I was excited, of course.
Earlier this year, Microsoft invited me to its Silicon Valley campus to contemplate AI, the generative kind.
So there I was in this enormous, airy building of the future, with hardly a human being in sight. I wafted into a very fetching theater – yes, they spelled my name wrong on the big screen — and there were several actual journalistic luminaries on stage too.
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Oh, and a PR man from Microsoft, dressed all in black. The specific subject was AI and journalism. Little did I know how much it would move my whole year. For here I was, perhaps for the first time, confronted with the three great horsepersons of AI — the Experimenters, the Fearful and the Capitulists.
Those last ones? Capitalists who have already capitulated to AI’s allegedly all-encompassing powers.
Let’s try something new
Some panelists mused that the seemingly sudden incursion of AI offered a fine chance to dabble with it.
At one news service, for example, they’ve experimented with an AI version of one of its sports editors.
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The idea is to put some text into this AI-generated expert and let it/them speak. Yes, but could this bot give us a decent betting line on the Niners vs the Cowboys? You have to find a balance, said the news service’s journalist.
But is there really any value added by being, well, so tech-clever? This seemed to me to be one of the currently less-considered questions about AI. The year was all about generative AI. But, as with quite a few tech breakthroughs, how useful (and profitable) will it ultimately be? And precisely where and how?
So a strong impulse was to put it to the test in as many ways as possible. You never know what might emerge. Oh, AI. Who is the fairest of them all? You Are.
But then there was the gentlefellow from another tech publication. I know that sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it truly isn’t. It’s more of a mood enhancer.
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You see, this particular gentlefellow is an enormous enthusiast for AI. Actually, ‘enthusiast’ doesn’t quite cover it. He seemed more like the mesmerized subject of a despotic kingdom.
He offered the prediction that “generative AI will touch every piece of every part of the process of news from ideation, to headline generation to story editing.”
Full disclosure: I had the idea for this column myself, my editor is a human being with infinite patience, and I’m writing with my own fingers and (what’s left of my) mind.
