Yesterday I read what some might think is good news. Tabloids in England are firing human writers because Google AI summaries are undercutting human reader traffic to their sites. To this I have two comments.
Before every newspaper was pay-walled I would browse to The Guardian, the Independent, Le Monde, Le temps, Le Matin, and dozens of other newspapers. With time every one of them brought up a paywall and you might think “They’re right to, they deserve to be paid for the work they do but it’s worth remembering that for over a century, and during our lifetimes you could go to a newspaper stand or magazine shop and buy a newspaper and read all of the day’s stories, or you could buy a magazine and read all of the week’s or months articles. Now you’re expected to pay either for a single article, or per month, or per year.
In essence we can pay to read a single story but what we’re paying would have bought a newspaper. The web browsing habit that we had, of going to a newspaper and reading articles, and paying through viewing ads is undercut by the paywall.
It gets worse. We’re browsing the social web, and someone posts an article, we follow it, we accept cookies, and then they say, “oh, and now pay per month or per year” and you think “That’s devious”. You got a click, you got a reader, but you kicked them out within seconds, after you’ve stolen their data.
With Google News we could browse headlines, click through, and read the article, and then go to another site. That article led to ad views, which led to long tail revenue, which led to income.
If we see an article from The Times, of England, or Le Temps, or Le Monde, more often than not the article is pay-walled so we don’t click through anymore. Why would we click when we know that we’ll bounce?
The second comment is that if an article is well written, then AI is redundant, because the first paragraph offers context, and the final paragraph offers the conclusion. Since these are quick and easy to read AI summaries are just doing what has already been done by a human, to begin with.
The second part to this second comment is that the AI summaries are forced upon us, rather than requested. We search for something, and the first half screen is an AI summary which we skim read by accident. We don’t want that AI summary because we don’t know what the source was but we also don’t want that summary because of the inherent bias that an AI model might add. We know if a newspaper is Right Wing, Left Wing, neutral or other. With AI, in theory we don’t know the bias, but it might know what we think, and write the summary to line up with our prejudice and bias.
By choosing not to have human writers, some tabloids are giving AI more power than it should have. Journalists study media ethics and law, deontology and more. They also have a moral compass and will fight to expose the truth when they can, and denounce wrong doing when they can.
AI, as journalist just runs programmed, like Number Five from the film Short Circuit.
Humans go out and seek information. Ai can’t do original research. If we rely on AI for local journalism, then there is a lot that AI will miss.
One of the biggest frustrations I face, as a reader of news headlines, blogs and more is clickbait headlines. For a while I really liked looking for content on YouTube until I realised that every headline is clickbait. The same is true of news organisations. Back in the 2000s we’d read a headline, read the first paragraph and continue. Today we read the headline and the headline says “You’ll be astonished to learn that…” or “you’ll never guess why…” These headlines, instead of encouraging us to read an article, frustrate us, and encourage us to give up reading the news.
For me, the best way to get people to click through, rather than converse with AI about the news, is return to the factual headline that provides people with information, and to stop hiding articles behind paywalls after they have accepted cookies.
The less you invest in people, the less reason people will have for visiting specific “news” sites, if regional news is not covered.
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