Q: You know why editors die earlier than reporters?
A: Because they want to.
Photos 1981 by Tom Warren, Corvallis Gazette-Times
From Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:
Here’s a guess: the first serious use of AI in the newsroom will be to replace editors, not writers. Roughly speaking, AI will take reporters’ notes or rough copy—or even what we humans laughingly call finished copy—and turn it into great prose. We’ll still need someone around to nag us about issues of substance, but the robots will compose sentences and paragraphs better than us. What’s more, they’ll be able to churn out multiple versions of our writing instantly: the magazine version, the 6th-grade version, the TV script version, the Spanish version, the PowerPoint deck, etc. Just tell it what you need and you’ll get it.
Reporters will last a little longer, but just a little. I’m giving editors until, oh, 2035. I think that’s generous. Reporters will be out of business by 2040. Better get ready.
I’m totally ready. By 2035 I’ll be 81, which in O’Grady years is stone cold dead.
Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, Computers, editors, reporters
Mad Blog Media 
December 14, 2018 at 2:42 pm |
Fuck that AI crap. I want one of these.
December 14, 2018 at 2:46 pm |
Speaking of which, no Zappadan posts this year?
December 14, 2018 at 2:50 pm |
You know, it completely slipped my mind until a couple days past Bummernacht. Happily some other folks are a little more on top of things.
December 14, 2018 at 2:54 pm |
I spaced it too until I pasted in that URL for Jewish Princess. And then it occurred to me that we were in the middle of Zappadan.
December 14, 2018 at 3:12 pm |
Heard about that AI shit while sitting on a pile of sandbags in 1970. Something about HAL.
Day 11 of Zappadan. Here we go for another year with Road Ladies.
December 14, 2018 at 6:20 pm |
December 14, 2018 at 7:30 pm |
Beauty, heh? Nicely done Hurben. Thanks, mate.
December 14, 2018 at 6:09 pm |
Wohoo! Zappadan!
News drives me up the wall since they got rid of proofreaders, some of the mistakes make me cringe.
December 15, 2018 at 5:53 am |
AI? We are already up to our necks in it. It determines our news feeds, shopping preferences, weather reports and hundreds of other bits and pieces of info retrieval. As an early and prolific adopter of the digital age and its myriad of gadgets and user names and passwords; I’m a fixin to go the other way. Facebook killed off months ago, cell phone turned off after 5 pm and on weekends and a lockdown on anymore gizmos with a chip in em. My home was headed towards being a “smart house” with everything being controllable by a phone. Then I realized I might not be the one in control.
December 15, 2018 at 6:08 am |
Nothing smart in this house, not even the meat-things.
Well, except for Herself. And Miss Mia Sopaipilla. And Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment).
I keep the cameras covered on anything that can see me (the TV is too old to watch us the way we watch it). Disabling the mics is a good deal more difficult (turning the input volume to zero is simplest).
Facebutt, Twatter, Chatsnap and Instagrim? All gone. Only antisocial media remains (hate mail).
And when the phone rings I never answer, no matter what day or time of day it is, because it’s only a bot, a Russian, or a Russian bot. Nobody I actually want to talk to calls me these days. We text or use Messages.
Anyway, this 2012 iPhone 5 is so old and beat now that if I did answer, I’d burn through the battery before I could say “Неправильный номер, мудак.”
December 15, 2018 at 8:40 am |
Geez, I’ve only had the “smart” phone for 2 years now and still barely know how to use it. It chirps and beeps for gawd-knows-what reasons and I can never find out why. But I croaked the F and T and LinkedIn over the last year so they can only find me via the phone. But I’ll tell anyone interested we’re in Napoli this week, checking out apartments for later while The Prof meets up with some of her new Fulbright colleagues. We might even take an organized bike tour of the area tomorrow to see if it’s worth hauling our road bikes down here – or perhaps like in Rome a few years back the ancient MTB’s might be a better idea? https://cycleitalia.blogspot.com/2014/11/cycling-old-appian-way.html