AI is great for some things. It is not currently great (or even remotely passable) at writing interesting magazine articles.

Obviously the WSJ staff shouldn't be using it in the final output, but if it's a prominent guest's opinion filtered through ChatGPT, I'm mostly fine with it.

There's no way anyone would know. It's a pointless thing.

Good luck trying to figure out whether something was written by AI or a human. This mass hysteria around AI will soon be forgotten. Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.

Even if you want to keep AI out of the content-writing part, or the image generation part of your product, there are still areas where a newsroom can do much more ambitious work with the same people:

- AI can do research to assist in fact checking of articles

- AI can help suggest story ideas based on patterns it found in your own articles over time (an editor would still curate them)

- AI can help the newsroom pore over more first-hand sources/raw sources. Think of how many times you've had to process a stack of hard to OCR PDFs that come out of a FOIA, for example, or poring over government datasets when trying to make sense of something. Or a person's historical tweets, etc.

So it's clear that whoever won in this debate (hopefully there was at least a proper debate) wasn't interested in talking about all these additional areas where AI can help the existing people do more _without risking their jobs_.

We are witnessing the natural outcome of pursuing higher profits at the expense of everything else; at some point it becomes “as crappy as the market will bear”, and we all lose out. For some of us it may manifest as having to get our car serviced every few thousand miles because the parts are of poor quality (but cheap!). For some of us it may manifest as no longer desiring sweets because they’re now poorly made with substandard ingredients created in a lab somewhere.

It can also manifest in ways that are a threat to public safety; like rollercoaster rides that weren’t properly designed or tested because schools now pursue profits above learning; or because manufacturers somehow rely on regulators to do their job for them.

However it manifests, it’s hard to point to higher prices and lower quality goods and services and say this is the best that capitalism has to offer. If this is it, if this is the capitalist system working as intended, it’s no wonder movements like the Democratic Socialists of America are taking hold.