Since the start of 2023, it’s all been threat calls from artificial intelligence. Watch out, it’s coming. Watch out, it’s going to take your jobs. The scriptwriters and editors, go and take your turn on the dole. And when it comes down to it, when it has been carried out, it has been an absolute disaster. This is the case of io9, the famous website owned by Gizmodo, which, against the wishes of the workers, has relied on AI to write an article about ‘Star Wars’. It goes wrong at disastrous levels.
Some time ago in a galaxy out there
AI can be a help when it comes to writing, yes: it is able to find sentences in quotation marks in a quick text or give data easily, but, always trying to please, it ends up making things up. This is what happened in the article “A chronological list of Star Wars movies and series”, signed by “Gizmodo Bot”, which didn’t give a single one.
In an article like this, one would expect to find the products in chronological order, but instead they were simply listed as they pleased. What’s more, mentions of ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’, ‘Andor’ or ‘The Book of Boba Fett’, among others, were missing. A disaster on all levels that io9’s editor-in-chief found out about ten minutes before publication, and in which no one retouched a single line.
In fact shortly thereafter he rightly called the article “disgraceful, unpublishable, disrespectful to the audience and workers, a punch to our authority and integrity.” If it’s a window into the future of pop culture writing, it doesn’t look good. If it remains a simple reminder that a tool is just that, and cannot replace a human being no matter how much some insist it can, it may (hopefully) remain a footnote anecdote.
As more research has been done, more things have come to light that make sense. For example, that this rush to use AI comes from the CEO of the media conglomerate, with the thinly disguised intention of cutting creativity in mythical websites such as AV Club, The Onion or Deadspin in exchange for more money. It seems that no matter how much they insist that they are coming to take away the jobs of cartoonists and writers, we will continue to do well. The drawings done by AI are instantly snapped up and the writing is not of a high enough standard to be published anywhere.
Well, it looks like those who were rubbing their hands together waiting for the end of many jobs are going to need the Force to be with them in the future, since reality does not.
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