Will Artificial Intelligence replace journalists?

"hell no, we're not even close yet"

John Bohannon is both a journalist (Science, Wired, The Guardian) and an AI practitioner, specifically in NLP, as Director of Science at Primer.

As I’ve begun making more videos hosting interesting people I thought I would sit down with John to tap his experience on the process of interviewing. I also wanted to check if AI is going to soon replace the journalist-interviewer in which case I could free myself to go bark up some other tree. Spoiler: the answer is a resounding “hell no, we’re not even close yet!”.

So here’s the show:

The notes below give an outline of some of the topics we cover:

• Reverse of Turing Test

• An “Interview” is an operation to extract information from a person

• Several modes of professional interviewing

  1. Need an answer to a specific question

  2. I know a question I’m driving at and want to explore where it may lead

• Cadaver artwork project

  • “Where are you getting these bodies?”

  • “Are you getting these bodies from the Chinese government?”

  • “Are you getting these bodies from prisons and insane asylums?”

• More to the art of interviewing than “what to say next?”

• GPT is trained to figure out the next thing to say.

• Transformers and attention windows:

  • How good would an AI interviewer need to be to be able to setup the next interview? Realize the next person to talk to is X and not Y.

• OpenAI is actively working on something akin to a longer-term memory

• Who are you if not your memory?

• What’s hard about this

  1. How do you figure out what’s relevant?

  2. How do you decide the right strategy of which questions to ask, who to follow-up with for more clues? How do you frame the follow-ups to get the answers you want?

• GPTs have no “goals”

• Reinforcement Learning - crystalized sense of goals

• Sensors, processing, and prediction

• Two different worlds - synthesize these to

• Say-Can at Google: Say Can

• Adobe - audio AI

• Whisper - speech-to-text from OpenAI

• Video is a data paradise.

• Text summarization

• “Nut graph” in journalism - 2nd or 3rd paragraph that summarizes the whole article

• Bert changed everything - 2020 got crazy good

• No ranking of sentences/grammar

• InstructGPT - RLHF - take user feedback and shape the way the model outputs text

• Cambrian explosion of text2text models - how cheap and efficient can you make that?

• Eleuther  - open source version of GPT-3 called GPT-Neo

• Deepmind consistently coming out with paradigm shifting AI - Flamingo - computer vision married to NLP

• Old methods of authenticity signaling - power get consolidated to existing platforms

• Give up on truth or give up on anonymity - both have huge consequences

• Manufacturing consent

• Driver’s license for the Internet

• Early Internet was like a sparse suburban childhood

• Stretching the tether from one person to the other - comments on a YouTube video - you’re the worst version of yourself

• AI attempting to host a journalistic interview

• “Make a chatbot that’s worth talking to”

• The passive data stream

• Gathering the facts: important across crisis management, triage situations, emergency healthcare, national security

• Who, what, where, when, why?

• Automated simple journalist - reads the work of other journalists or reporting of any kind on events - figure out what are called “casualty events” (people getting hurt or killed)

• Inferences are expensive to run real-time stream on everything daily

• Intelligence gathering - a lot of people are going to have to change jobs or adapt

• AIs looking for problems

• An attempt at an AI-driven media company