds... rather unconvincing.
IDK, it all seems fairly plausible to me.
(Another example of this in B&H’s case is their store-branded credit card, which gives you a NY tax rebate. This appears to be fine legally, but it matches the general trend.)
[1] https://advertisinglaw.fkks.com/post/102h8g1/bh-photo-prevai...
The fabricated author biography and photo suggest that it's not just an "oopsie!", especially considering that they also said, "We typically do not create a writer profile unless we use someone more than occasionally". B&H understood what they were doing.
In large companies usually there are even simpler mundane explanations. Most likely in this case there was no previous company policy, and some local department was running an experiment.
Then it got discovered, policy was established, and article was deleted. Nothing really malicious, nothing really interesting.
Courts ruled in their favor. Don't blame B&H, blame the tax code
> “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated content. They overlooked adding disclosure to the article indicating that it was AI-generated, which was a mistake, and did not delete the article after the test.”
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Commercial blogs have been posting stuff under fake bylines forever. I remember sites in the 90s that had non-existent people would write out random promotional blargh.
Am I supposed to expect that B&H has artistic integrity or something? They’re just a gear vendor. I don’t care if their guides are written by AI or JK Rowling as long as they help me pick out a lense or whatever.
Deleted Comment
Applied to medicine, my field: for every error that's discovered and made public, 99 others just like it go unremarked.
For every air industry near miss, 99 others are never reported.
Deleted Comment
The crazy thing was that whole section of the site was getting maybe a thousand views per hour on a site that got seven figure hits a day. Most employees didn't even realize it existed. The amount of money burned on it attempting to chase SEO was crazy.
The last time I tried ordering something from B&H Photo their inscrutable fraud prevention algorithms put a hold on shipping my order after they charged my card. No idea how much "AI" was involved, but I'm fairly confident it's either currently or in the future going to be more than "none at all." They tried calling me to verify, but calls from numbers not in my contact list go straight to voicemail because of all the phone spam I get. I called them back and talked to someone in their verification department, thinking that would be the end of it and the item I ordered would promptly be on its way.
Apparently that didn't work. A couple of days went by without it shipping, and then they tried calling me again. I canceled my order and let them know they'd permanently lost a customer.
Eventually someone from their customer service department reached out and said, "We can't tell you what the criteria is for triggering order verification," as if explaining that to me would somehow change my mind about doing business with them in the future. "Oh well yeah, your super-smart fraud prevention algorithms clearly make mistakes, and I'll happily just play phone tag with you for a week or so to get everything cleared up." Nope.
For this and many other reasons, I'm now buying everything I can at physical retail stores with cash, in part to help make sure it's still going to be possible to buy things in physical stores with cash in the future. I'm hoping it might yet be a while before real-life meatspace commerce is going to become thoroughly AI-enshittified.