And so it begins: The lurch toward the sentient-robot dystopia that we’ve been imagining all these years, as artificial intelligence blossoms, making humankind nothing more than livestock for the system around them.
Well, maybe it’s not exactly that bleak just yet, but one major tech news outlet just took a secret step in that direction, and the results were shocking.
A POPULAR news outlet has been publishing articles written by AI since November, keeping it on the down low.
Tech media site CNET has been publishing the articles since November, and lots of readers don’t seem to have noticed.
The portal has reportedly churned out and published 73 AI-generated articles since then, reports Futurism.
“This article was created using an AI engine and reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by our editorial staff,” reads a note on the website under the headline, date and author/editor credits.
Humans were still involved, but only in a managerial role.
The publication mentioned on its website that it doesn’t compromise on its journalistic integrity and that a team of editors is involved in the editorial process “from ideation to publication.”
It even blindsided some who worked for CNET.
Ironically, Jackson Ryan, a reporter for the tech and news site wrote an article on the website last month where he said that journalism jobs are safe from being pounced on by technology when talking about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence.
“It definitely can’t do the job of a journalist,” Ryan wrote of ChatGPT. “To say so diminishes the act of journalism itself.”
Scarier still, A.I. could very well be programmed to reverse-engineer the revenue generating algorithms of the advertising sector, and then publish “news” articles catered to the sensationalist aesthetic as opposed to the tenets of journalistic integrity.
