The Hype of 'Generative Hey Hi' (G.A.I.) is Over, It Won't Replace the Dying Media
The "news deserts"* remain a crisis which dooms the Web and results in misinformed populations
THE other month we grabbed screenshots of computer-generated (CG) 'articles' - basically plagiarism - that had entered the indexes of Gulag Noise (Google News)... somehow. Was quality control at Google assigned to a bot? What an embarrassment. Google actively encouraged and rewarded CG spew and plagiarism (nowadays the media calls that 'generative hey hi'), but it has since then stopped. Perhaps Google managed to detect and remove these CG spew and plagiarism sites (other problems/nuisances have since then infested these same indexes, possible due to "news deserts"*).
But forget about 'generative hey hi'.
The hype is dying down. It has been rapidly dying since the summer. It had previously helped Microsoft distract the media (while paying publishers!) from tens of thousands of layoffs, resulting in many Microsoft divisions and products dying permanently. A shame that the media (what's left of it anyway) barely covered that. Microsoft is going through times of crisis with massive bills that pile up. Activision has been a great distraction from a truly grim reality and tough times at GitHub (several rounds of layoffs so far this year, even office shutdown!).
"Deals for generative AI were down 29% in the third quarter of this year," says this news article (Source: Quartz). We've just included it in Daily Links, quoting the portions that say: "There are a couple factors that could be leading investors to pump the brakes. One is that Big Tech, with its market influence and deep pockets, might be scaring away smaller players. But even Big Tech has slowed down its dealmaking. And valuations are still all over the map, further complicating things."
Don't say "pump the brakes". Say "pump and dump". All this 'generative hey hi' hype was about "pump and dump" for companies' shares. We've been saying this since the start of this year and are being proven right every month since around June.
Speaking of being proven right, our decision to quit social control media (even before Elon Musk entered the picture) has aged well. It is now being reported that for NPR "the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. [..] There’s one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic."
This morning we wrote something related to this in the sister site ("Society Cannot Bear Social Control Media for Much Longer").
So basically, NPR, which quit Twitter (it was among the first mainstream outlets to do so), says leaving Twitter had no real effect on traffic and I believe I saw another site saying the same this week (but cannot recall which one/s, aside from those who mention NPR).
"Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic" is good news. This means that social control media is grossly overrated (many bots and fake figures, triggered by mere linking). We need to see more people rejecting clown computing and other forms of outsourcing (like outsourcing one's audience to Twitter instead of encouraging adoption of RSS feeds).
"Cory [Doctorow] had a discussion of that in his latest blog post too," an associate notes. "Also Nieman Reports. Cory's recent two books are very on topic in that regard. They're available as audio books, too..."
To quote Nieman Reports: "A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says. [...] Twitter wasn’t just about clicks. Posting was table stakes for building reputation and credibility, either as a news outlet or as an individual journalist. To be on Twitter was to be part of a conversation, and that conversation could inform stories or supply sources. During protests, especially, Twitter was an indispensable tool for following organizers and on-the-ground developments, as well as for communicating to the wider public. This kind of connection is hard to give up, but it’s not impossible to replace.""
The problem with NPR right now is, it's taking bribes from Microsoft and from the Famous Criminal Bill Gates, habitually admitting it in public (not always, sometimes actively hiding it despite legitimate criticism from American audiences). We stated calling it BillPR some years ago. It's his part-time reputation-laundering 'public' service, along with BillBC here in England. █
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* Pro Publica, which has meanwhile resorted to taking bribes from the Famous Criminal Bill Gates, reports that "Local Newspapers Are Vanishing." This has become known as "news deserts" because many cities/towns now lack a local newspaper or newsroom. "Local newspapers have already vanished," one reader told us. "The names might survive in random instances but they are owned by a national company and not used for local news. Instead the national uses the local name to disseminate propaganda and such into the local community." Gates has already bought many of these.