Your "hahahaha those doomers" comments is either intentionally cruel or Pollyannish. Your "people have agency" "criticism" doesn't address the key points of the article:
1. The damage in the form of the destruction of news sources and replacement of writers with AI has happened and continues to happen. Writers are already jobless. News sources are already dead. But sure, these jobless people with no hope for their industry are "doomers". The article doesn't mention artists, but they are also getting hammered.
2. The worst players already have agency over their data choices, they are using that to build silos and destroy their competitors who don't have that ability.
3. Some social places have already become unusable. Twitter for instance. Threads may be able to push back on this, but they are already a dangerous silo.
News is a really weird place to start with AI, because it obviously doesn't work. The AI cannot go out into the world and do investigating journalism. It still can't access tons of documents that are still hidden away in archives and libraries around the world and it cannot do an sit though endless hours of court room session (even if that might be a fairly good place to start). The only "news" AIs can report on are press releases, that and rehashed articles written by journalists.
Due to the volume of half-arsed news the current AIs can generate your average reader might not notice that some is missing, though I questions that. People are starting to notice that their newspapers doesn't actually have news anymore (and that's just do to cost optimization and competition from ad supported online news).
I fear that we're entering a world where some of us pay for news written by real journalists, while the masses consume garbage "news" which is more tailored to them clicking ads, rather that learning about the world.
A lot of in-depth news comes from organizations that are funded by paid subscriptions, which gets copied elsewhere. The better websites cite their sources when re-reporting it. So, I guess we can thank the subscribers?
We’re all copying other people’s homework, especially in social media. How much of what you know about the world comes from personal observation? Most people haven’t traveled to most places.
> News is a really weird place to start with AI, because it obviously doesn't work. The AI cannot go out into the world and do investigating journalism.
The news business are almost entirely an ad business now. Only a few sites do real investigative journalism and only with a few journalists.
Many news businesses are now owned or majority controlled by billionaires and have the expected editorial biases that also don't really support hard hitting journalism.
1? I don't care. People lose jobs from technological progress, they've been able to see the writing on the wall for a while, and it's still not even a done deal, so frankly if journalists aren't figuring out how to get paid now, it's kind of on them. If their answer to how do I get paid is lawsuits, they deserve the suffering they're going to get.
2. Open source data sets can have curation too, this seems like a silly strawman to make.
3. Twitter isn't just unusable because of AI. It was never more than barely useable to begin with, and many of users didn't help the situation.
> 1. I don't care. People lose jobs from technological progress, they've been able to see the writing on the wall for a while, and it's still not even a done deal, so frankly if journalists aren't figuring out how to get paid now, it's kind of on them. If their answer to how do I get paid is lawsuits, they deserve the suffering they're going to get.
I got it from your original post: you don't give a shit. I was just calling you out on it. At least you own it.
> 2. Open source data sets can have curation too, this seems like a silly strawman to make.
It's not a strawman, but "curated open source data sets" are a red herring: those data sets are not what is going to be controlling the online experience of the vast majority of those online.
Why should I care about journalists vs anyone else? The pain that journalists suffer will be outweighed by the benefit to society of the tools - assuming people like you don't throw up their hands in defeat and choose to give all their power away to soulless megacorps when choosing which AI tools to use.
News is going to break, and people who break it accurately with personality and a unique take are going to do well regardless if whether newspapers and other bastions of old world journalism continue to exist.
Writing has always been a tough gig and maybe it’s gotten worse, but it doesn’t seem quite that bad? Aren’t some newer writers making money from subscriptions?
From a reader’s point of view, it seems like there’s plenty to read.
1. The damage in the form of the destruction of news sources and replacement of writers with AI has happened and continues to happen. Writers are already jobless. News sources are already dead. But sure, these jobless people with no hope for their industry are "doomers". The article doesn't mention artists, but they are also getting hammered.
2. The worst players already have agency over their data choices, they are using that to build silos and destroy their competitors who don't have that ability.
3. Some social places have already become unusable. Twitter for instance. Threads may be able to push back on this, but they are already a dangerous silo.