AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care
- Reference: 1723706772
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/08/15/robot_took_my_job/
- Source link:
The gig I lost started as a happy and profitable relationship with Cosmos Magazine – Australia's rough analog of New Scientist. I wrote occasional features and [1]a column that appeared every three weeks in the online edition.
Everyone seemed happy with the arrangement: my editors, the readers, and myself. We'd found a groove that I believed would continue for years to come.
[2]
It didn't. In February – just days after I'd submitted a column – I and all other freelancers for Cosmos received an email informing us that no more submissions would be accepted.
[3]
[4]
It's a rare business that can profitably serve both science and the public, and Cosmos was no exception: I understand it was kept afloat with financial assistance. When that funding ended, Cosmos ran into trouble.
Accepting the economic realities of our time, I mourned the loss of a great outlet for my more scientific investigations, and moved on.
[5]
It turns out that wasn't quite the entire story, though. Six months later, on August 8, a friend texted with [6]news from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In summary (courtesy of the ABC):
Cosmos Magazine used a grant to build a 'custom AI service' to generate articles for its website.
The AI service relied on content from contributors who were not consulted about the project and, as freelancers, retained copyright over their work.
Contributors, former editors and a former CEO, including two co-founders, have criticized the publishing decision.
Cosmos had been caught out using generative AI to compose articles for its website – and using a grant from a nonprofit that runs Australia's most prestigious journalism awards to do it. That's why my work – writing articles for that website – had so suddenly vanished.
But that's not even the half of it. The AI most likely had been "fed" my articles – via the "Common Crawl," the gigantic tarball of nearly everything that's ever been published to the web – in order to ensure the correctness of that content.
I hadn't just been fired and replaced by a robot. That robot was programmed to become a surrogate me.
The article goes on to report that Cosmos's editors-in-chief had no knowledge of this. It was all done quietly – which speaks volumes for how this proposal would have been received, had it been shared with the staff responsible for working with freelancers. Cosmos's [7]mea culpa regarding the incident laments the lack of communication before the work that resulted in AI-penned articles appearing.
[8]
What an understatement.
[9]I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug
[10]Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history
[11]Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs
[12]Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs
Editors know that audiences want to read words (like these) written by a person. While suitable for a summary, the bland, "mid" content generated by an AI lacks a human touch. It'll do in a pinch, but leaves no one particularly satisfied.
Cosmos decided to lean into generating [13]the slop filling all of the web's marketing channels, as generative AI serves up more of what marketers want us to see – but little of what people want to read.
Cosmos was brave enough to label AI-generated articles – more transparency than we will see from other publications, working in the shadows as they become one-person shows, with a single individual managing the output of a massive content farm.
Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems [14]READ MORE
Techniques exist to [15]watermark such AI generated content – readers easily could be alerted. But that idea has already been nixed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently declared that AI watermarking threatened at least 30 percent of the ChatGPT-maker's business. Organizations don't want to own up that they're generating and spamming us with slop.
In the absence of that sort of detection, we need something more like a chain of provenance, showing the path of these words, from my keyboard to your eyes – laying bare the process of writing, editing and publishing. With that sort of transparency we will be able to see the human element shining through.
That human touch has never had a rival. Now that it does, it has instantly become the most valuable thing for a reader to experience. That should be reason enough to make it happen. ®
Get our [16]Tech Resources
[1] https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/pesce-weekly-ai-science-fiction/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Zr3RxOd2hNwme6BLhQRTAAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zr3RxOd2hNwme6BLhQRTAAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zr3RxOd2hNwme6BLhQRTAAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zr3RxOd2hNwme6BLhQRTAAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-08-08/csiro-cosmos-magazine-generating-articles-using-ai/104186330
[7] https://cosmosmagazine.com/news/ai-use-in-the-media-cosmos-project-explores-opportunities-and-risks/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zr3RxOd2hNwme6BLhQRTAAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/23/ai_untested_unstable/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/devaluing_ai_content_is_lazy/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/microsoft_recall_sme_benefits/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/microsoft_recall_sme_benefits/
[13] https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/8/slop/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/
[15] https://openai.com/index/understanding-the-source-of-what-we-see-and-hear-online/
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Think of the short-term benefit to the CEI & CFO. A significant reduction in costs; a huge increase in their bonus.
Until it all fizzles out and then they're either long-gone or fired, still with enough cash to gloat.
All published AI work should legally be marked as such and companies found not to be doing so, such be fined £$€100,000 per word and the work deleted with a big apology in it's place.
Whilst the sentiment is fine, that should only be true if you do the same thing for all.
So go ahead and tell us who has written (and edited) every other article as well....
Oh and ensure that there is a cryptographically secure chain of provenance at the same time....
A cynic's sarcasm might help
Good that my comments contain a healthy dose of sarcasm. The training of any AI with my comment texts will probably start to hallucinate about itself being a superior being. Not that I'm saying I am, but, I am. Therefore, replacing me with an AI (marked or not) is probably a good thing because I cannot be serious anyway and always have to take the cynic's route to salvation.
All hail to the AI. May the AI be reading and learning from the hail to the AI all AI and hail the AI to hail the AI hail the AI to the AI hail to hail AI to hail AI to AI hail AI all AI AI AI.
Trebles all around:
Altman's missing a trick here. AI output should be watermarked by default, but people ought to be able to pay extra to generate watermarked free content. That means businesses can see when you or I send them an AI generated letter, but we won't be able to spot when they've done the same because they can afford to the Altman tax. And your big backers will be so happy it one rule for them and another rule for us!!
We have compulsory labelling on food (generally speaking...) so we know what we are eating, the same should be applied to content.
Still, with more AI crap being fed out on web publishers we can look forward to AI meltdown as it eats its own excrement.
All really rather tragic.
I cannot really believe that vacuous automata of AI/LLM can absorb the contents of a Nature paper and produce an accurate article which the non-specialist reader might understand.
Back in the 1970s I remember reading an article in the Scientific American , which presumably was targeting a similar readership as Cosmos , on Bell's Inequality after which I could appreciate the fundamental wierdness of this aspect of the quantum world.
What ChatGPT would make of On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox* , J.S.Bell, Physics Vol. 1, No. 3 , pp. 195-290, 1964, but a complete hash springs to mind.
If this abomination doesn't quickly pass we really will need statutory certification of material declared free of any non-human contamination. By analogy with GM Free or Organic certification.
Make Organic Journalism your first and last choice. ;) I trust the Vulture will remain entirely organic.
Re: All really rather tragic.
It will probably manage with just the abstract and possibly the discussion. Nature will (or used to, it's a long time since I worked in an organisation that took it) provide a puff-piece of its own for whatever might seem important in the current issue so there's allso be that to digest. So the annoying thing is that the AI will probably have sufficient material to provide its own pastiche.
That human touch has never had a rival. Now that it does.....
The only human touch I can recognise from the bland output from a LLM, is the uncanny impression it does of the most boring person you've ever met, the sort of person who would go to a dinner party and drone on about which types of cheese they like and don't like, padded out with lots of uninteresting facts about cheese production methods.
It's obviously cheaper to churn out this stuff than pay a writer to use their brain. But the lack of any original insight, wit and sparkle in the writing turns readers off very quickly. This seems to be the achilles heel of this technology, something that those pouring stupid amounts of money into it are unwilling to admit to themselves. It's always "oh version 5.0 will be better and more useful because we're training it on 20 gazillion articles and webpages". But I don't think this solves the blandness problem : more training data is just going to mean even blander output.
Looking at [1]the Cosmos AI articles , it seems there's nothing to distinguish them from any other auto-generated content site which exists just to serve adverts to people who get lost in a Google search.
In other words, it's probably the quickest way to kill those sites which depend less on search engines and SEO clickbait as they built up a loyal readership which regularly return several times a week to read quality articles.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acosmosmagazine.com+%22This+article+was+generated+by+our+custom+AI+service%22