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Will Artificial Intelligence replace journalists?

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Will Artificial Intelligence replace journalists?

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

DK
Jan 24, 2023
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Will Artificial Intelligence replace journalists?

www.curiousdk.com

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!”.

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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

Thanks for reading Curious DK! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Will Artificial Intelligence replace journalists?

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