Maybe this isn't really news to most of us. Our local suburban newspaper's sports page doesn't run any stories on my alma mater's basketball team (even though it is a local Chicago college, and they're having a pretty good season. Yet the paper continued to run photos of Taylor Swift kissing Travis Kelce two days after the football game. Don't get me started.)
So earlier today, I surfed Google looking for a story of last night's basketball game. I found a brief AP story - four paragraphs giving the result of the game, and listing the players from each team who achieved notable statistics. No quotes from the locker room, no perspective on the two teams' seasons, the state of the conference race, who they play next - i.e. the sorts of things sports journalists used to include in their stories.
What caught my interest was what followed the story:
The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar.
Naturally, there was no byline (although for little stories like this, which might be compiled in a roundup story, perhaps AP never has done bylines?)
I guess there is still journalism being practiced by humans out there. But in the world of sports journalism, it seems like the shoe leather is being worn out these days by bloggers and broadcast-media interns. And by the teams' own in-house public-relations departments.
The examples of AI generated journalism that I have seen come across as bland and boring. But one place where I think AI actually does a good job is audio books and articles. It doesn't have to generate the content, that is done by humans. It just has to do a decent job of putting a voice to the content. Which means that more books can be available as audio without the cost of hiring someone to actually record reading it. Which I suppose is bad for voice actors, but good for people who listen to books a lot.
ReplyDeleteYesterday I was trying to pay a credit card bill online and it wouldn't recognize my password. Wouldn't let me change it either. So I resorted to paying it by phone. Usually that .means talking to someone who is probably in a foreign country and is hard to understand. This time I was talking to an AI voice which was easy to understand. The transaction took less than five minutes.
Katherine, you are right that the robot-generated voices for audio books, and even for telephone prompts like, "If you are calling to make a payment, press 1; to report a service issue, press 2; ..." are replacing voice actors. This is somewhat similar to one of the biggest concerns of the Hollywood actors' union, which led to their historic strike last year.
DeleteEven though AI can supply the voice for audio books, could AI ever have done all the voices that someone like Mel Blanc did?
DeleteAs The Machines do more and more jobs faster and more cost-effectively (if not actually better) than we can, I wonder if the next big existential dilemma will be trying to figure out which jobs we WANT real people to do and what people are good for.
ReplyDeleteEx, I have no trouble letting a bot read me news aloud. But I don't WANT a bot reading me a book. I often fall asleep to Nicholas Clifford reading Henry James, thanks to Librivox.com. Clifford was a denizen of the old C'weal list. He taught lit, has a pretty good voice, reads James's dense sentences with ease, and gets those little bits of deadpan humor in. Clifford died some years ago, but I still rely on his vocal markers to teach me where to look in James for the interesting stuff. I'm glad I thanked Clifford for his reading before he died.
Here is today's Sabine Hossenfelder science news video reporting on a survey of AI experts predicting future milestone's in their field. She says, for example, "You can see that the experts say the first jobs to be replaced by AI are everything relating to language. That includes reading, transcription, translating, and writing, reaching the level of NYT best-selling fiction by 2040 or earlier."
ReplyDeleteI can believe that AI could take over something like Harlequin Romances or formulaic crime novels. But I find it hard to imagine that AI could write something like Moby Dick, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Girl on the Train.
DeleteIt isn't that I think all those books I named are the greatest literature. But they all have plots which are not at all formulaic.
DeleteHossenfelder's report says more about the way AI experts think about language and literature more than anything else: It's drudge work that a machine can mindlessly grind out. All pretty much a predictable outcome of decades worth of stinting and sneering at humanities education. Like my brother always says in his black-humored way: "Now you know why we die. We want to."
DeleteI think the revenge of the humanities majors is in politics. So many of our social divisions are rooted in philosophy.
DeleteJim, so do you mean philosophy in the sense of how we look at life? I don't think too many people think about the ideas of people like Kant and Hegel, etc. very much.
DeleteKatherine - I agree that most of us aren't well-read in philosophy. But there are some people who are, and they can be influential in the dissemination of political philosophies.
DeleteOne example that comes to mind: it's significant that the US public-opinion needle has shifted recently in favor of Palestinians and against the State of Israel. Israel probably isn't in any near-term danger of falling out of disfavor in the US, but the longer-term future seems riskier, because a sizeable minority of younger Americans sees Israel as an bad actor. And all this despite what the Palestinians did to Israelis on October 7th. I would argue that there is a philosophical idea underlying this way of looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: the notion that Israel is an oppressor, whereas Palestinians are oppressed. This is a viewpoint that, 40 or 50 years ago, would have seemed so absurd that it nobody would have taken is seriously. To be sure, I don't think my kids (at least some of whom share this viewpoint) could expound on the philosophical roots of the oppressor/oppressed prism of viewing reality. Nevertheless, they've obviously been influenced by it.
Jim, I'm sure you are right that many people are viewing the conflict through an oppressed/oppressor lense. But I think the main thing which is driving the shift in opinion is people just doing the math. At first after the Oct. 7th attack on Israel, public sympathy was very much on their side. The needle started moving the other direction when the casualties in Gaza exceeded the number of victims in Israel. And then exceeded them by a power of ten, and now has doubled and tripled that.
Delete"I agree that most of us aren't well-read in philosophy. But there are some people who are, and they can be influential in the dissemination of political philosophies."
DeleteWho did you have in mind? Noam Chomsky is the only Big Thinker who comes to mind. More a linguist than a philosopher, and I am not sure how influential he is anymore.
In Michigan what seems to be driving sympathy away from Israel is a very large Arab population of both Christians and Muslims, in the metro areas. We have a great many young Arab doctors, including my cardiologist and one of my oncologists. Our pharmacist is Egyptian. None of these people has ever talked politics with me, but they are really kind and caring professionals, show me pictures of their kids and dogs, etc.
Knowing individuals in your community who may have a stake in these places does make you think twice about enabling Netanyahu's scorched earth policy.
It doesn't appear to me that Netanyahu has any kind of an end strategy. What are they going to do when it's all over?
DeleteJim Pauwels said: "And all this despite what the Palestinians did to Israelis on October 7th."
DeleteI think it is a major distortion to think of the ongoing killing as a reaction to what the "Palestinian did to Israelis on October 7th." According to Wikipedia,
As of 11 February 2024, over 29,000 people (27,708 Palestinian and 1,410 Israeli) have been killed in the Israel–Hamas war, including 85 journalists (78 Palestinian, 4 Israeli and 3 Lebanese) and over 136 UNRWA aid workers.
On 7 October 2023, 1,139 Israelis and foreign nationals, including 764 civilians, were killed, and 248 persons taken hostage during the initial attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip. Since then, over 27,708 Palestinians (the majority of whom were women and minors) in the Gaza Strip have been killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry. . . .
According to my calculations, approximately 95% of those killed have been Palestinians and 5% Israelis. The most conservative estimate (according to Wikipedia) of the percentage of civilian deaths on the Palestinian side has been 61%. That was by counting only women children, and the elderly as civilians. Other estimates range as high as 90% for the number of Palestinian civilian deaths. How many more have to die to avenge the attack of October 7th?
It makes no sense to me to claim Israel is not a "bad actor." Horrific as the October 7th attack was—and I would say it was an attack by Hamas, not by "Palestinians"—that doesn't give Israel a license to slaughter the people of Gaza.
According to reports at the end of December, Israel had destroyed 70% of the housing in Gaza. It is hard not to think of them as "bad actors."
The Palestinians are the Indians and the Israelis are the European settlers. But the Israelis don't have the immunological advantage we had over the Native Americans. Right now, they're finishing the job they started while Palestine was controlled by Britain. Jewish settlers were used by Britain decades before 1947. Now Israel has a GNP like Britain and around 200 nukes. They're big boys now and we probably can't even stop them if we wanted. They are a nuclear power. But we don't have to subsidize their barbarity. I think the palestinians should start thinking diaspora and the billions the US politicians want to give to Israel should support it. Israel is getting what it always wanted but I'm done with Israel.
Delete"...the Palestinians should start thinking about diaspora..." That thought occurred to me as well. Most of Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. War is expensive. Israel and its allies should channel the money they were spending on war into payments to the people the war has displaced to start a new life somewhere else. Where should that be? Anyplace they want. Is it fair or just? No. But it would beat starving to death without shelter or medical care (I was horrified to read that amputations were being done without anesthesia, because they didn't have any).
Delete"I think it is a major distortion to think of the ongoing killing as a reaction to what the "Palestinian did to Israelis on October 7th.""
DeleteFirst of all - sorry to you and everyone for taking so long to respond. Busy life these days.
I guess I'm not entirely clear on what you're saying in the sentence I quoted above. I do think the Israeli bombing and then invasion of Gaza was precipitated by the events of October 7th. I'm not sure whether that's your view or not.
I certainly agree that the death toll is extremely one-sided, even though I'm skeptical of the numbers put out by the Gazans (whose government, of course, is Hamas), and even somewhat skeptical of UN and Western media on this topic, as they've all been compromised to one degree or another by Hamas and their paymasters/armorers in Tehran.
My original comment had more to do with US public opinion. I don't think the events of October 7th and what has followed have been the catalyst that has pushed public US public opinion in a different direction; I think those events revealed a shift that already was underway. And I'm attributing that shift to the oppressor/oppressed lens of looking at this conflict (as one instance of many aspects of human life that can be viewed through this lens).
FWIW: I don't think the Israelis think they are oppressors. I think they think they are a tiny minority surrounded by a vast sea of implacable hostility and murderous hatred. 50 or 60 years ago, much of the Western world also took that view. Today, apparently not so much - or at least there is not as much of a consensus in the West. I see quite a few whie American progressives marching alongside Palestinian college students and Palestinian-Americans. I wouldn't have expected American progressives to make an alliance with - in effect - Iran, but the oppressor/oppressed dynamic may supersede some of the old ideological divisions, such as that between theocratic authoritarians and liberal democracies.
You say: "I do think the Israeli bombing and then invasion of Gaza was precipitated by the events of October 7th. I'm not sure whether that's your view or not."
DeleteI have no quarrel when you put it that way. What I object to is calling the events of October 7th "what the Palestinians did to Israelis," as if all the Palestinian people in Gaza were collectively responsible for the attack on Israel. If "the Palestinians" committed atrocities against "the Israelis," then they ought to pay a steep price for it. But those paying the price are not merely civilians who had no part in the attack. They are largely women, children, and the elderly, who neither planned nor participated in the atrocities against Israel. The blame for the attack lies with Hamas.
As for theocratic authoritarians and liberal democracies, it seems to me Netanyahu and Trump (and his MAGA base) are both moving in the direction of abandoning liberal democracy in favor of theocratic authoritarianism. I of course do not agree with Americans (or others) who wish for the destruction of Israel "on behalf" of the Palestinians. But I don't think people who feel that the Palestinians are being mercilessly slaughtered are making some kind of alliance with Iran.
David - I agree re: Netanyahu and Trump having authoritarian tendencies. I don't think either man is theocratic, although both have religiously-motivated allies.
DeleteShowing solidarity with suffering Gazans requires careful distinctions between Gazans on the one hand, and Hamas+Iran on the other. Likewise, all of us have to be careful about not letting our dislike of Netanyahu - and, for those who feel this way, their dislike of the project of Zionism and the modern Israeli state - bleed into anti-Semitism. In noting this, I don't have you (nor anyone else here) in mind. And I'm acknowledging that you just did me the courtesy of pointing out that I need to be more careful in attributing to Palestinians what, really, should be attributed to Hamas.
AI van be very useful but I see no evidence of the "singularity" where they become self-aware though they can probably imitate self-aware. These machines are very good at chess, go, answering your complaints but a dog can't do that and a dog IS conscious though it can't add and subtract. I think AI will be added to the long list of things that have benefits in the short run but unseen downside in the long run. With a car, I can go faster and longer than any human runner. But I'd be healthier if I could get to where I wanted mostly by foot. I walked around 60 miles on cobblestone in Poland and Germany. I think AI will do a half-ass job which will be good for rich people and companies and most of the rest of us will forget what the real thing was and settle for mediocre crap, the equivalent of Chef Boy-ar-dee.
ReplyDeletePretty much my feeling. Book rec for you, Stanley: Corey Doctorow's collection of short novellas called "Radicalized." In one story, landlords get kickbacks from appliance manufacturerers for putting their dishwashers, stoves, etc in apartments. To further monetize the enterprise, the appliances are rigged to handle only certain brands of things. So tenants can only toast certain brands of bread in their toasters, which kickbacks money to landlords and appliance mfctrs. There are ways to override the programming, but it's illegal thanks to clauses in your lease brought to you by real estate lobby interests.
DeleteThat day's coming, and won't it be GREAT for the One Percent?!
But, hey, I gotta run out and get my Apple Vision Pro so I can make my home interior look like a beach in Maui and stop nagging Raber about when we're going to remaster the ceiling. I'll just cover my concerns with virtual reality and enjoy my fantasy life.
Remaster s/b replaster
DeleteLOL Jean, I was wondering how to remaster a ceiling. It sounds like more fun than replastering.
DeleteHaha, I'll post pictures of our remastered ceilings if we ever get them done! Raber learned a variety of plastering techniques in architectural preservation school, but I think plain old patching with drywall mud is more our speed now. That and a coat of matte ceiling white hides a multitude of imperfections.
DeleteOld family story. My grandfather back in the thirties wanted to save money by plastering a wall himself. He mixed the plaster and went at it. He finished the job and it looked great. When he got up the next morning and checked out the wall, all the plaster had slid down into a pile on the floor.
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