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Gibberish from the machine


I’m honored that Germany’s Stern asked me to write about AI and journalism for a 75th anniversary edition. Here’s a version prior to final editing and trimming for print and translation. And I learned a new word: Kauderwelsch (“The variety of Romansch spoken in the Swiss town of Chur (Kauder) in canton Graubünden) means gibberish. 


We have Gutenberg to blame. It is because of his invention, print, that society came to think of public discourse, creativity, and news as “content,” a commodity to fill the products we call publications or lately websites. Journalists believe that their value resides primarily in making content. To fill the internet’s insatiable maw, reporters at some online sites are given content quotas, and their news organizations no longer appoint editors-in-chief but instead “chief content officers.” For the record, Stern still has actual editors, many of them.

And now here comes a machine — generative artificial intelligence or large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT — that can create no end of content: text that sounds just like us because it has been trained on all our words. An LLM maps the trillions of relationships among billions of words, turning them and their connections into numbers a computer can calculate. LLMs have no understanding of the words, no conception of truth. They are programmed only to predict the next most likely word to occur in a sentence.

A New York lawyer named Steven Schwartz had to learn his lesson about ChatGPT’s factual fallibility the hard way. In a now-infamous case, attorney Schwartz asked ChatGPT for precedents in a lawsuit involving an errant airline snack cart and his client’s allegedly injured knee. Schwartz needed to find cases relating to highly technical issues of international treaties and bankruptcy. ChatGPT dutifully delivered more than a half-dozen citations.

As soon as Schwartz’s firm filed the resulting legal brief in federal court, opposing counsel said they could not find the cases, and the judge, P. Kevin Castel, directed the lawyers to produce them. Schwartz returned to ChatGPT. The machine is programmed to tell us what we want to hear, so when Schwartz asked whether the cases were real, ChatGPT said they were. Schwartz then asked ChatGPT to show him the complete cases; it did, and he sent them to the court. The judge called them “gibberish” and ordered Schwartz and his colleagues into court to explain why they should not be sanctioned. I was there, along with many more journalists, to witness the humbling of the attorneys at the hands of technology and the media.

“The world now knows about the dangers of ChatGPT,” the lawyers’ lawyer told the judge. “The court has done its job warning the public of these risks.” Judge Castel interrupted: “I did not set out to do that.” The problem here was not with the technology but with the lawyers who used it, who failed to heed warnings about the dubious citations, who failed to use other tools — even Google — to verify them, and who failed to serve their clients. The lawyers’ lawyer said Schwartz “was playing with live ammo. He didn’t know because technology lied to him.”

But ChatGPT did not lie because, again, it has no conception of truth. Nor did it “hallucinate,” in the description of its creators. It simply predicted strings of words, which sounded right but were not. The judge fined the lawyers $5,000 each and acknowledged that they had suffered humiliation enough in news coverage of their predicament.

Herein lies a cautionary tale for news organizations that are rushing to have large language models write stories — because they want to be cool and trendy, or save work, or perhaps to eliminate jobs, and manufacture ever more content. The news companies CNET and G/O Media have gotten into hot water for using AI to produce content that turned out to be less than factual. America’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, just turned off artificial intelligence that was producing embarrassing sports stories that would call a football game “a close encounter of the athletic kind.” I have heard online editors plead that they are in a war to produce more and more content to attract more likes and clicks so they may earn more digital advertising pennies. Their problem is that they think their mission is only to make content.

My advice to editors and publishers is to steer clear of large language models for writing the news, except in well-proven use cases, such as turning highly structured financial reports into basic news stories, which must be checked before release. I would give the same advice to Microsoft and Google about connecting LLMs with their search engines. Fact-free gibberish coming out of the machine could ruin the authority and credibility of both news and technology companies — and affect the reputation of artificial intelligence overall.

There are good uses for AI. I benefit from it every day in, for example, Google Translate, Maps, Assistant, and autocomplete. As for large language models, they could be useful to augment — not replace — journalists’ work. I recently tested a new Google tool called NotebookLM, which can take a folder filled with a journalist’s research and summarize it, organize it, and allow the writer to ask questions of it. LLMs could also be used in, for example, language education, where what matters is fluency, not facts. My international students use these programs to smooth out their English for school and work. I even believe LLMs could be used to extend literacy, to help people who are intimidated by writing to communicate more effectively and tell their own stories.

Ah, but therein lies the rub for writers, like me. We believe we are special, that we hold a skill — a talent for writing — that few others can boast. We are storytellers and wield the power to tell others’ tales, to decide what tales are told, who shall be heard in them, and how they will begin and neatly end. We think that gives us the ability to explain the world in what journalists like to call the first draft of history — the news.

Now writers and journalists see both the internet and AI as competition. The internet enables the silent mass of citizens who were not heard in media to at last have their say — and to create a lot of content. And by producing credible prose in seconds, AI devalues writing and robs writers of their special status.

This is one reason why I believe we see hostile coverage of technology in media these days. News organizations and their proprietors claim that Google, Facebook, et al steal away audience, attention, and advertising money (as if God granted publishers those assets in perpetuity). Journalists are engaged in their latest moral panic — another in a long line of panics over movies, television, comic books, rock lyrics, and video games. They warn about the dangers of the internet, social media, our phones, and now AI, claiming that these technologies will make us stupid, addict us, take away our jobs, and destroy democracy under a deluge of disinformation.

They should calm down. A 2020 study found that in the US no age group “spent more than an average of a minute a day engaging with fake news, nor did it occupy more than 0.2% of their overall media consumption.” The issue for democracy isn’t so much disinformation but the willingness — the eagerness — of some citizens to believe lies that stoke their own fears and hatreds. Journalism should be reporting on the roots of bigotry and extremism rather than simplistically blaming technology.

In my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I track society’s entry into the age of print as we now leave it for the digital age that follows. Print’s development as an institution of authority took time. Not until fifty years after Gutenberg’s Bible, around 1500, did the book take the shape we know today, with titles, title pages, and page numbers. It took another century, a few years either side of 1600, before the technology and its technologists — printers — faded into the background, making way for tremendous innovation with print: the birth of the modern novel with Cervantes, the essay with Montaigne, and the newspaper. A business model for print did not arrive until one century more, in 1710, with the advent of copyright. Come the 1800s, the technology of print — which had hardly changed since Gutenberg — evolved at last with the arrival of steam-powered presses and typesetting machines, leading to the birth of mass media. The twentieth century brought print’s first competitors, radio and television. And here we are today, just over a quarter century past the introduction of the commercial web browser. This is to say that we are likely at just the beginning of a long transition into the digital age. It is only 1480 in Gutenberg years.

In the beginning, rumor was trusted more than print because any anonymous printer could produce a book or pamphlet — just as anyone today can make a web site or tweet. In 1470 — only fifteen years after Gutenberg’s Bible came off the press — Latin scholar Niccolò Perotti made what is said to be the first call for censorship of print. Offended by a bad translation of Pliny, he wrote to the Pope demanding that a censor be assigned to approve all text before it came off the press. As I thought about this, I realized Perroti was not seeking censorship. Instead, he was anticipating the establishment of the institutions of editing and publishing, which would assure quality and authority in print for centuries.

Like Perotti in his day, media and politicians today demand that something must be done about harmful content online. Governments — like editors and publishers — cannot cope with the scale of speech now, so they deputize platforms to police and censor all that is said online. It is an impossible task.

Journalists must be careful using AI to produce the news. At the same time, there is a danger in demonizing the technology. In the best case, the rise of AI might force journalists to examine their role in society, to ask how they improve public discourse. The internet provides them with many new ways to connect with communities, to build relationships of trust and authority with them, to listen to their needs, to discover and share voices too long not heard in the public sphere, to expand the work of journalism past publishing to the wider canvas of the internet.

Journalists think their content is what makes them valuable, and so publishers and their lawyers and lobbyists are threatening to sue AI companies, dreaming of huge payments for machines that read their content. That is no strategy for the future of journalism. Neither is Axel Springer’s plan to replace journalists in content factories with AI. That is not where the value of journalism lies. It lies with reporting on and serving communities. Like Nicollò Perotti, we should anticipate the creation of new services to help internet users cope with the abundance of content today, to verify the truth and falsity of what we see online, to assess authority, to discover more diverse voices, to nurture new talent, to recommend content that is worth our time and attention. Could such a service be the basis of a new journalism for the online, AI age?

Apology to Germany

For the record. I did not insult Germans about VR. I was honored that Die Welt asked me to write about VR for a special they were doing. The lede gained something in the translation. I wrote:

Virtual reality will not change the world. But it might help change how we see it.

This was replaced by this subhed:

Deutsche Verbraucher sind laut Umfragen besonders skeptisch, wenn es um virtuelle Eindrücke geht. Liegt das etwa an der Nazi-Zeit? Oder daran, dass schon der Begriff Virtual Reality in die Irre führt?

Which means:

German consumers are particularly skeptical when it comes to virtual reality. Does that have something to do with the Nazi era? Or that is it that the term virtual reality is misleading? 

I have been critical of Germany’s overreaction, in my view, about American technology companies and copyright and privacy. But I purposely did not want to make this another German #technophobia story. Lower down in the piece, I raised the question and cited a few oddities — like the philosopher who found Nazi ideology in Pokemon Go (!) — but said that VR is sweeping Germany as elsewhere. And note that I pinned those oddities on German media.

Not a big deal. But I wanted to be clear, for the record. Here, by the way, is the English text (with German quotes still in German so as not to double-translate):

 

Virtual reality will not change the world. But it might help change how we see it.

Thanks to the internet, we are coming to the end of the Gutenberg Age. His era — not quite six centuries long — was ruled by text: content that filled the containers we call books, magazines, and newspapers. Now the information and entertainment that media provided are available in so many more forms: as databases, applications, visualizations, bot chats, videos, podcasts, memes, online conversations, social connections, education, and so on. Text is not dead. It just has a lot of new company.

Are we also leaving the Kodak Age, thanks to the advent of virtual reality? The printed photograph — like the movie and TV screens that followed — was bound by its two dimensions. But now images are freed to expand past those borders.

“VR” is being used, incorrectly, to include everything that breaks out of film photography’s flat Weltanschauung: 360-degree (and panoramic) photography, 360-degree video, augmented reality, light-field photography, and virtual reality itself (that is, a computer-generated, interactive representation of an environment).

At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach, we believe we need to start our students not with VR but with 360-degree photography and video. We will push them to think and see outside the single path between the lens and the subject: straight-on, static, one-way. We want our students to ask when it could be useful for the public to see what is happening to either side or even behind them. How does that peripheral view impart added information or perspective?

As with every shiny new gadget that tempts us media folk, 360-degree media are being misused. There is no point in bringing a 360-degree camera to an interview, for when do you want to turn around and look the other way when talking with a person? Augmented reality is being used to make two-dimensional printed pages look three-dimensional; I frankly don’t see much point.

The first good and obvious use of 360-degree media is to put the viewer in the middle of a scene. Recently, news outlets used 360-degrees to put viewers in the middle of the balloon drop at the end of each American political convention or in an Olympic arena in Rio. They have used these cameras to give us a daredevil’s you-are-there perspective. All that is fine. But once you’ve seen one dangerous fall off a cliff, haven’t you seen them all?

I hear much talk that VR brings empathy to media, putting the viewer in the body of a story’s subject to enhance the viewer’s understanding. True. The Guardian took viewers into a six-by-nine-foot solitary confinement prison cell, a frightening experience. Bild took users to a battle in Iraq. I’ve stood in a virtual setting in which an angry man was pointing a gun at a woman just the other side of me; it is unnerving. I’ve even heard the empathy argument used to justify VR porn.

Making 360-degree video requires much expertise and expense: Multiple cameras sit in tricky rigs that can warp with heat and ruin the end result. Complex software is used to stitch all this video into one scene or to animate action. Virtual reality requires even more difficult software. And watching VR still requires a hassle: donning a cheap or expensive headset and looking like a fool while avoiding puking. Since the equipment is so expensive and difficult, I wonder whether we’ll soon see VR cafés just as, not long ago, we went to internet cafés to get online.

All that is why I am more enthused about using relatively inexpensive 360-degree cameras like the Samsung Gear 360 or Ricoh Theta S (or shooting panoramas on a phone). The best way to reach an audience of scale today is to post 360-degree photos on Facebook or video on YouTube.

The shiny new panoramic camera that has me most excited these days doesn’t even shoot 360 degrees around, only 150 degrees. The Mevo video camera captures a wider angle than regular video cameras, which simulates having multiple cameras as in a TV studio. It is controlled entirely on an iPhone or iPad: Click on someone’s face and that’s the closeup; move a box on the screen to shift the closeup. It’s the first camera written to Facebook Live standards. I’ve been using it to make my own podcasts. When I showed this small, $400 device to a newspaper owner, he ordered his staff to stop building their TV studio and control room.

Pokémon Go got me jazzed anew about the opportunities of augmented reality or AR. Years ago, a Dutch company called Layar showed the possibilities of adding information to what the camera on a phone saw (“This restaurant has great steaks” or “George Washington slept there”) but they were early. Now Pokémon shows how we could augment what a user sees in public with history or news about a location, restaurant reviews, ads and bargains, or annotations left by other users.

Ah, but leave it to German media to worry about the implications of a new technology and its application. In Bild, Franz Josef Wagner complained: “Aber die Nerds, die Millionen Pokémon-Süchtigen, sollten nicht nach Monstern suchen. Sie sollten die Wirklichkeit suchen.”

More amazingly (or amusingly), in Die Zeit, philosopher Slavoj Žižek discerned Nazi philosophy in Pokémon Go: “Und hat Hitler den Deutschen nicht das Fantasiebild seiner nationalsozialistischen Ideologie beschert, durch dessen Raster sie überall ein besonderes Pokémon – ‘den Juden’ – auftauchen sahen, das sie mit einer Antwort auf die Frage versorgte, wogegen man zu kämpfen habe?”

VR wariness is not just German media’s fault. An international survey by the firm GfK found German consumers the most skeptical about the value of a virtual experience. Nonetheless, especially in gaming, VR is also storming Germany.

Yes, there are issues to be grappled with in VR and its related technologies: When you shoot 360-degree photos and video, do the people behind the camera realize they are being captured? We have already seen that people watching virtual reality experiences have a heightened sense of reality. But I don’t buy the fear that people will withdraw into their VR headsets and experiences; it’s just another way to look at images.

VR et al might just give us another way to experience what other people experience — that is why both Facebook and Google are investing heavily in the medium, so we all can more fully share our lives. But fear not: just as text lives on after the Gutenberg age, reality will still exist after virtual reality.

 

 

 

That German guy and his beard


Just a brief post to cross the language barrier with an amusing story going on in German media.

Kai Diekmann is the explosively colorful, diabolically charming, dangerously brilliant, stunt-prone editor-in-chief of the largest paper in Europe, Bild (it’s a tabloid in spirit that is printed on really big paper so the bare breasts are bigger). His company, Axel Springer, scares even big, (not) bad Google. He unseated a German president. He is powerful.

For reasons I cannot remember — I think it had something to do with his nine-month-long visit to Silicon Valley, during which he partook of many delicious, digital lotus leaves — Diekmann started growing a beard that became his temporary trademark. His Christmas card last year was of him with a beard that wouldn’t stop growing. He retweeted every beard joke about him.

Today, in a stunt to end all stunts (well, probably not), Kai is shaving the beard on national TV. To benefit the Bild charity Ein Herz Für Kinder (A Heart for Children), the razor giant Gillette — of course — and supermarket giant EDEKA are paying 100,000€ to shave off Kai’s beard.

The German advertising magazine W&V calls it what it is: content marketing with a beard. The editor as native advertising.

One can hardly imagine a stuffy American editor doing such a thing. Heaven forbid. But, of course, American journalism used to have such larger-than-life editors: Hearst, Pulitzer, and James Gordon Bennett, Jr., whose paper, the New York Herald, was the namesake of the square where he is now memorialized and who funded expeditions to Africa (Stanley, meet Livingstone) and the Arctic:

bennett herald square

Digital media may breed such characters. Arianna Huffington was herself a bit of a swashbuckler, until she disappointingly — in my mind — shifted her ambitions from running the world to being Oprah. This week at CUNY, we gave the Knight Innovation Award to Shane Smith — he just returned from jumping off a helicopter in the antarctic — who has built an impressive empire atop his strong editorial voice. (Disclosure: He and Knight awarded the school $500,000 to establish a fund to support young journalists around the world.) But how many others are there?

Well, anyway, tonight Diekmann will be clean-shaven once again. I understand his wife will be relieved.

: Half-a-postscript: Halfway there:

Finally:

Oh, those Germans

warover

German publishers warring with Google — and the link and the internet — have now completed their humiliation at their own hands, capitulating to Google and allowing it to continue quoting and linking to them. How big of them.

The pathetic sequence of their fight:

1. German publishers under the banner of a so-called trade group called VG Media and led by conservative publisher Axel Springer called in who knows what political chits to get legislators to create a new, ancillary copyright law — the Leistungsschutzrecht — to forbid Google et al from quoting even snippets to link to them.

2. In negotiations in the legislature, snippets were then allowed.

3. The publishers went after Google anyway, contending that Google should pay them 11 percent of revenue over the use of snippets.

4. Google, being sued over the use of the snippets, said it would take down the snippets from those publishers this week.

5. The publishers said that for Google to take down the snippets they were using to blackmail Google amounted to Google blackmailing the publishers. And you thought Germans were logical.

6. The publishers went to the government cartel office to complain that Google was using its market power against them.

7. Officials laughed the publishers out of the cartel office.

8. Now the publishers have said that Google can use its snippets for free while this legal matter is being ironed out.

Of course, the publishers never wanted the snippets taken down because they depend on those snippets and links for the audience Google sends to them … for free. It is all their cynical game to try to disadvantage their new and smarter competitor. Those who can, compete. Those who can’t, use their political clout.

Enough. Genug.

I have written a much longer essay about the damage these German publishers are doing to Germany’s standing that I am trying to place in a print publication — so I can speak to the print people. I’ll link to it when that happens. Here’s the lede:

I worry about Germany and technology. I fear that protectionism from institutions that have been threatened by the internet — mainly media giants and government — and the perception of a rising tide of technopanic in the culture will lead to bad law, unnecessary regulation, dangerous precedents, and a hostile environment that will make technologists, investors, and partners wary of investing and working in Germany.

LATER: Ah, there’s another chapter already.

9. Like Japanese soldiers stuck on an island thinking the war continues, Axel Springer has declared that Google must take down snippets from four of its brands: Die Welt, and the auto, sport, and computer subbrands of Bild. Note well that they didn’t do that with superbrand Bild, their largest newspaper and the largest in Germany. They need the eggs. So as it loses its argument that Google is a cartel, the German publishers’ cartel crumbles.

Technoeuropanic

Europe is at it again. Or still. I’m told that a consortium of European publishers will run an ad in European papers this weekend attacking Google and the EU’s antitrust deal with the company. It’s the same old stuff: publishers whining and stomping their feet that it’s just not fair that Google is doing better than they are and government should step in to do something about this, this damned, uh … competitor.

Screenshot 2014-09-04 at 8.17.21 PMIn the ad, the publishers’ argument is that Google’s search is not “impartial.” First, who said it has to be? Second, Google does point to its competitors; see this search for “maps” to the left. Third, who requires the publishers to promote their competitors? Here, the so-called Open Internet Project — a front started by German publisher Axel Springer — demands “equal search” (what the hell would that be?) for, say, shoe listings, complaining that Google makes money pointing to its shoe advertisers. Hmmm. And here is Bild, Springer’s gigantic newspaper, selling shoes itself. I don’t see them linking to Google’s shoe ads. Shouldn’t a news publication be — what’s the word? — impartial?

But, of course, this isn’t the point. It’s a game. I’ve seen German publishers chuckling about it that way. They think they can use government and political pressure to cut some flesh out of Google. But they should beware the unintended consequences. They are helping Europe — and particularly Germany — get a reputation for being hostile or at least inhospitable to technology. Here is the Economist writing about “Germany’s Googlephobia.”

It so happens that I’m going to Berlin next week to speak at the IFA technology show about just this topic: Europe (specifically Germany) and technology specifically American technology companies). I worry about Europe.

Germany just banned Uber (despite the advice of EC VP Neelie Kroes). A European court instituted the ludicrous and dangerous Right to be Forgotten (what about the right to remember?). German government officials harassed Google over Street View so much that Google gave up photographing its streets (so much for Blurmany). German publishers got government to pass an ancillary copyright to go after Google quoting and linking to their content (but then lost a round in court). The German book industry gave technosceptic Jaron Lanier its big-deal peace prize and Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel is roaring up the charts. A German pol is threatening to break up Google (how?). Spain is looking to tax the link. The head of powerful German publisher Axel Springer raises the spectre of Google starting its own nation without laws. A German government agency is talking about declaring Google a utility and regulating it as such; I’d call that quasi-nationalization. “It is the core task of liberalism and social democracy to tame and restrain data capitalism gone wild,” declared Social Democratic Chairman Sigmar Gabriel in a German paper. “Either we defend our freedom and change our policies, or we become digitally hypnotised subjects of a digital rulership.” I could go on….

Would you invest in technology in Europe and specifically in Germany? I sure wouldn’t.

Some of this is about disrupted companies and institutions rallying to try to hobble their disruptor. Some of this is cultural technopanic. In either case, the damage to Europe and particularly Germany could be great.

At IFA, I plan to tell the technology executives there that they need to step up and defend progress or they might find themselves left behind.

Screenshot 2014-09-04 at 8.05.22 PM