AI in Publishing Is Even Scarier Than I Thought

The other week, we had dinner with out neighbors, one of whom is some sort of managing editor at a big German publisher of newspapers and magazines. What he had to say about his industry’s adoption of generative AI is terrifying. We’re so worried about generative AI companies stealing copyrighted text and art to use for training up AI and so worried about whether or not we’ll be able to tell real videos and images from generated ones. But we haven’t given enough thought to what these trained up AIs can be used for.

Well, our neighbor, experiencing the changes to the news publishing industry that have been going on around him, made it clear. Pretty soon, thanks to generative AI, there won’t need to be much in the way of journalists or editors. Instead of having entire newsrooms full of journalists and photographers and editorial boards and hoards of freelancers, all of which represent people with their own opinions and political beliefs, one or two people will be able to control the creation, editing, and distribution of news. Which is a nightmare for democracy, because that gives a small number of people an even greater power to manipulate the rest of us by controlling what information we have access to and how it is presented to us.

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