A new AI-powered content generator called ChatGBT launched in late 2022. Its proprietors market it as “a large language model developed by OpenAI that can be used for natural language processing tasks such as text generation.”
It writes stuff, in plain English. And in the future, it’ll do so faster and cheaper than humans. ChatGBT is already used for simpler text-based tasks like operating chat boxes, auto-generating responses to common questions on online forums, and social media posting.
ChatGBT has recently earned author credits on several academic papers, because academics apparently can’t be bothered to write, as explained in the science journal Nature:
The artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT that has taken the world by storm has made its formal debut in the scientific literature — racking up at least four authorship credits on published papers and preprints…
The bot is already disrupting sectors including academia: in particular, it is raising questions about the future of university essays and research production.
ChatGBT and similar AI tools have a very specific temporal limitation for writing news content, though. As Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Canada research chair in natural language processing and machine learning at the University of British Columbia, explains, “The point of weakness of ChatGPT is that it’s trained on outdated data from 2021 or 2022. It will not be able to detect something that happened recently. For example, it would not be able to tell you if France did or did not win the Qatar World Cup. That type of factual information is hard for the model to tell”.
But those shortcomings haven’t stopped entrepreneurial news agencies from attempting to cut overhead costs by pushing out AI-generated news into the ether, like CNET. The experiment’s reportedly turned out to be a s***show riddled with errors so far (not that CNET was ever a journalistic paragon anyway).
Related: Trust the Artificial Intelligence, Part One
And, for what it’s worth, Google claims it currently classifies AI-generated content as spam, which harms its search engine ranking and potentially deters companies (including journalistic outlets) from using them.
Current failures notwithstanding, the temptation to cut costs and streamline the editing process will likely prove too great to resist, especially as the technology inevitably improves in speed, accuracy, and mimicry of natural speech.
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