The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

I am of a certain age that it is difficult to get too worked up about technology, especially when all the usual suspects are gushing and waxing poetic about how paradigm subverting it may be.

That doesn't mean I am a Luddite...far from it! I enjoy the tech just as much as anyone. Flat screen TVs are fantastic! Rocket-fast internet, incredibly powerful computer processors (sadly more than matched by bloated code), amazing cars, CAD/CAM that can take products from dreams to reality in a matter of weeks, medical technology, and on and on. We live in fantastic times!

But... the current lunacy with using Artificial Intelligence to do every task formerly reserved for people with functioning brains has exposed the intellectual flaccidity of many parts of our society, but none more so than our Fourth Estate. Let's be honest, there are very few so-called journalists who know how to write a clear and concise article. Apparently they no longer teach writing in our journalism schools. Add in the use of AI, especially among those wet-behind-the-ears budding H. L. Mencken or Joan Didion, and we have the unpleasant result of chaotically structured news articles that are also horribly agrammatical.

Sadly for these pup reporters with limited skill and even more pathetic drive, they are putting themselves out of the news business. It is blatantly obvious to those who pay their salaries that their crappy output is only marginally better than pure AI-written articles. So why pay these entitled idiots, when they could get comparable content from a couple of high-end PCs and a couple of "editors" feeding wire service data into those machines?

The real question is: If journalism's use of AI is so abysmally bad, what about all of the other uses? Investment advice, programmed trading, reading X-rays and MRIs, approving or denying insurance claims, writing software, designing safety systems for airplanes...

And what about future uses? Do we really want AI to replace air traffic controllers and surgeons and civil engineers? Ask anyone who is involved with these systems about "hallucinations!" Yeah...that's a thing with AI.

I have no issue with private companies pissing away their R&D budgets on the flashy new toy of AI. Just don't affect the bottom line (too much), because good old human beings are still pretty good at some things, and judging by the amount of money being spent by the tech companies on both AI hardware and software, it is entirely possible that people are cheaper and better! Just not in journalism!

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter] And the Apple and Spotify feeds for CJN's podcast should be working!

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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