#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#Chatbots#Media#News#Journalism: "Most general news consumption is not driven by a desire to seek specific information. People actively go to news sites for broad-spectrum updates on the world (“What’s going on today, local newspaper?”) or just to fill a content-sized hole in their day (“Give me something interesting to read, Washington Post”). And for news consumption that doesn’t start at a news site — which is to say, most news consumption — that generally starts with an answer, not a question, Jeopardy-style. (A headline on a social feed tells you about something that’s happened — and it’s almost always something that you weren’t explicitly seeking information about five seconds earlier.)
LLMs are, in contrast, overwhelmingly about specific information seeking.2 They share that characteristic with Google and other search engines, which are powered by specific user intent. (Things like “car insurance quote” and “cheap flights.”)
What I’m saying is that bot-offering news orgs will need to find ways to bridge that divide. It’s easier to imagine with a financial outlet like the FT or Bloomberg, where specific information seeking aligns better with high-end business users. But even for an outlet as high-end as The New York Times, it’s not obvious what use cases an “Ask NYT” chatbot would fulfill. News-org-as-all-knowing-oracle will require some philosophical shifts from news-org-as-regular-producer-of-stories. (For example, imagine an AI that could generate an on-the-fly backgrounder whenever a reader sees a person or concept they don’t recognize in a story. That sort of “Who’s this Ursula von der Leyen person?” question is the sort of specific information request that could be met contextually.)" https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/03/the-financial-times-is-ready-for-its-ai-to-answer-your-questions-well-some-of-them/
