"Let's go down the waterfall. Think about the good times and never look back."
What happened at SI is not an outlier. It's probably a sign of things to come.
This week’s soundtrack: Radiohead - “I Might Be Wrong”
I mentioned automation in journalism last week in passing. A story broke Monday that is the fulfillment of these and similar trends. According to a report in Futurism, Sports Illustrated recently published stories entirely written by artificial intelligence, with bylines of fake reporters and writers. The content was created by corporate publisher, the Arena Group, Futurism reports in the story. When asked, Arena Group blamed it on a contractor. SI’s editorial union is understandably upset and its members took to Twitter.
AI’s threat to the creative arts – insomuch as journalism qualifies as a creative art – was near the heart of the entertainment strikes over the last year. Automation replaces the budget line items that are labor. People are expensive and require things like breaks, weekends, health insurance, paid time off and all the other benefits that the organized labor movement fights for and has fought for.
There is an argument – and the industrialists and other bosses in charge of most of these huge multinational organizations certainly make that argument – that the AI revolution will be like the Industrial Revolution. All that inefficient work – writing sports stories in the case of SI, or rolling steel in the case of the rolling mill –that was done by people can now be done more efficiently by an algorithm or a machine.
AI’s big problem, most of us argue, is that work done by AI lacks humanity and (more applicable to the journalism world) accuracy. You’ve almost certainly seen the AI-generated images of human beings with odd numbers of fingers, but AI “hallucinations” have been a problem for a while now. I cover this at my job and one of the main concerns of government, Congressional and military IT leaders is a lack of accuracy in AI systems. This is where the Industrial Revolution is different enough to this moment; the mistakes that the machines made back then were not as publicized and didn’t move as quickly through the world as they do now.
What the industrialists say, though, is that it may not always be this way. Generative AI has made huge improvements just since Dall-E launched a few years ago. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that accuracy can be achieved; spell check (non-generative AI) has improved by leaps and bounds since it was introduced, for example.
SI’s staff is terrific and having an editorial union is one of the final vestiges of the magazine’s past that Baccellieri references in her tweet. The industrialists behind the Arena Group describes itself as “an innovative technology platform and media company with a proven cutting-edge playbook that transforms media brands,” which is a far cry from the best and most in-depth sports magazine. That’s, unfortunately, the way the current media ownership environment is, with deliberately obfuscating language to blur the line between actual journalism, sponsored content and entertainment.
(Sports is hardly the most serious journalistic endeavor. Charissa Thompson’s recent admitting of a serious journalism crime has her without punishment and her defenders has mostly downplayed the notion that sideline reports matter at all. Fair points, for sure; I’d rather Thompson make up that she talked to a head coach than a White House reporter fabricate a quote from the president. But maybe don’t make anything up at all. That’s, like, journalism 101.)
As with machine-created physical products (v. handmade), the consumer probably doesn’t care so much. If the product does what it is supposed to do and is cheap, the public is fairly unencumbered by every other externality. I think this, ultimately, is where the Arena Group (and the entertainment industry executives) are placing their betting money.
A huge disconnect, especially online, is the gap between creators and audiences. In the entertainment industry, this is where the Martin Scorsese had to explain himself about the definition of “cinema” regarding the Marvel universe. The reason that everything in the movie world is either a giant superhero movie (money in the bank. Expensive to make, but profitable) or a tiny cheap movie (often good, sometimes profitable) is money and audience wants. Art is not, uh, profitable. The more that movies become product, the better shareholders make out. Art requires people, products don’t have to.
(It’s no shock that the VFX world is increasingly a part of the movie world. It’s cheaper and the CG VFX world is not unionized; plenty of it is outsourced to all ends of the earth.)
To that point, the gap between journalists and a lot of the journalism audience is that a lot of the audience wants information (“news you can use” and such). While journalists fancy ourselves “storytellers,” the audience mostly wants information, not artfully delivered information. When I was at GovExec and was one of the main audience points of contact, I didn’t hear from the audience about anything until the TSP ticker went wrong. The audience didn’t care much about the huge, well-researched featured stories that were crafted; the biggest stories were about the pay raise proposal or if the president was going to give feds a day off for Christmas Eve. Before remote work, there was good web traffic for stories about whether OPM was giving feds off for snow days; OPM’s social media streams made that type of story extinct because it could now just be “delayed start” on Twitter or whatever.
Back in the newspaper days, the highest ad rates were for page two: The page of the newspaper with the weather report. Sports pages put the score lines on the front page; these are the things people care about most. Weather.com is the highest-trafficked non-search/non-social site on the web. People, in the aggregate, aren’t interested in journalism from their journalists. They’re interested in information.
This difficult truth is something with which I grapple a lot (along with concepts like “people only read headlines,” “social media is ruining journalism” and everything involving the phrase “fake news.”). But, it’s not of particular concern for the industrialists – the bosses – who make these decisions.
This was the crux of my newsletter last week; The Way Things Work means that bosses (and their bosses: shareholders) don’t see labor as anything but a cost. No one ever became really rich by treating other people with humanity (see also: The entire history of the U.S. as an economic power).
David Roth has written about this extensively and, in fact, wrote about this arrangement at Defector in connection to the SI scenario:
Still, these donkeys have a lot of money and a lot of power, and while that has not enabled them to brute-force any of their dopey imagineerings into anything that any normal person has to deal with or care about, it does mean that their self-administered nervous breakdowns over this shit make the news. It also means that the residual toxins in these ideas tend to show up further downstream, where the rest of us live, and work.
These powerful people and their weird gilded toys and what they don't care about have become everyone's problem.
The whims of the bosses hit everyone, but they never think it will hit them. Money insulates you until it doesn’t; if AI keeps evolving to the point that is predicted, bosses can be replaced, too.
The nihilism is fairly easy to see. If everything is just information (in the case of journalism) or stroking comic book fan pleasure centers with nostalgia (in the case of entertainment), the actual people who make it can go. But we lose our connections to one another and humanity. Everything becomes semiotics and “remember when Batman did that thing?” at the loss of anything new and connected.
Nostalgia is cheap. Software is cheap. These things are cheap. No one knows that better than a boss. The Arena Group certainly understands that. All bosses do.
When will they realize that the AI will come for them, too? And when will they realize that they can’t get rid of people altogether and continue to have a functioning civilization?
Lulu Update
The weather was lovely in DC last week during the holiday, so we took to our shared backyard and played with a ball outside for much of the morning. No one loves playing wiht a ball more than Lulu does.
A Recommendation: “Striving And Streaming In The Desert: A Visit To TwitchCon Las Vegas”
Libby Watson is a terrific writer and her piece on the Twitch convention is a must-read. It touches on some things about the online ecosystem of fame, streaming and social media (streaming is, in a way, a type of social) and reminds me how much of a transformative a moment we living through. Making money in the online environment like streaming or influencing, as Watson notes int the piece, is entirely foreign to a lot of people, but it’s real and pays real money (albeit less than it used to). It’s a fascinating exploration of this world.