Uncertainties abound in the time of Bing and Bard

 

I am on the waitlist for the New Bing – touted as the future of search. So are millions around the world. So, no big deal, really. Articles about AI and ChatGPT and Bing and Bard are now like prime time news – they are in the headlines everywhere. Recently, I received a video on WhatsApp showing children streaming into a classroom, sitting down and wishing the teacher good morning. Only that the teacher was not a human, she was a robot. And I said to myself: What a wonderful world! 

AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all — search, said Microsoft chair and CEO Satya Nadella. In a blog post written by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the company revealed that its ChatGPT competitor was named Bard and that it would be rolled out to the public in the coming weeks. Algorithms (such as ChatGPT) that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos and they are likely to radically change the way we create content. 

Speaking to Rohan Banerjee for Raconteur (a newsletter for business leaders), The Financial Time’s CEO explains why ChatGPT cannot replace good journalism. Rather than fearing artificial intelligence, John Ridding says the FT wants to understand it, use it and hold its proprietors accountable. Guided by the editor, the FT appointed its first AI editor, “a bold decision,” according to Ridding. Banerjee says Ridding does not doubt AI’s potential to be “powerful and transformative”. In fact, he is excited by the efficiencies it might drive in the newsroom, through better capabilities to transcribe interviews, for example. But, in terms of a potential threat to content production, the 35-year FT veteran who has played a key role in shaping the publication’s history retains full confidence in its future, Banerjee point out. “If you ask ChatGPT to write an essay, or a story, does it do it well? ChatGPT isn’t going to break a story. It’s never going to be [the FT’s chief economics commentator] Martin Wolf. There’s a level of journalism where the FT plays and operates, and that is safe,” Banerjee quotes Ridding as saying. 

In an article for Wired, Arian Marshall and Paresh Dave say that news publishers are getting wary of the Bing Chatbot’s media diet. After all, Microsoft’s new search interface can serve up key information from articles, removing the need to click, potentially undermining publisher business models. But the new chatbot experience offered by Bing — and a bot called Bard in the works from Google — offer much more than just the links, short previews, and thumbnails common on tech platforms, Marshall and Dave say, adding that if web users spend more time with bots and less time clicking links, publishers could be cut off from sales of subscriptions, ads, and referrals. 

Pointing to gradual rise of a body of journalism ethics that broadly aims to make the industry accountable, and therefore credible, Hamilton Nolan writing for In These Times, says that accountability requires a human mind that can answer all questions. Because AI can never truly be accountable for its work, its work is not journalism and because of that, publishing such work is unethical, he says. He is for the news publishing industry to collectively agree to standards that ensure no news outlets publish journalism that is produced directly by AI. The technology can be a tool to assist humans in news gathering, but it should never replace humans in a newsroom, he cautions. 

“We are entering an era of media that will be populated by swamps full of videos and audios and photos and pieces of writing that are all completely computer-generated and designed to mislead people. The public is about to have a very, very hard time distinguishing what is real from what is fake. It is more important than ever that credible news outlets exist, and remain credible. In order to do that, we need to hold the line against AI taking over the work of human journalists. We need to unify around the idea that such a thing is not ethical. If we don’t, you can bet that companies will move as fast as possible to save a dollar — and utterly destroy journalism along the way.” Olan could not have said it better.