OK. I'm going to say this one more time, slowly, and maybe the corner-cutting media vultures and spreadsheet vampires will finally get it - although I suspect they do and just don't give a damn:
Machines. Can't. Write.
Writing is a process. It is the product of critical thinking and creativity, and therefore uniquely human. It is not something that can be replicated by some mindless algorithm-in, algorithm-out soft-shoe, because it is as much art as skill and art is beyond the scope of even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence.
I mean, there is a reason they call it artificial intelligence.
Machines. Can't. Write.
You want to know how I know this?
Because this actually appeared in the Columbus Dispatch as a "sports brief" a couple of weeks ago:
Two area high school football teams played a football game on Friday night with one emerging victorious 21-12.
The game was tied going into the opening kickoff but that would soon change when one team would later score.
Both teams hope to learn from this game as they are back in action next Friday night against other opponents.
And, no, before you ask, I did not make that up. It is not a spoof. It is not satire. It really appeared in the Dispatch -- the time stamp tells us it was published at 11:25 p.m. on August 18 -- and at the bottom it says it was the product of something called ScoreStream, "the world leader in fan-driven sports results and conversation."
My reaction: If this is the world leader, I want to see the rest of 'em. I bet they post in crayon.
Seriously, how could anyone at the Dispatch, an award-winning newspaper of some repute, allow such absurdity to get out on its website? Was no one minding the store that night? Do ScoreStream posts automatically post without any vetting? Where was the ink-stained wretch on the copydesk to say "What the HELL? Who won the f****** game? Who were the teams? 'The score was tied going into the opening kickoff'? What kind of gerbil wrote this crap?"
Of course, given how the vultures and vampires are gutting newsrooms these days, there probably was no ink-stained copydesk wretch to ask all that. I'm guessing they've all been replaced by EditStream, an AI program that inserts random commas and totally irrelevant parentheticals -- and, unlike real copy editors, doesn't spill coffee on the keyboard or swear at a headline count that won’t fit.
Once upon a time the great Dan Jenkins wrote a novel called "Fast Copy," which centered around a young woman coming back to her tiny Texas hometown to run the local newspaper. The paper had a sports editor named Clarence "Big'Un" Darly, who occasionally pretended he had a bigger staff by writing sidebars under the pseudonym Crew Slammer.
Well. Suffice to say I read that AI post in the Dispatch and immediately thought "Hey, they musta hired Crew Slammer to write for 'em!"
A fake sportswriter for a fake sportswriting app. What could be more perfect?
Other than imagining how it would have gone had AI been around back in the 1920s, when Grantland Rice was writing purple prose about the Four Horsemen. Why, just think if it had been Grantland AI instead ...
One College Team Beats Another College Team
By Grantland AI
Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, a football team beat another football team yesterday. The score was tied heading into the opening kickoff, but that soon changed when the one football team scored, assisted by four men on horseback.
Next week the victorious football team will play some other football team. Probably the University of Navy.
Now that's some writin', boy.
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