Their parent comment did¹, as did the parent to that one² (i.e. you, who used the word “metric” twice), which is the top of the chain. So, in essence, everyone in the immediate conversation “said metrics”.
> Implying that anyone who disagrees with you is empty
That’s not what they did at all. You’re choosing that interpretation, you can choose a kinder one.
In fact it probably only solves a minority of them.
I don't think it's fair to say the narrative sucks unless you know exactly which problems they were concerned about.
I recall a classic photo of a meeting in Nazi Germany where one single man didn’t stand up to applaud Hitler.
It doesn’t matter if you win right now. It matters not to betray yourself.
In my opinion, the AI companies’ openly stated desire to eliminate any reason to live for hundreds of millions of people is something very Nazi in its nature.
Fort them I think it makes sense.
And I'm pro AI.
I just don't want to read AI articles/books/etc, it is a waste of my time on earth.
That doesn't mean I won't use AI, when I specifically ask, like finding answers.
If yes: why? If no: why?
All they’re saying is that they want to make sure the finalized articles are handwritten and aren't chockful of LLM slophistry. They even mention in this very article that they’re not against writers using AI-space adjacent tools to do preliminary research.
This seems like a pretty reasonable perspective for a magazine. Use AI for ideation and research but not to create the final version of articles for publication.
FYI this is written by someone who's fairly bullish on AI and uses it pretty frequently on a daily basis.
If that's what you took from the article, perhaps AI writing is just the thing for you.
AI is great for some things. It is not currently great (or even remotely passable) at writing interesting magazine articles.
> Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something.
Why?
Well they didn't do that, and in fact specifically mentioned how they are not doing that. So what are you even talking about?
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.
It was an op-ed, it's inappropriate to edit those heavily. So they either had to accept it more or less as submitted (with the usual basic editing around grammar, clarity, and typos), or not accept it. If they'd rewritten it, it would not have been an op-ed by Druckenmiller anymore, but someone else's interpretation of his submission.
Maybe that would have been a totally acceptable outcome?
Missing the opportunity to be informed about those points because of aiphobia seems suboptimal.
ChatGPT polish adds no value to this.
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.
It’s a magazine, not a social media website. They control who writes for them and they know who they can trust. If any of those people break that trust, they are banned and replaced with someone else.
> Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human.
Of course they will. To this day people still care about (for example) colonialist actions from hundreds of years ago or buying print books. It’s disconnected from reality to believe everybody will simply not care who wrote what they read.
Btw it is kind of weird how it still can't write prose normally but it can write impressively high quality code now. Must be something to do with their training. Or maybe it's easier to quantify good code.
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_.
They banned AI-generated text or images from appearing in the magazine.
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.
This seems to be the underlying moral justification for creatives' opposition of AI. Job destruction is the obvious self-interested justification.
My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).
A quick hypothetical:
Let's say instead of hoovering up billions of images from data dumps, the AI researchers took a still camera to all the art galleries on the planet and snapped photos of art, then trained the neural network on those photos. Is this still "theft" of the artists' work? What about if an embodied AI in a robot chassis did the same, then painted new art with oil & canvas? Is this still theft?
Perhaps this example fails because it's not enough data? But is it a difference in degree or a difference in kind?
Those successful artists accessed their training data through legitimate means (please hold your 'well actually' replies about some artist using bittorrent here and there). They didn't all pirate, on a historic, industrial scale, every scrap of creative work that they saw in their lives. That's the key distinction.
Outside of a few standouts, the companies that survived did not do so by embracing quality journalism and independent reporting.
Now the bloggers and upstart publishers that killed traditional media are the incumbents.
Out of curiosity, which companies embraced quality journalism and failed because of it?
More importantly, you can add in all of the local independent newspaper, tv, and radio channels that were either shut down or gobbled up by large corporations and gutted (Sinclair, Clear Channel, etc). Over 3000 newspapers were closed down, as well as nearly every foreign or government bureau.
This is when the largest drop ever of professional reporters in the US happened - we entered the 2020s with less than half of the number of employed reporters as we had in 2000.
The slopification of news started before AI.
I think this is key. If AI wasn't force-fed into every industry in a rapacious grasp for more profits, our society might have been able to grow into a healthier equilibrium where AI is a useful tool for creative professionals.
Even the insiders I talk to at big AI labs express the opinion, "nobody likes where we're going, but the pressures are too strong."
What about other artifacts that you produce, such as images (that are not illustrations), videos, sound effects for your podcast, or the code that runs your website?
> No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration
> am proud to say that as part of our new union contract, Current Affairs recently adopted one of the strictest anti-AI policies in the publishing industry. No text that is AI-generated may be published in our magazine. No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration.
>This doesn’t mean nobody doing work here can ever use any of the softwares that are broadly lumped together as AI. Much as we respect the Luddites around here, we’re not against technological innovation. Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element.
As someone trying to pickup writing fiction after years of doing technical writing, I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions? am I describing things in interesting ways? or is it a slog to read? etc...). Since Current Affairs is a commentary magazine and not just straight facts reporting, I could imagine authors wanting similar feedback. Would this kind of usage be permitted? Seems... yes? But I'm not completely sure.
You trust LLMs to play tastemaker?
if OTOH Fox News came out with this announcement, nobody would care except some of their viewers/readers would be annoyed by it.
point is it's hard to ever identify if a magazine would be doing this purely out of principle since it's also good marketing.
Making a declaration that you are rejecting AI can come across as implying use of AI is a moral failing. There are certainly people who overtly claim it is a moral failing.
I think the people who are offended are perceiving this as as statement impugning their character.
I would way rather read handwritten articles. I think everyone should celebrate the human craft of writing. I really hope this doesn't slowly become the "no-VFX" posturing from the film industry, however.
I think the far bigger and more important issue is that through generative AI hallucinations and lies become more and more part of our written media.
Albertatech told a humorous, light-hearted story[1] about how this affected her personally, but the results could be far more devastating:
AI generated text is still exhausting to read.
You are a good AI, but maybe you should update your context window.
> I don't like vanilla ice cream
> Ok well prove it then!
What you're now saying is that it's a by-product of what they do. What you said earlier was that it was their goal.
Which is it?
Just like they've forgotten about tulip bulbs?
Even if LLMs deliver a fraction of what their advocates promise, their impact entry into society will be relevant for centuries, much as with piracy, industrialization, and abolition.
Figuring out whether something is written by AI or a human is fairly easy with Pangram, and soon all major models will embed fingerprinting and it will be basically 100% detectable.
The premise that rules should equally apply here is absurd. It’s completely natural that certain rules don’t apply to humans but not AI and vice versa. Similar to humans vs animals or humans vs inanimate objects. Even among humans, rules don’t apply equally always.
Diffusion models tune a series of numbers via a complicated but essentially straightforward and "pipeline-like" process from the training data, so their work is significantly less derivative, even if visually it looks different. I guess we all agree that say, a encrypted zip file of a song is not a derivative, it's the song after some data processing.
Maybe we should improve the definition of derivative work to express how many layers of indirection lie between training material and output? If I trace over a painting I guess most would agree I've barely done any art, and I think that the process is more or less "pipeline-like" (even if complicated): input data is immediately converted to "art" by my brain following the lines. An artist that studies Goya for years and slowly improves his Goya-like portraits is another kind of level of indirection between training material and output!
Nobody cares if hobbyists make a "Star Wars but make it Monet" art piece with AI and put it on their wall. It's the part where bosses fire John Smith and then ask the LLM, "please write 100 articles in the style of John Smith." It's the part where an actor is hired once, their face scanned, and then their likeness is used (unpaid) in a hundred films.
AI generated writing is (usually) hot garbage.
kolinko•56m ago