Whither humanity as AI takes charge?

I know, it's a video cliché. Nonetheless it sharply captures my acute reaction to a journalism-related post I read yesterday titled "Sloppy work." Sloppy is kind, an adjectival generosity I would have been incapable of applying to work that was incomprehensively reckless, lazy, and immensely disrespectful of readers and the journalistic trade.

The post consisted of reports and commentary submitted by horrified onlookers, beginning with this entry, from one Lincoln Michel:

Over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times—a storied and award-winning newspaper and longtime home of Roger Ebert—published a summer reading list. Almost all the books were fake. There is no Nightshade Market by Min Jin Lee, Boiling Point by Rebecca Makkai, The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, or The Rainmakers by Percival Everett, among other invented titles.

Then came the real kicker, the Heath Ledger Joker in the deck:

The article was not only generated by ChatGPT (or similar program), but clearly unedited. No one at the Chicago Sun-Times even bothered a cursory check. And not only the Sun-Times. The article, along with other seemingly AI-generated pieces, were syndicated in multiple newspapers across the country including the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Another contributor observed specifically that "a full" 10 of the 15 books are nonexistent. They're but imaginary creations pulled, I gather, from the internet by the unthinking machinery of AI. Wrote another commentator: "T get that standards in the field have slipped across the board, but this is a goddamn disgrace."

The disgrace is shared. The summer books story's reporter was inexcusably slothful in relying on AI "research," which he later conceded. Editors are hired to catch such things before they pollute publication; it seems this reporter's editor, however, was, in the colloquial, out to lunch. But still, the ultimate disgrace? Upper management, so to speak. "No one at the Sun-Times claimed responsibility for allowing it into the Sunday paper," added another contributor to the post.

Yet another observer was somewhat sympathetic toward the perpetrators, noting that "It is no accident that this happened less than two months after their parent company, Chicago Public Media, laid off 23 journalists and editors in a mass layoff," a staffing slash of 20%. Hence the one saving grace of the grotesquely disgraceful.

In further sympathy — properly circumscribed — I'll note another perpetrator, one vastly beyond Chicago's city limits: the American public. Respected newspapers nationwide are having to gut personnel because of declining subscriptions. That's the effect, the cause being a country increasingly populated by the willfully un- and ill-informed. Such was the breed the Founders feared most in a republic.

But back to our story. The opportunistic trigger was, of course, AI, a tangle of circuitry unable to think its way to what's real and what's not. Worse, this technology lacks the spark of human creation, or rather, creativity — a sublime characteristic often accompanied by research. And not that of a button's press.

Were I to care for a sick friend by consulting AI, for all I know the damn thing would recommend swinging a plastic bag filled with garlic and cat feces over the lingering body of my concern, while chanting Goobah three times, repeat until patient is well. AI's cure, derived from having stumbled on some super-informative internet page of voodooism. (I exaggerate, obviously, but you get my point.)

Whither humanity as AI takes charge?