The article mentions the bad guys in this case are Chinese scammers that acquired the newspaper's domain and filled the site with lightly-rewritten articles from legitimate sources.

Isn't it a shame though that we created something like the internet that could have been a good thing and now it's a nightmare like this due to AI? It seems illogical that the same people who theoretically love the internet also created the technology that will make it a nightmare, but I guess money does that to them.

I think this trend is going to get worse and we haven't hit bottom.

But the bounce from bottom may be we seek out actual journalists and a new (again) market emerges for human generated, quality content. And I hope this starts at the local level. We need "local papers".

How is this the takeaway?

The newspaper went under. Then the address got bought by scammers.

Did I misread the article?

the perpetrator is the "carpenter media group" conglomerate, please see my earlier comment

this is new. please see my comment above on the carpenter media group.

Avoid the FBI/FCC/FTC expenditures and instead fund high school classes in media literacy and analysis.

> inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation

Isn't the deception itself a sufficiently egregious harm?

Those people have no self-reflection and in 5 years when their claims haven't come true they'll have already moved onto whatever the latest hyped up thing is. Just like how we still don't have mass driverless cars, and just like how Bitcoin didn't take over the world, just like how LLMs aren't going to take all our jobs. I bet there's a good alignment between people making outrageous LLM claims and people who shilled for those other things too, for how they were "right around the corner".

Ironically, an actually good use case of LLMs would be to scan peoples HN posts and compile a rating of how many hyped up topics they shilled for in the past, so that we know who to just kind of ignore when they're hyping up something new, as they don't have a good track record.

> How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy?

I noticed that most of the journalism that I care about ~drifted~ from the writing to non-structured media (e.g. podcasts, videos), where in writting we have only things oriented to the SEO and future reference and historical purposes, and the actual red meat content comes in "conversations" or in aired media in youtube channels.

Back in the day, a journalist could sit in a hearing or in an audience, and you could read at the weekend a deep dive with key points in the trial, points made by the prosecution and defense, the verdict, and the entire trial dynamic and buildup. Currently you have in writing only some high-level summary with no specifics and maybe some journalist opinion, and the entire breakdown you can have it on Youtube.

For me, this is one of the two saddest trends that I see in modern journalism (another one is the lack of investigative journalism revealing political corruption), where you can only get in the depths by going to the prolix audio and video media formats.

One thing in tech I find interesting is I run into a lot of people that view everything as a tech problem. The AI can be a local journalist if it gets good enough and on one hand that's always true, sufficiently good tech can do anything, but it seems weird to have it be the only suggested solution by some people I know.

It's especially confusing to me in situations like this where the tech is currently exacerbating the problem and the underlying reasons why aren't going to go away just if the tech gets better. On the current trajectory I don't get why the technology getting better will suddenly have the AI do substantive local journalism instead of just higher quality garbage.

In conjunction with actual journalists I could see it being useful but the article seems to be talking about a site with fake bylines so that doesn't seem to be the case here.

> How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy?

It can't. And the notion that it will be able to "in five years" is completely without any basis. It's possible, I suppose, but anyone who claims this with great certainty is not a serious person.

> How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy?

Is that a thing with local journalism now? Actual journalists still doing stuff like that? Lets not pretend that a lot of good writing or journalism is involved with local news papers. It's not a particularly hard job for an LLM to do better.

In any case to answer your questions:

- yes you can let an AI listen in on meetings and conversations and they'll do a decent enough job of transcribing what was said and summarizing key points.

- you can also use them to prepare for interviews, get some background information on people, companies, etc. and prepare some questions. Perplexity is great for background research like that.

- and if you provide all of that as context, it will do a half decent job of writing an article. You might want to do some prompt engineering to tune style and content and maybe fact check a thing or two. For best results, maybe use one model to generate and another to fact check.

You are probably already reading a lot of stuff that is AI generated; or at least AI assisted without realizing it. It's not always that obvious. The future is last year. Already happened. What you are seeing is the more obvious/lazy stuff. Which is of course a thing because good enough is good enough and the benchmark for that is very low with most media corporations. And being factual isn't necessary something they value either.

The people who think AI will replace good journalism are the same people who think "X" is revolutionizing citizen journalism

There's an incredible amount of local journalism--especially outside of major cities--that was already incredibly poorly covered. There used to be a labor of love type newspaper in my town until the publisher got ill. At this point, there's basically very little way to get information on the various town meetings outside of major issues and mostly not even then. I'm not spending the time and effort to attend a lot of random board meetings.

There are always two sides to news -- there's the consumer-facing text/video/whatever, which AI can create. But there's also newsgathering -- the reporting, which requires shoeleather, phone calls, building relationships, etc. AI cannot do that.

(Disclaimer - building a news platform featuring human journalists' reporting - https://www.forth.news)

> If so, who pays?

the "carpenter media group" is paying. theyre a conglomerate from the southeast that started buying up small town news agencies across the country in 2023, and began laying off 50% of staff to replace them with AI. please see my other comment in this post.

While I don’t have a dog in this race:

> …who pays?

The status quo today is

- ProPublica’s donors

- the family trust of 22 year olds in Columbia Journalism School. Don’t take this too literally. Journalism school is a metonym for paying your dues.

- the husbands and wives of the older journalists

- millions of Boomers paying just four publications that are diversifying into media companies with video games and recipe lists, so not really journalism alone

Should journalism be philanthropic? It’s an interesting question. I’m not worried about AI writers as long as parents keep paying their kids’ rent to break into writing, and as long as New York and Los Angeles remain attractive places for young people to live. My point is that there is a status quo where journalism is already essentially a charity, so anything is possible, it is totally incorrect to characterize journalism as profit motivated, because if it were it would have been gone long ago, and it isn’t for lack of free labor, because most journalism is done for free.

> How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy?

How is any of that relevant to getting people to read your articles? Seems like getting rid of all those will make reporting a lot cheaper. That way, anyone can start a newspaper and report whatever they want!

I'd argue that you have a much better chance of a consistent reader-base if the contents of your articles have no base in reality.

> How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy?

Streams? The AI summaries of YT videos are already pretty good. And asking questions is probably easy enough as well, assuming the meeting is using a platform that allows for questions to be asked. Text-to-speech can be used on platforms like Zoom or even a simple phone call.

In 5 years:

An AI can go through all the breaking footage posted on social media. An AI can join a phone call with 400 individuals and retain complete notes on everything that is happening. An AI can go through every single expense report, every month for a decade to find the one thing that explodes into a story.

An AI journalist won't be a 1:1 copy of the human, but it can definitely do actual reporting.

Also often over looked is that this slop will then be scraped and fed into the next model. They will start to degrade further over time.

If you live in a town with a major industry that industry tends to get a lot of free PR from local news who eat up all their releases at face value. AI writing would surely do the same but globally.

>How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy?

I suppose when we give it a robot body?

As much as I hate the concept, I suspect many publications consider Journalism Theatre to replace Journalism.

Similar to security theatre substituting real security.

Devils advocate. Its going to take my notes and turn them into 12 different sets of copy for dissemination to 12 different outlets.

Microphone / camera / speaker in meeting?

I'm sympathetic to the way you're looking at this, but imho the end state will be similar to most other automating technologies.

The simplest, lowest-effort work will be automated (sitting and transcribing), and humans will reapply themselves to (more productively) do higher-level tasks.

I'm sure a local beat reporter would be thrilled if they could get notes from all the meetings yesterday.

First I should say that I agree with you fully.

However, the "5 years" timeline which yeah its crap with what they are saying. I do worry that what they are actually hoping (not paying for writers) for will actually happen. Since there is a lot of money in not paying people and pushing content that keeps people reading.

Just regurgitating information over and over again in different ways. Or taking stray quotes or whatever as the information.

I worry that the question isn't if AI is going to get better or how its going to answer some of those questions that you have when the people running the sites for news clearly already don't care and its going to happen anyways. It doesn't matter if the technology is any good or it's valuable.

Maybe at some point people will wake up and realize that the regurgitated content serves no real value, but at that point how much have we dug ourselves into this hole already.

I know that some people compare this to crypto but there is a much different acceptance level and... ease of use here that is making it actually gain traction.

> AI can hoover all that up and rewrite and expand, but surely there will be a need to have boots-on-the-ground?

You missed the funeral for beat reporting by about 10-15 years. Boots on the ground has been dead since people stopped buying newspapers and blogging took over everything. This is just a further cost reduction.

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Most “journalism” these days is done from a desk. The Migrants eating Cats story for example — the national networks ran statements from certain local officials but didn’t actually go there and interview or investigate directly. They relied upon statements from public officials to refute the story. (Not saying it was a true or false story, but the major “news” networks certainly didn’t spend much, if any, time there — they didn’t investigate anything; they reported what public officials said.)

Many stories might as well be AI: feed into it something Trump said, then the algorithm creates a story with lots of “without evidence” qualifiers and then call it a day.

The media rarely investigates anything — they report on what others investigate or choose not to investigate and that’s printed as fact depending on who made the claim.

These problems are trivial when considering that we're already living in a sci-fi timeline where this technology was largely considered impossible 10 years ago. You're asking how it's going to know to ask the right questions, and to whom, when getting a system to ask questions in a general sense was the hard part. If you can't imagine humanity overcoming this hurdle, you lack in imagination.

If journalists want less slop media then maybe they shouldn't go around having their identities stolen by scammers producing fraudulent articles pretending to be from a legitimate news source.

What you're complaining about is that real journalism costs money to produce, but fake journalism via AI is vastly cheaper, so really it's the journalists' fault for having to pay bills and eat food. The journalists "perform worse" because they have to get paid, and because they're writing articles to be truthful and enlightening rather than appeal to SEO algorithms.

What a disgusting and useless take.

Odd accusation. OPB may have some bias, but it's definitely not "AI slop" territory.