Accurate Reporting? That'll Be $5/month, Please.

On A.I. slop, the death of journalism, and class.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that “the rise of machines” will probably not involve Terminator-type robots with guns coming to kill us all. (That is, unless Elon Musk does something incredibly stupid…again.) Rather, the threat of A.I. is having more to do with information; who has access to it, who creates it, and for what purposes.

The promise of A.I. and automation was that it would free humanity from dangerous, low-wage labor so that we could pursue even greater scientific discoveries and/or write poetry under fig trees like our ancestors would have wanted for us. Instead, newer technology is pitched to us as innovative new ways to go to work, and the main use case of A.I. has been the creation of robot-created ✨content✨.

Post from @KarlreMarks: “Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted” (Twitter)

As a writer and as an educator, I care deeply about media literacy and the accuracy of our information. What’s increasingly becoming clear to me—through TikTok kids’ content, the articles we see on social media, and even ChatGPT songwriters—is that the ability to discern what is and is not A.I.-generated will be one of the most important skills we learn in the 21st century. People are already using ChatGPT like it’s Google—it’s not—and assuming extravagant A.I.-generated interior design photos are real places, despite the impossibilities within them.

@elyse_just_elyse#greenscreen ai is embarrassing us. #ai #aiinteriors #interiordesign #interior #interiordesigner

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This alone could be the topic of its own article, but I think it’s important that we also discuss this issue in the greater context of the decline of journalism. Newspapers are dying, journalists are having to stay afloat by putting their content behind a paywall (thank you, paid subscribers), and most useful academic studies are inaccessible to those who aren’t currently working at a university. Information—which is to say, accurate information—is becoming pretty expensive, but A.I.-generated slop is cheaper and more widespread than ever.

If A.I. continues to take up space in our feeds, I wonder: is the working class doomed to only reading A.I.-generated content slop, while only the well-off can afford media that allows them to adequately critique the world around them?