Riley MacLeod of Aftermath writes about the proliferation of artificial intelligence-generated articles on financial news site Quartz.
MacLeod writes, “As of publishing, the ‘Quartz Intelligence Newsroom’ has written 22 articles today, running the gamut from earnings reports to Reddit communities banning Twitter posts to the Sackler settlement to, delightfully, a couple articles about how much AI sucks. Quartz has been running AI-generated articles for months, but prior to yesterday, they appear to have been limited to summaries of earnings reports rather than news articles. Boilerplate at the bottom of these articles notes that ‘This is the first phase of an experimental new version of reporting. While we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard.’
“The articles, to their credit, do cite where the AI is gathering its information from. But even this is surface level: the Reddit article, for instance, cites Yahoo and the New York Post, but the Yahoo post is actually a repub from the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and the Post article cites NBC News as its own source. I cannot imagine how this game of telephone could go wrong, especially when letting a robot write news about contentious public figures and rapidly changing events.”
Read more here.