It's so emblematic of the moment we're in... where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore
Melissa Bell, CEO of Chicago Public Media, issued an apology this week which categorised the litany of human errors that led to the Chicago Sun-Times publishing a largely AI-generated supplement entitled “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer.”
Instead of the meticulously reported summer entertainment coverage the Sun-Times staff has published for years, these pages were filled with innocuous general content: hammock instructions, summer recipes, smartphone advice … and a list of 15 books to read this summer.
Of those 15 recommended books by 15 authors, 10 titles and descriptions were false, or invented out of whole cloth.
As Bell suggests in her apology, the failure isn’t (just) a failure of AI. It’s a failure of human oversight:
Did AI play a part in our national embarrassment? Of course. But AI didn’t submit the stories, or send them out to partners, or put them in print. People did. At every step in the process, people made choices to allow this to happen.
Dan Sinker, a Chicago native, runs with this in an excellent post which has been shared widely. He calls the time we’re in the “Who Cares Era, riffing on the newspaper supplement debacle to make a bigger point.
The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.
It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
[…]
It’s easy to blame this all on AI, but it’s not just that. Last year I was deep in negotiations with a big-budget podcast production company. We started talking about making a deeply reported, limited-run show about the concept of living in a multiverse that I was (and still am) very excited about. But over time, our discussion kept getting dumbed down and dumbed down until finally the show wasn’t about the multiverse at all but instead had transformed into a daily chat show about the Internet, which everyone was trying to make back then. Discussions fell apart.
Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something smart that would demand a listener’s attention in a way that was challenging and new to something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.
So what do we do about all of this?
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.
[…]
As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.
Source: Dan Sinker
Image: Ben Thornton