Reader Rep: When Computers Replace Journalists, Watch Out
Readers, be wary when algorithms are your only editors.
Journalists are starting to catch on that computers are coming for their jobs and the general public might not really care all that much about the fate of the Fourth Estate.
The has been tracking for journalists, with about a quarter of U.S. adults now saying that journalists contribute 鈥渘ot very much鈥 or 鈥渘othing at all鈥 to society.
The might have landed a mortal blow to the newspaper industry, but , and a variety of other algorithm-oriented companies have been ripping it to bits in recent years, with their clever programs, like a pack of wolves tearing apart a wounded turtle.
A big part of this weakening of the traditional media industry is its own pretentious fault, for not continually investing in research and development, for getting complacent in its business models, for failing to adapt quickly to new communication and computing technologies, for focusing primarily on short-term gains through 聽and, in general, for treating professional journalists poorly (while these companies and suppressing costs).
The clear and inherent societal value of journalists gets reinforced daily when we read, watch and hear about what happens when the world tries to function without them.
Imagine a future (but not too far in the future) where your news primarily comes from conflicted and blathering propagandists, such as Donald Trump’s former campaign manager,聽, who gets 聽and who has signed a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from disparaging Trump (or any of his family members) in any way whatsoever, under threat of litigation, but who also serves as a prominent pseudo-journalist on a major news network.
Lewandowski actually to discuss the merits of the candidates, Trump, while regularly disparaging (at no additional cost) Trump鈥檚 rival Hillary Clinton, without much on-air pushback about such an arrangement is in a journalistic context.
In this respect, Lewandowski has become a kind of for Trump and his political operatives. CNN, for its part, not only facilitates the abuse of journalistic principles and values, it, in its twisted pursuit of profits over people.
Also, as a part of this future (but not too far in the future), computers busily can crank out all sorts of journalistic discourse and decide exactly what you see (and what you don鈥檛) in the day鈥檚 news.
, these machines only could duplicate the most formulaic and basic kinds of stories, like , and . But as these programmers and programs have become more sophisticated, they threaten to destroy the value of something even more precious to the news industry than classified ads: the telegraph-era writing style known as .
If the inverted pyramid implodes, because computers can generate these kinds of plainly written stories, in descending order of importance, from a pile of data (documents, transcripts, analysis of security camera photographs), what will the non-computer journalist be left to do?
If you think computers are far off from this objective, take this comparing a computer鈥檚 writing to a human鈥檚. How did you do? If these machines can whip out decent poetry and novelizations, they probably will be able to figure out the inverted pyramid soon enough.
As these programmers and programs become more sophisticated, they threaten to destroy the value of something even more precious to the news industry than classified ads.
Maybe people could be serviceable for editing and gatekeeping in the future, but , , 聽and many other tech titans already have pushed past the post-human filtering phase. They have made billions of dollars on such strategies, as tend to do. But they also have revealed something interesting about the nature of journalistic work in the process of automation and .
That is the material existence of , 听补苍诲听, among others, all based on human bias within their systems, hidden deeply inside the algorithms.聽Just like I recommend readers to find out what鈥檚 behind the numbers, I also recommend investigating what鈥檚 behind the computer program. Statistics and computer data are especially convincing at creating the illusion of objectivity and fairness. But they fundamentally are incapable of reaching either of those objectives.
When someone chooses to count something in one way and not another, when a computer program favors one factor over another, . That鈥檚 why the first beauty contest decided by an artificial intelligence algorithm recently ended up with almost , because somewhere deep within the code was the bias toward white beauty, put there by programmers.
That鈥檚 why , used across the nation, targets black people. That鈥檚 why targeted to them by Google.
That鈥檚 also why we need people out front and transparent about information production and filtering jobs. People can be held accountable for their actions in ways that robots, computers and algorithms cannot.
Along those lines, Amazon has . Facebook has . 聽are hiring more humans for editing work. Maybe this means people as journalists have some sort of a future after all.
