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Cold comfort AI

I’m old enough to remember a world before Google. (My kids like to ask what Abraham Lincoln was like and I say he was quite charming.) But then came the Internet, where one could ask a butler for answers or wade through the morass of a Yahoo! Search result. The revelations of Google, why the name became a verb, was because of the clarity and focus its results provided. For the first time the Internet’s vast sea of information seemed navigable.

Judged by user experience improvement I don’t think anything since Google has come close to the leaps that artificial intelligence has provided. It’s a whole new ballgame with rules that are being written as we go along. I’ve personally not engaged with AI much. I made a ChatGPT account but was soon bored by it. Now of course, Google’s AI shows up at the top of each search result, so it’s hard to avoid. It might be the writer in me, but I don’t necessarily want a large language model giving me answers. It seems a plagiarist’s dream, and that offends me. Writing is hard, and needs to be done badly at first so it can improve. My fear is that writing will shift into a place where the spoils go to those who can best manipulate the algorithm, who write for the AI.

But it’s like that now already, isn’t it? With influencers able to goose the algo to their needs. Maybe it’s still a bit unseen, if you’re not deep into social media you might not know this is going on. Yet, having a million followers is a form of power in 2024.

A few weeks ago I asked our social media guru Ryan to see if we could use AI to create short videos from the stories we publish. Down the rabbit hole he went, and came back with some interesting but not-yet-ready options like Lumen5 and Pictory. And then along came Google, with its NotebookLM. Ryan gave it a recent newsletter we published and within minutes Notebook had created an 8-minute “podcast conversation” about the newsletter, conducted by two AI hosts. He embedded that into a Canva template and we had a ready-to-go social media post ready within minutes.

The way the AI hosts bantered is what blew me away (listen to the embed below). The speech patterns, the pauses, the way questions were injected into the conversation – it was so good it gave me pause. And just to be clear here, the way the newsletter came out of the AI was what shook me. It wasn’t a re-reading of it, or quotes from the text. It had digested the topics, the contradictions and the theme of the piece and sent all of those back in a really compelling format.

These sort of jaw droppers have been around for a while now of course, the deep fakes in the celebrity and political world are terrifying. I guess it hadn’t hit home for me yet, it became personal to hear the words we’d written and edited get the AI treatment. And get it so well. Damn. The fact that we had been the ones to feed the machine was cold comfort. — Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media

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