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- Friday 17th March: Don't believe the h.A.I.pe - GPT-4 is a poor replacement for journalists
Friday 17th March: Don't believe the h.A.I.pe - GPT-4 is a poor replacement for journalists
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There was a fun - if concerning - trend on Media Twitter yesterday of demonstrating why Chat GPT-4 is still extremely unsuited to the discipline of journalism. In fact, it made so many mistakes and excuses that you could be forgiven for mistaking its output for Boris Johnson's own pretensions at being a journalist. But as this article for DCN makes clear, there are benefits for media companies to using generative AI - provided it's approached as a tool and not a miracle:
"Currently, there are some practical concerns for digital media companies and large questions still to be answered, according to Bloomberg’s [Julia] Beizer. She questions how the advancement of these tools will affect relationships: “If we use AI in our own content creation, how should we disclose that to users to gain their trust?”
Look. Let's not kid ourselves that media execs aren't going to try to use generative AI to cut costs. But the industry has been using AI for many years, and even the impressive step change to GPT-4 doesn't alter the fact that human journalists will always be required for the most important aspects of news-gathering.
The only disappointing thing about this news is that the figure isn't higher. If you claim to be a news business but make misleading your audience a central tenet of your strategy then you deserve to be mistrusted. Let's just hope the same happens to the other Murdoch-owned titles around issues like Brexit.
Happy to share this one - not just because it's from our friend Mark Stenberg - but because it's about an under-prioritised platform. I've written about Pinterest's strong ecommerce proposition before, but Mark's article makes it clear that the interest-based platform is a key partner for publishers' ecommerce ambitions.
I'm forever telling Peter and Esther that we need to do video podcasts. Hopefully this article from Digiday explaining the sheer amount of cash money that's going into the associated ad formats will help sell them on it. That said - as a bald man all I need to do is throw on a jumper and make sure my beard is trimmed, while I know the two of them will want makeup artists on call 24/7 and perms for every episode, so maybe it's best we stick to audio for now...
More from Media Voices
On this week’s 250th episode we hear from Max Tani, media reporter at news start-up Semafor. He tells us how he came to Semafor; the Venn diagram between media, politics, Hollywood and pretty much everything else in life; about Semafor’s attempts to balance out news and opinion; and whether covering the White House was anything like The West Wing.
