The future of AI journalism is less hyperbole and smarter readers
Reported today on TheNextWeb
For the full article visit: https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/02/25/the-future-of-ai-journalism-is-less-hyperbole-and-smarter-readers/
The future of AI journalism is less hyperbole and smarter readers
Today we launched Neural, our new home for human-centric AI news and analysis. While we're celebrating the culmination of years of hard work from our behind-the-scenes staff, I'm taking the day to quietly contemplate the future of AI journalism.
The Guardian's Oscar Schwartz wrote an article in 2018 titled "The discourse is unhinged: how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong." In it, he discusses the 2017 hype-explosion surrounding Facebook's AI research lab developing a pair of chat bots that created a short-hand language for negotiating.
In reality, the chat bots' behavior was remarkable but not entirely unexpected. Unfortunately the media at-large covered the interesting event as though SKYNET from the "Terminator" movies had been born. Dozens of headlines popped up declaring that Facebook's AI had "created its own language that humans can't understand in order to communicate with itself" and other nonsense. Dozens others added that Facebook's engineers were terrified and "pulled the plug" after realizing what they'd done.
Sadly, this le