Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player "Useless"
Microsoft's MSN news portal published a garbled, seemingly AI-generated article that derided Hunter as "useless" in its headline.
Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying attention. This is the "AI" apocalypse everyone has been wringing their hands over and dumbass executives have been salivating over. This is exactly the problem with LLMs, they produce very convincing looking content, but it's not actually factual content. You need teams of fact checkers and editors to review all their output if you care at all about accuracy.
As is with software developing, actually writing the stuff down is the easiest part of the work. If you already have someone fact checking and editing.. why do you need AI to shit out crap just for the writing? It would be easier to gather the facts first, fact check them, then wrangle them through the AI if you don't want to hire a writer (+ another pass for editing).
LLMs look like magic on a glance, but people thinking they are going to produce high quality content (or code for god's sake) are delusional.
Yeah. I'm a programmer. Everyone has been telling me that I'm about to be out of a job any day now because the "AI" is coming for me. I'm really not worried. It's way harder to correct bad code than it is to just throw it all away and start fresh, and I can't even imagine how difficult it's going to be to try to debug whatever garbage some "AI" has spewed out. If you employ a dozen programmers now, if you start using AI to generate your code you're going to need two dozen programmers to debug and fix it's output.
The promise with "AI" (more accurately machine learning, as this is not AI) as far as code is concerned is as a sort of smart copy and paste, where you can take a chunk of code and say "duplicate this but with these changes", and then verify and tweak its output. As a smart refactoring tool it shows a lot of promise, but it's not like you're going to sit down and go "write me an app" and suddenly it's done. Well, unless you want Hello World, and even then I'm sure it would find a way to introduce a bug or two.
I don't think this one is even an LLM, it looks like the output of a basic article spinning script that takes an existing article and replaces random words with synonyms.
This seems like the case. One of the first stanzas:
Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats.
Language models are text prediction machines. None of this text is predictable and it contains basic grammatical errors that even small models will almost never make.
AI doesn't exist, but it will ruin everything anyway.
Hah, great video. There was a reason why I put quotes around AI in my response because yes, what's being called AI by everyone is not in fact AI, but most people have never even heard of machine learning let alone understand the difference between it and AI. I've seen a trend of people starting to use the term AGI to differentiate between "AI" and actual AI, but I'm not really a fan of that because I think that's just watering down the term AI.
The danger about current AI is people giving them important tasks to do when they aren't up to it. To put it in War Games terms, the problem is not Joshua, not even Professor Falken, but the McKittricks of the world.
if you care at all about accuracy.
There’s the problem right there. The MSN homepage ain’t exactly a pinnacle of superlative journalism.
This article wasn't even remotely convincing, though.
Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons
Dude really went wild during the steam summer sale.
Don't we all.
Gotta teach it to add qualifying language. The above is falsifiable (even if it happens to be true).
Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in approximately 67 video games over two seasons
Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in at least 67 video games over two seasons
The second one is only technically falsifiable. It wouldn't be practical though as you'd have to prove you investigated every video game over a 2 year period (and not necessarily contiguous). Not an easy task.
Agreed. Otherwise the content was perfect.
I really hope public opinion on AI starts to change. LLMs aren't going to make anyone's life easier, except in that they take jobs away once the corporate world determines that they are in a "good-enough" state -- desensitizing people to this kind of stupid output is just one step on that trail.
The whole point is just to save the corporate world money. There will never, ever be a content advantage over a human author.
The thing is LLMs are extremely useful at aiding humans. I use one all the time at work and it has made me faster at my job, but left unchecked they do really stupid shit.
I agree they can be useful (I've found intelligent code snippet autocompletion to be great), but it's really important that the humans using the tool are very skilled and aware of the limitations of AI.
Eg, my usage generates only very, very small amounts of code (usually a few lines). I have to very carefully read those lines to make sure they are correct. It's never generating something innovative. It simply guesses what I was going to type anyways. So it only saved me time spent typing and the AI is by no means in charge of logic. It also is wrong a lot of the time. Anyone who lets AI generate a substantial amount of code or lets it generate code you don't understand thoroughly is both a fool and a danger.
It does save me time, especially on boilerplate and common constructs, but it's certainly not revolutionary and it's far too inaccurate to do the kinds of things non programmers tend to think AI can do.
It's already made my life much easier.
The technology is amazing.
It's just there's a lot of stupid people using it stupidly, and people whose job it is to write happen to really like writing articles about its failures.
There's a lot more going on in how it is being used and improving than what you are going to see unless you are actually using it yourself daily and following research papers on it.
Don't buy into the anti-hype, as it's misleading to the point of bordering on misinformation.
I'm going to fight the machines for the right to keep slaving away myself
And when I'm done, capitalism will give me an off day as a treat!
You're missing the point. If you don't have a job to "slave away" at, you don't have the money to afford food and shelter. Any changes to that situation, if they ever come, are going to lag far behind whatever events cause a mass explosion of unemployment.
It's not about licking a boot, it's that we don't want to let the boot just use something that should be a net good as extra weight as they step on us.
As someone who works in content marketing, this is already untrue at the current quality of LLMs. It still requires a LOT of human oversight, which obviously it was not given in this example, but a good writer paired with knowledgeable use of LLMs is already significantly better than a good content writer alone.
Some examples are writing outside of a person's subject expertise at a relatively basic level. This used to take hours or days of entirely self-directed research on a given topic, even if the ultimate article was going to be written for beginners and therefore in broad strokes. With diligent fact-checking and ChatGPT alone, the whole process, including final copy, takes maybe 4 hours.
It's also an enormously useful research tool. Rather than poring over research journals, you can ask LLMs with academic plug-ins to give a list of studies that fit very specific criteria and link to full texts. Sometimes it misfires, of course, hence the need for a good writer still, but on average this can cut hours from journalistic and review pieces without harming (often improving) quality.
All the time writers save by having AI do legwork is then time they can instead spend improving the actual prose and content of an article, post, whatever it is. The folks I know who were hired as writers because they love writing and have incredible commitment to quality are actually happier now using AI and being more "productive" because it deals mostly with the shittiest parts of writing to a deadline and leaves the rest to the human.
It still requires a LOT of human oversight, which obviously it was not given in this example, but a good writer paired with knowledgeable use of LLMs is already significantly better than a good content writer alone.
I'm talking about future state. The goal clearly is to avoid the need of human oversight altogether. The purpose of that is saving some rich people more money. I also disagree that LLMs improve output of good writers, but even if they did, the cost to society is high.
I'd much rather just have the human author, and I just hope that saying "we don't use AI" becomes a plus for PR due to shifting public opinion.
I mean.... if they're dead, they probably really suck at basketball so it's not exactly untrue.
I mean, MSN is just a portal and I doubt there's much behind it besides what domains are popular. MSN "published" this the same way Google News published articles. It sounds better to say Microsoft did it, but it's from some news site called Race Track and it was simply scraped by MSN.
Yeah, but that's a key part of the problem. The media had already automated a lot of the news curation into Google News, MSN and other portals, getting people used to not paying much attention to the particular source of news. The news is now moving to generating the actual content in an automated way, rather than just the aggregation step.
Link to the article (archived)
#Brandon Hunter useless at 42# Story by Editor • 9/12/2023, 11:21:42 PM21h
Former NBA participant Brandon Hunter, who beforehand performed for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic, has handed away on the age of 42, as introduced by Ohio males’s basketball coach Jeff Boals on Tuesday.
Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats.
He earned three first-team All-MAC convention alternatives and led the NCAA in rebounding throughout his senior season. Hunter’s expertise led to his choice because the 56th general decide within the 2003 NBA Draft.
Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons and achieved a career-high of 17 factors in a recreation in opposition to the Milwaukee Bucks in 2004.
Hey!
"Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in 67 video games over two seasons and achieved a career-high of 17 factors in a recreation in opposition to the Milwaukee Bucks in 2004."
He wasn't useless, you wish version Skynet!!
Intelligence is not the same as Wisdom. People often conflate the two and "AI" as it exists today is equivalent to a 3 year olds level of wisdom and a 40 year olds level of intelligence. It has access to vast amounts of facts and data but is completely unable to actually "understand" context and meaning.
This is just word replacement of an existing article (forward = ahead, games = video games, passed (away) = handed, points = factors) done to avoid DMCA claims, whether it was done by AI or an algorithm is irrelevant. The AI was used to reword the article, and it's good at doing that, but why those words in particular were replaced is beyond my comprehension.
Oh yeah, you're right. Seems like the AI replaced dead with useless as in "dead batteries". That is really awful.
Microsoft Tay could be looking for a new job as a writer at MSN.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s career with the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic.
The rest of the brief report is even more incomprehensible, informing readers that Hunter "handed away" after achieving "vital success as a ahead [sic] for the Bobcats" and "performed in 67 video games."
It made headlines last month, for instance, after publishing a similarly incoherent AI-generated travel guide for Ottawa, Canada that bizarrely recommended that tourists visit a local food bank.
As a result, as we reported last year, the platform ended up syndicating large numbers of sloppy articles about topics as dubious Bigfoot and mermaids, which it deleted after we pointed them out.
Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats.
Accusing an NBA legend of being "useless" the week he died isn't just an offensive slip-up by a seemingly unsupervised algorithm, in other words.
The original article contains 882 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Imagine being an AI-generated summary of an article criticizing AI-written articles
Still included a shitty AI generated sentence in there anyways. Not knocking the bot or the creator though. This bot seems pretty good at summaries for the most part.
It's even funnier to consider that many publications are probably using AI (or more accurately LLM's) to pad out their articles. So then you directly get one program trying to lengthen a article and another trying to shorten it.
Pretty cool to be able to watch it happening though
So MSN has started relying on AI to do all of the work for their writing? And they can't at least proofread it??
MSN didn't write this. They are entirely responsible for that odd travel article not too long ago, but MSN is mostly just a news aggregator.
Costs too much
