Why Most IT Media Will Prefer AI Authors For Their Corporate Friendly IT Articles
Executive Summary
- IT media has become so robotic and advertiser driven, then it’s a perfect fit for AI to replace many current journalists.
- The IT media has demonstrated they prefer to be PR outlets for vendors.
Introduction
We analyze the IT media. We find that many articles are written by journalists without domain expertise, without the time to investigate the story, and for entities with enormous financial biases.
The following quotations cover this natural next step to AI writing articles.
Many of these being financially focused news stories since the data is calculated and released frequently. Which is why should be no surprise that Bloomberg news is one of the first adaptors of this automated content. Their program, Cyborg, churned out thousands of articles last year that took financial reports and turned them into news stories like a business reporter.
The Washington Post also has a robot reporting program called Heliograf. In its first year, it produced approximately 850 articles and earned The Post an award for its “Excellence in Use of Bots” from its work on the 2016 election coverage. However, The Post is using their system to not replace journalists, but to assist them and make their jobs easier and faster. – Forbes
AI for Articles Versus Books
Articles, unusually fast-paced article coverage, is perfect for AI. Even without AI, many articles are simply a combination of snippets of quotes from “official sources,” with some transitory text which serves to point to the next quotation. This allows the journalist to write an article, but without knowing anything about the topic. Insert “official source,” and the journalist at many an IT media outlet can feel as if they have done their job.
The Useless Nature of IT Media
This is the primary reason that we have stopped accepting media invitations to be interviewed. There is little point in taking the time to explain a topic to a journalist for a significant IT media outlet if they only go and speak to a PR representative who then lies to them — and the journalist then presents “both sides.”
Naturally, a book would be challenging to write with AI, but short articles are quite easy to write with AI. If we look at the example of the media coverage on McDonald’s purchase of an AI company as we wrote about in the article How Awful Was the Coverage of the McDonald’s AI Acquisition? Most of the coverage was already undifferentiated from a robot. There were zero attempts to fact check what just a press release from McDonald’s was. And naturally, the story was filled with falsehoods and PR positioning that none of the media sources caught.
Conclusion
The ultimate goal of AI is to displace workers and to reduce costs so that the savings can be diverted to the billionaire class. The vast majority of media entities look at publishing as simply a way to make money and have no connection to publishing what is true. For them, AI is a perfect fit for their corporate-friendly neutered coverage. AI robots have zero critical thinking ability and configure stories in digestible from, and they work 24 hours a day for no pay. They are, therefore, what IT media entities like ComputerWeekly or TechTarget consider “perfect employees.” Authors can be “constructed” by simply using images from stock photography sites and then creating a fake name to go with the image.
References
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2019/02/08/did-a-robot-write-this-how-ai-is-impacting-journalism/#677b3b007795
*https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/25/the-rise-of-robot-authors-is-the-writing-on-the-wall-for-human-novelists