CLEVELAND, OHIO (TheOBR.com) - Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
THE DAILY BLOVIATION
"At some point in the early twenty-first century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI… a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines." - Morpheus, The Matrix
That time has arrived, but I wouldn't exactly call it a celebration. The advent of AI is sending ripple effects throughout the world, for good and ill.
I've been involved with AI for nearly thirty-five years, since doing some early work with expert systems and neural networks in the 1990s to the present day, taking off time in the early 21st century on a quixotic quest to establish a business built around the on-field success of the Cleveland Browns, an effort that has resulted in untold riches and worldwide fame. Or not.
As frequent readers of this Massive Morning Missive can attest, I've been talking about it frequently over the past two years, particularly its positive and negative impacts, which have little to do with the Browns, who play a sport that very much relies on human capabilities and thinking, but a lot to do with the surrounding society. I started skeptically, then became very excited by it, and have now settled into a belief that it's a tool that can be used - like most human creations - for good or evil. It's a tool in the toolbox, but one that you have to use very carefully.
I'm talking about it today because the actual Browns "news" that came out in the last 24 hours is a bunch of non-factual, hot-take nonsense, and I don't feel like wasting our mutual time with discussions of someone else's opinion about the top 100 players in the NFL.
I've thought a great deal about how AI can apply to our work here at the OBR, despite the limitations built into our use of CBS's technology platform, which I can't "hack" or simply change to make it do what I want. I believe there are some places where it can be useful, and some where it must be avoided.
We've seen recently some big media types look to leverage AI for actual writing. Cleveland.com uses it to summarize its podcasts to squeeze more dollars out of that venture. ESPN has apparently started using it to write game summaries, such as NBA Summer League games. In fact, one got screwed up recently, and ESPN took pains to blame the error on humans rather than AI.
I don't want to insult our larger peers, who are trying to survive in an economic environment that is tough on journalists, but before the local site started labeling their AI-powered podcast summaries as AI-generated, I looked at them quizzically when the headline was intriguing enough to click on. I absolutely hated them, and I didn't know why, but now that I know they're built by AI, it makes sense.
I have an app on my Mac that I use to determine whether a text is AI-generated. I've tested it, and it's remarkably accurate. There are certain patterns you can find and read. What I get from AI-generated content is a sameness. You can't always detect it, but it has a vibe not unlike what critics once called the "uncanny valley" when computers tried to mimic human faces on film. It just feels off, which is why I reacted so badly to Cleveland.com's efforts.
As with other tools, there's a tendency to try to use AI for everything. It's a universal hammer right now. I don't think its true value in journalism is replacing writers, although I feel it can be used to draw insights from large amounts of data, monitor real-time events, and so forth.
Computers
Ooo, like, it's all shiny! (Photo: Unsplash.com)
The big AI chatbots and enterprises are built around an imitation of human behavior. Training models of what act like neurons to build connections. It was first aggressively used to predict which word you would use next in a sentence. It did this by being trained in sentence structure and language to the point where it could make guesses about which word might come next in a sentence like "Have a Nice _____". Hence, the reference to them as "LLMs" or "Limited Language Models". If you can train a model to do that, you can train it to predict what humans can/should do next, given a variety of inputs.
At the end of the day, it's an imitation of humanity, not the real thing.
There's no soul, just an imitation of soul. There's no feeling, just an imitation of feeling.
An AI doesn't truly understand The Drive, The Fumble, or Red Right 88. AI doesn't truly understand why fans might not be enthusiastic about Deshaun Watson. It can imitate what a human might say, but it doesn't truly understand it.
Journalistic enterprises can look at their business and say, "We convert clicks into money with ads", or "We convert trust into money with subscriptions". The business can be soulless. But the consumers are not.
But while that's how we get by financially at the OBR, that's not the reason I built it. I built it because I shared Browns fans' anger in the 1990s and their struggles since then, and because I wanted to celebrate something I loved and that's special to my friends and family. Writing is intrinsically human, and means nothing if you can't connect your emotions to your words.
That's why, after quite a bit of experimentation and observation of the attempts that have been made to date, the OBR will not rely on AI for content creation. We won't use it any more than we relied on soulless aggregation and writing stories as quickly as possible to pump up our revenues. We will use AI in some ways mentioned above - I already use it for coding, for example - but not for anything that is intended for a human audience, where it present faux takes on things its never felt.
AI may be really well trained by the technology giants, but it has no soul. And you need a soul to write.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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Positive news from the world of sports and beyond...
Yesterday, we had an item on how a tree frog might help save human lives from cancer. Today it's an item that reports how researchers are studying the golden spiny mouse, whose unusual biology may help scientists better understand healthy aging across mammals. I guess what I'm saying is watch what you step on or might run over with your car, because it might save your life.
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When not trying to figure out whether AI headline correction represents actual work, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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