AI's White-Collar Road Kill

Journalists may be worse off than polar bears. After all, cold winters may return someday but AI isn’t going anywhere. I chatted with a couple newspaper editors on a recent trip east.? The conversation inevitably turned to the algorithm in the room. One editor said it was a firing offense for his reporters to use AI in writing articles, but ruefully admitted that the technology had become so good his paper had no way of catching cheats. The other shook his head, mumbled something about embracing the future—especially since it had already arrived—and announced that, thanks to AI, his paper could produce as much content as it did in the past with just ten percent of his prior workforce. Today, a staffer can feed an event’s basic facts into ChatGPT and, seconds later, have a well-written, accurate article that is 90-95 percent good to go. The editor merely proofs the piece for errant word choices and the increasingly rare factual misstatement before hitting the “print” button.?

Both editors agreed that journalism’s heyday, such as it was, is in the rear-view mirror.?

The conversation meandered to other endangered white-collar occupations. Both agreed that Hollywood writers and lawyers—not ambulance chasers, just the smart ones who do actual research and writing—are high on AI’s hit list. And when the proliferating world of podcasts came up, editor #2 said prepare to be shocked. As an experiment, he’d downloaded an 800-word article into Google’s NotebookLM. Within seconds, he had a sprightly podcast based entirely on his article. He played the five-minute podcast for us. Sounding like typical morning talk show hosts, the man and woman were cheerful, clever, on point and 100 percent fake. Mellifluous, happy talk robots that I never would have guessed were bogus.?

He said other AI apps will now translate your writings into 120+ languages (goodbye human translators) and that—news to me—Google Translate allows you to travel virtually anywhere in the world and converse with the locals using your phone; think Captain Kirk greeting aliens with his flip-top communicator.

To put a momentary cork in this, I asked the tech-embracing editor to take my recent essay on antiquated retail zoning and turn it into a fake podcast. Piece of cake. This talk took less than a minute to create (hear it below).?

AI-Generated Article Commentary

Not only is it convincing and accurate, but the devilish bots picked out the piece’s best analogy—‘mandating only ‘true retailers’ in a shopping district today is like building a bird house for passenger pigeons’—and ran with it*.?

I don’t know about brave, but it’s definitely a new world.?

*The essay is reprinted below should you wish to compare the two.

Empty Stores, Empty Logic – A Palo Alto Retail Vacancy Conundrum

Palo Alto’s city council is considering a “vacancy tax” on empty shop space in its downtown, penalizing owners stuck with vacant buildings. Not widely heralded for its common sense, the Council reasons that landlords are behind our beleaguered downtown’s hollowing out. One council member crowed that greedy landlords are intentionally holding their …?Continue reading

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This essay first appeared in TheRegistry Magazine. All of my essays may be read on LinkedIn or at Mcnellis.com.