narwhalHow Stuff Works replaced writers with GPT-generated content and laid off editors
This seems really short-sighted. Why would I go to How Stuff Works when I can just ask the LLM myself?
Maybe there’s just no possible business model for them anymore with the advent of LLMs, but at least if they focused on the “actually written by humans!” angle there’d be some hook to draw people in.
This reminds me of the short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” by Roald Dahl. In the story a machine is invented that can write great stories, but it’s creators go around buying the naming rights of authors so people will actually not their books.
so people will actually not their books
What?
I think I meant but. I’ve edited the comment. That said, after rereading the story last tonight, the reason they buy the rights to authors names is to eliminate competition and maximize profits.
LoafyLemonLLM cannot create new concepts, it can only create a mishmash of things it has been fed on.
Just like Hollywood!
Isn't that exactly how howstuffworks operates though?
Humans aren’t much different. 99.9% of what we create is just a remix of existing parts/ideas. It’s why people spend 12-20 years pre-training on all the existing knowledge in the field they’re going to work in.
It's completely different. We can come up with new ideas, language models can't.
The thing is, the LLM doesn't actually know anything, and lies about it.
So you go to How Stuff Works now, and you get bullshit lies instead of real information, you'll also get nonsense that looks like language at first glance, but is gibberish pretending to be an article. Because sometimes the language model changes topics midway through and doesn't correct, because it can't correct. It doesn't actually know what it's saying.
See, these language models are pre-trained, that the P in chatGPT. They just regurgitate the training data, but put together in ways that sort of look like more of the same training data.
There are some hard coded filters and responses, but other than that, nope, just a spew of garbage out from the random garbage in.
And yet, all sorts of people think this shit is ready to take over writing duties for everyone, saving money and winning court cases.
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Absolutely. Creating new documentation will always be a human sport.
It could be AI sport when we actually have an general purpose AI. That based on people working on llm and gpt, would take between 6 years and never happening.
It’s not easy to create a super ai who’s realistically smarter than humans in every aspect.
CybersteelJust like the mutant Olympics that we have today.
Yeah, this is why I can’t really take anyone seriously when they say it’ll take over the world. It’s certainly cool, but it’s always going to be limited in usefulness.
Some areas I can see it being really useful are:
- generating believable text - scams, placeholder text, and general structure
- distilling existing information - especially if it can actually cite sources, but even then I’d take it with a grain of salt
- trolling people/deep fakes
That’s about it.
It isnt going to take over, its being put in control by idiots.
The thing is, the LLM doesn’t actually know anything, and lies about it.
Just like your average human journalist. If you ever read an article from not specialist journal on a topic you are familiar with - you know. This seems actually where LLM are very similar to how human brain works - if we don’t know something, we come up with some bullshit.
tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺So modern journalists were redundant all along?
But yeah, the quality of what is passing as journalism now is often ridiculous. But the only way to combat this is by having editors that are knowledgable about topics. But it seemed editors were the first people laid off, when internet articles became a thing.
So modern journalists were redundant all along?
24 hours news cycle of online media creates junk journalism on new level. Good journalism needs time and can’t spit out news articles every minute of the day. Editors won’t help, because it’s just not possible to do good journalism on that scale. But jeh - in general with AI, the jobs will shift more to editing. Which will be extremely soul-draining, going though tons of AI generated bullshit
Even medium human writers can comprehend their work as a whole, though. There is a cohesiveness even to the bullshit. The LLM is just putting words down that match the prompt. It’s rng driven, readable Lorum Ipsum.
If the results were still edited afterwards, there may be some merit to the output, but any company going full LLM isn’t looking for quality. They want to use it to churn out endless content that they simply can’t get from even a team of humans. More than could be edited even if they kept editors on staff.
Even medium human writers can comprehend their work as a whole, though
Sure, but a lot of humans are rather bad writers.
but any company going full LLM isn’t looking for quality.
That is true for 24h news cycle of online media, regardless LLM.
Sure, but a lot of humans are rather bad writers.
Bad writing is still a step above rng junk, imo.
but any company going full LLM isn’t looking for quality.
That is true for 24h news cycle of online media, regardless LLM.
Yes, that was my point. Setting up your company to put out more content than can possibly be processed by humans is a glaring sign of their values - ie quantity far above quality.
Bad writing is still a step above rng junk, imo.
I’v read writing worse than GTP. I had to help someone write an essay - and I just wrote it for him in the end, because he absolutely lacked the skills to write a long meaningful text. At at the same time - genius of a percussionist.
Do you think that person was signing up for jobs writing for blogs or content farms?
Have you read some low quality journalism? The whole yellow press can be replaced with GTP and no one would ever see a difference.
Ok, so do you wanna talk about your terrible writing partner in school? Or “yellow press”? Or maybe the topic of the article, which isn’t journalism in the slightest? Or how about my point, which was, again, that even bad writers have context, as opposed to an LLM which is just filling in the arbitrary patterns it’s programmed to delineate. Readability is not what I’m talking about.
That’s how you get the room
BlackmistLiterally predictive text but for whole articles.
It doesn’t know the limits of it’s knowledge or indeed know anything. It just “knows” what an answer smells like. It even “knows” what excuses are supposed to look like when you call it out.
AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦Because most people still google things. Websites full of LLM generated content are just the natural continuation of MFAs (Made For AdSense).
mrbubblesortCorrect me if I'm wrong, but isn't AI generated content not copyrightable? Therefore nothing is stopping someone from taking all their content, rebranding it as "how stuff really works" or something, and then start stealing their business & ad revenue.
Creating a market for real human content? Sounds tasty
Maybe make it a co-op and put the CEO + AI article company out of business
I’m down for that
circuitfarmerThis is going to happen for a while. Execs who actually have no clue have now been sold on the idea that AI lets them keep making money without paying labor.
It will fail eventually when the execs eventually take the time to learn what AI is capable of and what it isn’t capable of.
Who am I kidding? It’ll continue indefinitely because there are few consequences for clueless executives.
vezrienExecs won’t take the time to learn that, they will learn it only by losing market share to the competition.
“That was two golden parachutes ago, what do I care?”
I see a possibility where these sites eventually become terrible and there is a new person can come in and make content made by humans.
Even edited by humans would be better than that
Not even inpainting smh
This is fine. Just let us know so we know what shows to avoid.
Altima NEOThis seems like a really dumb idea.
How long until we can a browser extension that lets us know when we are on a site written by AI?
I don’t mean AI detection, but instead, sites that announce they are laying off editors in favor of AI.
How about instead of all the tracking cookie popups for permission, we force these sites to display a message that the content is AI generated.
Why not both?
Used to be one of my favourite sites when I was younger. Haven’t visited that site in ages. Holy crap, has it gone to complete shit. Like way worse than I thought possible
When I read the OP I thought “oh yeah I used to use that all the time, I wonder what its like now?”. Seems to have changed a lot…
totally unrecognizable. I can’t believe I actually used to learn stuff there
Considering most articles on the internet that don’t come from legitimate newspapers sound like they’re written by a 6-year-old who gets paid by the word, how much worse could it get?
Gradually_AdjustingNever ask that
Bizarre. Not even keep a few editors for… the editing??
I wonder how this will affect the Stuff You Should Know podcsst.
mechinnThey haven’t been associated for awhile, the company owning HowStuffWorks spun off the podcasting division in 2017 before selling it to iHeartMedia in 2018 https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/iheartmedia-stuff-media-howstuffworks-podcast-acquisition-1202939938/
Oh, great to know!! They are my favorite duo, and I often here them talk about How Stuff Works articles.
Thank you for the link.
I quit SYSK when iheart bought HSW, creating a vertical monopoly… And turning HSW into a purely capital enterprise. Josh and Chuck rule. Wish they would do more of their own work off of the iheart platform.
Hm, I guess I haven’t paid attention to the ownership, I just skip past the ads to the content.
They will always be worth listening to.
waterplantsPeople really don’t understand the current state of LLM, like the pictures generated “Its a really good picture of what a dog would look like, it’s not actually a dog”. Like a police sketch, with a touch of “randomeness” so you don’t always get the same picture.
I’m guessing they will try to solve this issue with some cheap human labour to review what is being generated. These verifers will probably not be experts on all the subjects that the llm will be spitting out, more of a “That does kind of look like a dog, APPROVED”.
Let’s say I’m wrong, and LLM’s can make as good of an article as any human. The content would be so saturated (even a tumblr user could now make as good and as much content as one of these companies), I would expect companies to be joining in on all the strikes 😆.
Funny world we are all going into. Boas Entradas
One thing I disagree with is the assumption that anyone could create the same article by themselves. Coming up with a good prompt is a skill in itself and not everyone is equally good at it. I actually believe a prompt writer is going to be a new profession in the near future.
As usual with new technology, some jobs go away and new ones appear.
Are we assuming AI won’t be able to create a good prompt? 😂
VoxAdActaI’m guessing they will try to solve this issue with some cheap human labour to review what is being generated.
They already do. These current "AI"s are starting to look more and more like Mechanical Turks, except with a couple hundred third-world wage-slaves inside the box.
Someone should create a blocklist for all these new AI-driven websites.
For me personally thee primary appeal of websites are that there’s human authors behind the content… otherwise I’d just ask an ‘AI’ myself.
It would be great to have a list of sites so id know whose links I can just immediately ignore.
I wonder what they will do when the tripe the LLM spews doesn’t match the pictures they are showing.