The NYTimes story on the AI writing news is a story about the repackaging of the knowledge graph. the language model is just an interface. Repackaging as an assistant, the examples of broken factboxes, the sale as a labor saving device, "we don't intend to replace your writers, we want to give you more convenient access to factual information" - here's a piece that should help make sense of that. #SurveillanceGraphs https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/#the-lens-of-search-re-centers-our-focus-away-from-the-generative
The rewriting titles idea is perfectly in line with what they discuss in their investor calls in the context of advertising. it's a natural move if you see the LLMs as scope-limited enterprise tools that are intend to hook companies into dependence on their information access systems (consolidation of power) and hook people into them as means of interacting with an ecosystem of apps, commerce, etc. (intimacy of surveillance).
The debate about whether the LLMs are sentient is not serving us well. It's true, of course they aren't sentient, but it's obscuring more of the truth of the strategy than it is innoculating us against it at this point. Whether the LLMs are sentient is irrelevant because the plan was never to just continue to use the LLMs on their own. They are interfaces to other systems, can be presented as tools that can be conditioned by "factual information."
They won't work as advertised, of course, but we have to be very clear about the threat: The threat is not that LLMs will write the news. That's already happening, do any search. The threat is that the LLMs will be used to leverage greater control over our access to information by destabilizing our already fragile information ecosystem and presenting themselves as precisely not sentient, but handy assistants to interact with trusted databases - the last trustable sources of information left.
The addition of context-optimized clickbait headers for those willing to pay to be the brand beneath them is just an especially cynical product to sell to whichever suckers are desperate enough to buy it.
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