Wash Post Eyes robot edited operation work.

The Washington Post’s plan to introduce many external opinion writers, edited by artificial intelligence, is widely laughed at what it should be. But the idea is nothing new – at least the non-AI part.

Ten years ago, the post began publishing what was called Post Everything. “A digital daily magazine for voices from around the world. Here’s how the 2014 development explained it:

In every post, outsiders entertain and inform fresh take on telling stories that everyone is telling, personal essays, news analysis, other innovative ways to acknowledge, and things they have not heard yet.

I posted Post Everything one day in 2022 and now it’s back. According to Benjamin Marin (Gift Link) of The New York Times, the revived feature, known internally as Ripple, includes opinions from other newspapers, independent authors of subsacs, and ultimately non-professional authors. Ripple is digital only and will be offered outside the paywall of the post.

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What’s hilarious is that Marin contacted some of the partners the post is considering, including the Salt Lake Tribune and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and was told they weren’t interested. Another potential partner has been identified as Jennifer Rubin. Jennifer Rubin resigned from interfering with owner Jeff Bezos and began her own publication called The Contrian. Marine wrote: “When Rubin laughed and exploded when he was told she was under consideration at all. She said.”

The angle of AI is also ridiculed. A while after Ripple was released, this post intends to look for non-professional authors to broaden Ripple’s appeal. Use an AI editing tool called Ember to boost your writing. Marine explains:

Early mockups of the tool feature a “story intensity” tracker that tells the writer how it is formed, a sidebar that lays out basic parts of the story structure. One of the people said that the live AI assistant provides developmental questions and that the author writes a prompt to invite the author to add a “solid support point.”

Good Lord.

Ripple doesn’t attack me as a bad idea except for the AI ​​part. Everything is successful, and there’s no reason why this can’t be done either. The problem is that Bezos has so damaged the reputation of Post’s opinion section that everything Post is trying now is being greeted with skepticism.

Mea culpa x2

After Melissa Bell, chief executive of Chicago’s public media, published a brief statement posted on May 29th about how an AI-generated guide to a summer book that doesn’t actually exist in Chicago’s Sun Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, who released the same fake news, released the approval.

Sun Times is a nonprofit organization that is part of Chicago Public Media, a broadcasting work. In summary, Sun Times and Inquirer ran Sunday supplements from King Features, part of Hearst last month. As Bell writes, if Suntime and Inquirer were not called, other papers could have carried supplements the following weekend.

“The summer section, along with our own journalism, was intended to be a supplementary value for our subscribers,” she writes. “Instead, it undermined our work and distracted us,” she adds:

So, what will we take away from now? First, Chicago’s public media will never leave us experimenting and learning how to properly use AI. We don’t use AI agents to create stories, but we work to find ways to use AI technology to help our work and serve our audience. We recently started that job. This is thanks to a grant from the Lenfest Institute, which helps AI fellows fund AI fellows to work in responsible experiments.

Ah, yes, Lenfest Institute. It is a non-profit organization owning Philadelphia referrals. Lenfest has been all-in with AI and recently announced that the AI ​​Collaborative and Fellowship program is welcoming five new members, including the Boston Globe.

It should be noted that King’s characteristics have nothing to do with Inquirer’s decision to perform summer supplements. Like Suntime, Inquirer executives had no way of knowing that AI slops were included.

On May 21, Inquirer published a news story about the incident, citing editor and senior vice president Gabriel Escobar, calling the incident “a violation of our own internal policies and a serious violation.”

The Inquirer columnist mentioned Inquirer’s embarrassment in a June 1 column dedicated to AI bashing. He wrote:

There has been little or no debate about the lack of AI regulation, even though the warning of the human work apocalypse is not the only way programs like Openai’s ChatGPT are threatening the planet. The massive energy demand to power these supercomputers makes little sense amid the global warming crisis. Overuse of AI by students can turn the brains of younger generations into pulp. However, in American summer hallucinations, no one sees through the purple haze.

This isn’t good

On Tuesday, I wrote about the business insider’s plan to remove 21% of staff and embrace AI as a way to create more channelism, even when outlets are trying to convince their audiences to pay for digital subscriptions.

There is no doubt that AI retains the possibility of eliminating drighery from certain types of newsroom work, such as production-related tasks, writing social media posts (but check them out). Midcoast villagers in Camden, Maine use AI to track what’s going on in 43 communities, allowing real reporters to follow up.

However, AI is often used as a shortcut and a way to reduce costs. It is not a replacement for the relationships journalists develop with their community. What’s worse, AI remains unreliable. We are not in a good place.