I’ve been working with AI technologies since 1999. The first company I co-founded was an AI software company, and I’m still working with AI technologies today.
Let me say this about that:
AI is just a combination of computing and mathematics. What has changed is that compute power and storage has become massive, interconnected, and cheap, allowing us to do the same things we could do 20 years ago except at-scale, cheaper, and easier.
It’s not magic. It just looks that way.
AI is just an umbrella term for a collection of tech, and “generative” natural-language AI is one of several of those. It’s not new; it’s just new to the masses.
Generative AI is all the current rage, figuratively and literally. But it’s “magic” is looking at large data sets, and generating an inference or a very limited prediction from that historical data.
It can churn through many different possibilities and scenarios, and try to predict outcomes. But it is “probabilistic”. It over-weights historical patterns and under-weights outliers.
My point is that the future of success has always, and will always, belong to outliers, aka innovators.
I can’t teach you how to be an innovator, except that it feels like being dissatisfied and annoyed with the status quo all of the time.
AI doesn’t get dissatisfied or annoyed. It just consumes patterns, summarizes, and predicts.
There is no “general artificial intelligence” coming. We don’t even understand how our own brains work, let alone be able to create an artificial one.
But we can fool you (marketing) into thinking that our math and computer power looks like one.
As long as you don’t look too close, and hopefully you’ll become reliant on the AI enough to stop being dissatisfied and annoyed, give in, and stop innovating.
AI currently just makes stuff up. I've personally experienced completely false AI explanations where AI tried and failed 3 times attempting to answer my question. So AI journalism could easily be the same, gather unverified information and present it as facts. I did note, on a science page, that someone added AI to try to verify another AI's answer. It turns out that if a question is posed multiple times the AI being analyzed will be determined to be false if it answers with multiple different explanations for the one thing.
To the question of what a young, committed and aspiring journalist or prospective journalist should do, I'd add hone your craft. In fact I'd put this at the top. Quality of product has always been critical to success. With the inevitability of continuing growth in AI as a competitor to living, breathing and (most of all) sentient humans, sloppy spelling, structure, grammar, expression and word selection become ever greater liabilities. Having a brand is at most a start, in my book; the test of time is to keep making that brand more marketable, reliable, recognizable and attractive. And, as has always been the case, the faster the better.
I’ve been working with AI technologies since 1999. The first company I co-founded was an AI software company, and I’m still working with AI technologies today.
Let me say this about that:
AI is just a combination of computing and mathematics. What has changed is that compute power and storage has become massive, interconnected, and cheap, allowing us to do the same things we could do 20 years ago except at-scale, cheaper, and easier.
It’s not magic. It just looks that way.
AI is just an umbrella term for a collection of tech, and “generative” natural-language AI is one of several of those. It’s not new; it’s just new to the masses.
Generative AI is all the current rage, figuratively and literally. But it’s “magic” is looking at large data sets, and generating an inference or a very limited prediction from that historical data.
It can churn through many different possibilities and scenarios, and try to predict outcomes. But it is “probabilistic”. It over-weights historical patterns and under-weights outliers.
My point is that the future of success has always, and will always, belong to outliers, aka innovators.
I can’t teach you how to be an innovator, except that it feels like being dissatisfied and annoyed with the status quo all of the time.
AI doesn’t get dissatisfied or annoyed. It just consumes patterns, summarizes, and predicts.
There is no “general artificial intelligence” coming. We don’t even understand how our own brains work, let alone be able to create an artificial one.
But we can fool you (marketing) into thinking that our math and computer power looks like one.
As long as you don’t look too close, and hopefully you’ll become reliant on the AI enough to stop being dissatisfied and annoyed, give in, and stop innovating.
But whose fault is that?
AI currently just makes stuff up. I've personally experienced completely false AI explanations where AI tried and failed 3 times attempting to answer my question. So AI journalism could easily be the same, gather unverified information and present it as facts. I did note, on a science page, that someone added AI to try to verify another AI's answer. It turns out that if a question is posed multiple times the AI being analyzed will be determined to be false if it answers with multiple different explanations for the one thing.
Your article was well articulated. You fulfilled all the points of journalism that your article preached. Well done Dan.
To the question of what a young, committed and aspiring journalist or prospective journalist should do, I'd add hone your craft. In fact I'd put this at the top. Quality of product has always been critical to success. With the inevitability of continuing growth in AI as a competitor to living, breathing and (most of all) sentient humans, sloppy spelling, structure, grammar, expression and word selection become ever greater liabilities. Having a brand is at most a start, in my book; the test of time is to keep making that brand more marketable, reliable, recognizable and attractive. And, as has always been the case, the faster the better.