Since 2016 the hot button topic throughout news and social media is how the Russians affected the last Presidential Race in favor of the dishonest Donald Trump over the dishonest Hillary Clinton, through their use of BOTS and other algorithms to generate news stories. While that is true (in fact we have ourselves have been involved in many countries elections, trying to sway them into a more favorable outcome. Just during the Obama Administration the United States was deeply involved in the Israeli Election against Netanyahu and the Brexit Vote which we tried to vote down. Both failed.), Russian bots completely infiltrated FACEBOOK as well as TWITTER (reports out earlier this week suggest INSTAGRAM has Russian meddling), we have to ask why and how have BOTS become about.
Sadly we don’t have to far from our own media sources.
WIRED magazine ran a four part series on NEWS WRITING BOTS last February [2017].
In 2013, Amazon Billionaire, Jeff Bezos bought the floundering Washington Post. At the time Bezos had zero journalism experience (and some say still doesn't. But how many owners of companies today really know the businesses they own?) and immediately set out to overhaul the Post. And to be fair has done just that. In three years The Post has exploded and has become more susceptible for the digital age. However here inlies the [beginnings of] the problem.
THE RISE OF BOTS.
Back in 2013 AI-Journalism was in infancy with only a handful of companies actually generating automated content. Producing bare-bones data more useful in the sporting world and for stock analysts. Bezos’s strategists, though, saw something more. Seeing potential for AI systems to begin data mining story ideas in effort to provide a more seamless interaction between humans and computers. And in 2014 started evolving stories in a short period of time.
ENTER HELIOGRAF
Debuting during the RIO OLYMPICS Heliograf began auto-publishing stories that had a stronger editorial voice than some of their writers on staff. Heliograf works like this: Editors create templates for stories using key phrases, which then the AI would generate narratives for whatever potential outcome. This way news outlets could have stories ready to go at a moments notice and be first to publish. Because in today’s age of journalism, it’s not about the accuracy but who’s first with the story that counts. With AI Bots, the potential of constant reversals and gaffs would almost be eliminated. Not only that, news services could tailor their on-line and print media to a larger market by developing stories in every market rather than just a few and not having to employ thousands of journalists to do it. And in the cash strapped world of media this was a win-win.
As the 2016 Presidential Election came rolling around it was a no brainer for the media to let loose their newest creation for fast stories. And in 2016 the Washington Post was not alone in the AI News game. With the likes of Systems called WIZZBIT, NEWSTRACER, and most noteworthy BUZZBOT. Just to name a few.
In theory, as well [at times] in practice, AI algorithmic prediction tools help journalists gauge the integrity of say a tweet. The technology then scores emerging stories on the basis of “credibility” and “newsworthiness” by evaluating who’s tweeting about it, how it’s spreading across the network, and if nearby users have taken to Twitter to confirm or deny breaking developments, collect any information from on-the-ground sources at news events. The AI then can create short videos, condense news articles into a script, string together a selection of images or video footage, and even add narration with a synthesized newscaster voice.
So it’s no wonder that hackers from the Russia and/or China or North Korea would take great pains in infiltrating this. With AI data mining what people are looking at, a staff of hackers the size of less than a small business office could create thousands of false stories via tweets and social media posts that then the story writing algorithms would generate and post stories.
In the 2012 election it took twenty-five hours for human journalists to compose a small fraction of election results whereas in 2016 AI posted more five hundred articles in the same amount of time. Most of it hit the web with little to no human supervision.
When the news media lives on HOW MANY CLICKS A POST CAN GENERATE and how easy it is for a group of hackers can infiltrate systems (The Democratic Committee and the SONY hack to just name two) no one stopped to say “wait a minute?”
AI is a good tool for writers in media. It can find relevant data far faster than a person can. But replacing PEOPLE with BOTS is both ridiculous and stupid. And until the media and we ourselves figure that out we are store of more and more of this.
In the end, what we [America] called that most needed thing, an unbiased media will, and some says already, be destroyed and burnt to ash.
