Category: My Editor Hates Me

Things You’ll Never See On The CBC

Rebel News;

A government comedian from Trudeau’s CBC state broadcaster attended a Pierre Poilievre rally last week, aiming to ambush the Conservative Party leader. […] That video bombed on social media — it was a partisan attack on Poilievre, of course, and more to the point, it just wasn’t funny.

But I noticed something at 1:15 in the video: a “jump cut” edit — the CBC deleted part of the video but didn’t cover their tracks. What were they hiding?

It obviously wasn’t Poilievre saying something embarrassing, or they would have shown that for sure. So it must have been something the CBC said.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

How an AI-written Star Wars story created chaos at Gizmodo

A few hours after James Whitbrook clocked into work at Gizmodo on Wednesday, he received a note from his editor in chief: Within 12 hours, the company would roll out articles written by artificial intelligence. Roughly 10 minutes later, a story by “Gizmodo Bot” posted on the site about the chronological order of Star Wars movies and television shows.

Whitbrook — a deputy editor at Gizmodo who writes and edits articles about science fiction — quickly read the story, which he said he had not asked for or seen before it was published. He catalogued 18 “concerns, corrections and comments” about the story in an email to Gizmodo’s editor in chief, Dan Ackerman, noting the bot put the Star Wars TV series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” in the wrong order, omitted any mention of television shows such as “Star Wars: Andor” and the 2008 film also entitled “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” inaccurately formatted movie titles and the story’s headline, had repetitive descriptions, and contained no “explicit disclaimer” that it was written by AI except for the “Gizmodo Bot” byline.

The article quickly prompted an outcry among staffers who complained in the company’s internal Slack messaging system that the error-riddled story was “actively hurting our reputations and credibility,” showed “zero respect” for journalists and should be deleted immediately, according to messages obtained by The Washington Post. The story was written using a combination of Google Bard and ChatGPT, according to a G/O Media staff member familiar with the matter. (G/O Media owns several digital media sites including Gizmodo, Deadspin, The Root, Jezebel and The Onion.)

“I have never had to deal with this basic level of incompetence with any of the colleagues that I have ever worked with,” Whitbrook said in an interview. “If these AI [chatbots] can’t even do something as basic as put a Star Wars movie in order one after the other, I don’t think you can trust it to [report] any kind of accurate information.”

The irony that the turmoil was happening at Gizmodo, a publication dedicated to covering technology, was undeniable. On June 29, Merrill Brown, the editorial director of G/O Media, had cited the organization’s editorial mission as a reason to embrace AI. Because G/O Media owns several sites that cover technology, he wrote, it has a responsibility to “do all we can to develop AI initiatives relatively early in the evolution of the technology.”

“These features aren’t replacing work currently being done by writers and editors,” Brown said in announcing to staffers that the company would roll out a trial to test “our editorial and technological thinking about use of AI.” “There will be errors, and they’ll be corrected as swiftly as possible,” he promised.

Gizmodo’s error-plagued test speaks to a larger debate about the role of AI in the news. Several reporters and editors said they don’t trust chatbots to create well-reported and thoroughly fact-checked articles. They fear business leaders want to thrust the technology into newsrooms with insufficient caution. When trials go poorly, it ruins employee morale as well as the reputation of the outlet, they argue.

Artificial intelligence experts said many large language models still have technological deficiencies that make them an untrustworthy source for journalism unless humans are deeply involved in the process. Left unchecked, they said, artificially generated news stories could spread disinformation, sow political discord and significantly impact media organizations.

“The danger is to the trustworthiness of the news organization,” said Nick Diakopoulos, an associate professor of communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University. “If you’re going to publish content that is inaccurate, then I think that’s probably going to be a credibility hit to you over time.”

Well, that horse bolted the barn some time ago.

Guest Song

SDA regular, Denise, has sent in the following:

Years ago I clipped an article with the headline “Man Saws Off Foot to Avoid Work.” Bemused by this commitment to an idle lifestyle, It was the epitome of weird. Not anymore. Bizarre human behaviour has gone mainstream. Basement musician and husband James Frazer penned this quirky song describing the peculiar people who populate this clown world. How are we different from squirrels & birds? Listen to Strange Species here.

Lyrics

Not Watching For The Asteroid

Daily Beast;

Famed statistics guru Nate Silver and his website FiveThirtyEight are on the “chopping block,” Confider has learned, as ABC News looks to cut costs.

A decision on the future of the famed politics, economics, and sports analysis website is set to be made by the summer when Silver’s contract is up, multiple people with knowledge of the situation told us.

The oft-combative Silver, who has come under renewed scrutiny for his site’s polling selections, now faces an uncertain future as news division boss Kim Godwin reviews the publication, which has never turned a profit.

A Twitter poll.

This Is CNN (Bumped for more)

Remembering Brian Stelter.

At this point it’s almost cliché to say so, but what Stelter meant when he used words like “misinformation” was right-wing. For all the Reliable Sources anchor’s garment-rending about declining trust in the media, he spent a disproportionate amount of time covering for his industry’s egregiously biased, activist behavior over the course of the past few years. He defended his colleague Chris Cuomo’s unethical role as an adviser to his brother, the disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. He regularly offered up his show as a platform for Biden officials to repeat White House propaganda. On Jussie Smollett, he argued: “We may never know what happened.” And he himself regularly engaged in “misinformation,” including championing the fraudulent “Steele dossier” narrative. (When new details about the dossier’s fraudulent nature emerged, Stelter protested: “I’m a media reporter, and I’m not a Steele dossier reporter.”)

Via Jon Nicosia: “Once the coming shakeup at @CNN is done, don’t expect John Berman, Alisyn Camerota, Jim Acosta, Brianna Keilar, Jake Tapper, John King, and Don Lemon to still be at the network OR have their current show assignments.” (Sorry, forgot the link)

Steve Krakauer: A change is coming…

In the Trump years, Brian and his show, Reliable Sources, became emblematic of the Jeff Zucker Era of CNN. The office politics subsided, overtaken by the national politics that slowly, then rapidly, became intertwined with the media coverage. Fairly or unfairly – and, in reality, probably somewhere in between – Brian became a stand-in for Zucker himself, both in criticism of the network by places like Fox News, and internally among those who viewed the output as directly from Jeff’s brain.

When Jeff Zucker ran the network, that meant there was no one more untouchable at CNN. But Jeff was fired, and Chris Licht took over. In the new regime, being a stand-in for the old boss was perhaps the worst place to be. Yesterday it was announced Stelter would be leaving CNN, and Reliable Sources was canceled. The last episode airs Sunday, and Stelter’s last newsletter was sent last night. (Longtime media watcher Jon Nicosia’s sources said it was happening back in June.) […]

His exit marks a perception shift at the network, but is also quite obviously a reality check to those still in the building – the rumors about what Chris Licht, and David Zaslav, and John Malone plan to do with CNN are in fact true. The network will not be making small changes. It’s a full-scale overhaul. Jeffrey Toobin was gone last week. Brian Stelter is gone this week. Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, Brianna Keilar, Alisyn Camerota – you are on notice. The changes may have started small and subtle, but then the floodgates open and start coming all at once. (Licht signaled as much in his 9am comments this morning.)

New CEO Tells Employees, ‘You Might Not Like or Understand’ What’s Coming

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