Emily M. Bender’s Post

Meta to Mine Media for More “AI” Training Data by Decca Muldowney and Emily M. Bender We read this week in the Wall Street Journal that Meta is on the prowl for more content to train its ever-hungry AI tools and chatbot. Their most recent targets are media companies Axel Springer, News Corp and Fox Corp. Between them these three companies own a significant slice of the media landscape including the publications Business Insider, POLITICO, The Wall Street Journal itself, the New York Post, the Dow Jones newswires, and all Fox News channels and affiliates. Meta wants to license the companies’ articles for use in AI training (without the consent of any of the writers, of course!) This news broke within a day of Status reporting that journalists at Business Insider, which is owned by Axel-Springer, had been told they could use “AI” for research and to produce the first drafts of stories - although final products had to be the journalists’ “own work” according to an internal memo. Status reported that it seemed unlikely any label would be attached to articles informing readers that AI had been used in the writing process. Why is all this bad for reporters, for journalism, and for readers of the news like us? Well, let us count the ways… For news readers it means we have ever fewer reliable sources to go to and meanwhile the pollution keeps pouring into our information ecosystem. For journalism, at a systemic level, it means an overall loss of trust. And as for reporters, we feel especially bad for those who are still doing their jobs in good faith, but whose work is hosted on outlets like Business Insider that are known to use synthetic text and not disclose it, tainting everything they post. To find out about which Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 episodes (featuring Samantha Cole and Karen Hao) will get you up to speed on why “AI” is not the answer to better, faster, or more productive journalism check out our latest newsletter and the link below... https://lnkd.in/gzfjEEb2