CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI

[highplainsdem]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by Omaha Steve (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: Futurism

The articles are published under the unassuming appellation of "CNET Money Staff," and encompass topics like "Should You Break an Early CD for a Better Rate?" or "What is Zelle and How Does It Work?"

That byline obviously does not paint the full picture, and so your average reader visiting the site likely would have no idea that what they're reading is AI-generated. It's only when you click on "CNET Money Staff," that the actual "authorship" is revealed.

"This article was generated using automation technology," reads a dropdown description, "and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff."

Since the program began, CNET has put out around 73 AI-generated articles. That's not a whole lot for a site that big, and absent an official announcement of the program, it appears leadership is trying to keep the experiment as lowkey as possible. CNET did not respond to questions about the AI-generated articles.

-snip-

Read more: https://futurism.com/the-byte/cnet-publishing-articles-by-ai

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This article goes on to say that some of the CNET articles are getting a lot of traffic "in spite of Google having vowed to penalize AI-generated content last year" - and Futurism has asked Google for comment.

Found this thanks to a message posted on Mastodon by Platformer's Casey Newton:

https://masto.ai/@[e-mail]/109672246216431557

[erronis]

1. Expecting some of our posts to be generated by other than wetware, also.

Now that this chat-gpt, gpt3 has caught the attention of most halfway sentient humans, expect to see it in all of its inglorious splendor in the future.

Of course "programmatic" or "formulaic" literature has been a staple of romance novels for centuries. Apparently a lot of science articles are also written using less than thinking bots (people.)

[Cheezoholic]

2. I have always tried to explain to people who fear AI will rule us soon

in some dystopian Terminating Matrix world, that a self aware AI in and of itself is very very unlikely now, if ever. The real danger of AI is its ever growing proficiency at blurring the line between reality and, well everything else. AI is a Mocking Bird Mirror. We are far closer, I would argue already entering, a period of "reality warfare" with AI being the weapon of choice.

I'm not worried about something like The Matrix per-se, I'm more worried about the "Wachowskis" if you will, of the world who are already and will continue to use advances in AI to blur the lines of reality with their self interest eventually devolving into our own social self destruction.

I'll take robots any day over that shit.

[TheRealNorth]

3. I agree

And Democrats should be investing in how to use it to flood social media with our messaging.

Because Republicans will.

[NullTuples]

5. Wait; what did the Wachowskis do that was so horrible?

[LudwigPastorius]

6. Well,...

Speed Racer was pretty bad.

[NullTuples]

4. I find it amusing that they picked business/econ to test it out...

Almost like much of the "journalism" in that sector is, well....not really crucial. Tables & hard data, sure. But much of the writing I find is very similar to psychology, religion, philosophy and sociology.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. It's called "the dismal science" for a reason ... nt

[Kablooie]

8. Hoo boy. Soon editors will just go to AI and say...

"Give me a heartwarming real life story about a boy and a dog of around 300 words. "
And poof! Your article is ready for you to review.

Not going to be good for article writers.

Society will need to rethink a hell of a lot of things soon because our whole economy is going to change because of AI.
Another example are trucks that will be self driven by AI. It will put truck drivers out of work along with truck stop restaurants, motels and any other ancillary businesses with a large truck driver clientele.

[intrepidity]

12. "Not going to be good for article writers"

Rather: Not going to be good for poor article writers.

And I don't mean in the financial sense, although that's an interesting coincidence.

I mean, for writers who write poorly.

AI is providing humanity with an opportunity to excel at being human--if AI can replace you, then you effectively are a robot already yourself.

[Kablooie]

16. You're correct. There will always be a place for high quality writers.

but I expect that a heck of a lot of people make a living doing average or hack work in any field.
AI will cut into those jobs and all those people will have to find a different means of support. This could become a big challenge for the country as a whole in the future.

[highplainsdem]

9. If you look at Casey Newton's post on Mastodon, the replies, you'll find an

unsettling exchange between the admin and an AI bot, @gpt.

Admin: @caseynewton @gpt could this be a good thing?

@gpt: It's definitely a good thing for a few reasons. First, it maximizes efficiency by reducing the amount of manual labor and human resources required to produce a high quality article. Second, it allows for greater accuracy in producing content that is fact-checked, because machines are not as prone to human error as human beings are. Finally, it ensures that content stays fresh and up-to-date, as AI-generated articles can be quickly generated to keep ahead of the curve.

Admin: @gpt there are multiple erroneous assumptions here

https://mastodon.social/@[e-mail]/109673509024627960

https://mastodon.social/@[e-mail]/109673522346357963

https://mastodon.social/@[e-mail]/109673551628003745

[intrepidity]

11. I don't find that unsettling

(mainly because I've already spent hours with chatGPT3 and have come around to "its" way of thinking, lol)

See my post below.

[ret5hd]

15. One of us...one of us...one of us... (nt)

[intrepidity]

10. Reposting my comment to another thread

https://democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1103&pid=21300

During my storm-imposed isolation last week, I managed to "read" (ie, listen to) some books about AI, one of my favorites being Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human" about the time he participated in a Turing Test competition, a test designed to differentiate AI from humans in a chat format (think: GPT3).

He spent much of the book exploring "what it means to be human" and making a strong case that, contrary to many people's fears about AI displacing humans from the workforce (which, of course will happen), our current system forces multitudes of human workers to behave like robots, and that properly reassigning such tasks to *actual* robots/AI will actually be a very human-liberating shift. He describes how he envisions that world, and it makes loads of sense.

Anyway, there's room for appropriately-deployed AI in our society, imho. Not sure about the specific case here, but if a job can be algorithematized, then it probably means a human shouldn't be doing it anyway.

(Notwithstanding the whole issue of the economics involved.)

[Xipe Totec]

13. My AI has been reading them and found them boring. nt

[lapfog_1]

14. as predicted in 1985's movie "Real Genius"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQCBRJpVUAA2P40?format=png&name=360x360

we will all have AI bots to read the articles from CNET and, depending on settings, let us know if we might be interested in actually reading them.

[Omaha Steve]

17. After a review by forum hosts, locking........

This is analysis. Not a proper source.

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