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“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.” Melissa Bell, CEO, Chicago Sun-Times

This is one of the best corporate apologies I’ve ever seen, regarding the AI-generated summer supplement that went viral a couple of weeks ago. Bell walks through every step of the process that led to it happening, including her own decision to “not sacrifice any revenue” by continuing to offer these 3rd-party supplements without taking a closer look at how they were produced.

She also notes in her insightful lessons learned summary that, “Buscaglia won’t work for King Features again, nor will he work at Chicago Public Media, but I respect that he owned up to his mistake and took the responsibility in public.”

I initially posted briefly about this on LinkedIn and Mastodon, but wanted to say a little more about Marco Buscaglia, the journalist who “wrote” the AI-generated supplement in question.

Pity the Player Forced to Play the Rigged Game

I don’t know Marco Buscaglia personally, and had never heard of him before his surprising mea culpa to 404 Media shortly after his screwup went viral. Looking at his background, though — a career journalist who moved into content strategy ten years ago — he represents one very predictable outcome of a series of bad choices (pivots) that have been driven by FOMO for several decades now.

Content strategy and content marketing are powered by hundreds (thousands?) of former journalists who were laid off from magazines and newspapers over the past 20 years. There’s probably just as many aspiring journalists who never found a decent-paying role at the magazines and newspapers they’d hoped to work for and ended up cranking out “content” for a wide range of non-media companies and thought leaders hoping to create and control their own narratives.

Buscaglia ended up cranking out generic content at scale for publishers who don’t want to “sacrifice any revenue,” even if that means sacrificing their editorial credibility, while paying him a fraction of what it used to cost to produce hand-crafted versions of similar content readers might actually find useful. Ultimately, he ended up relying too much on the notoriously unreliable Generic Productivity Tool — one of a handful of over-hyped AI magic bullets the publishing industry seemingly can’t decide whether to embrace or exorcise — and it bit him in the ass.

I don’t think that makes him evil nor naive, though. He was simply trying to continue making a living in an industry that has aggressively devalued his profession, forcing journalists to do more with less. More content, less resources. More content, less rigor. More content, less credibility.

He moved fast and broke things, which is something only tech companies are allowed to do without consequences. Unfortunately, he’s probably the only one of the many other people who made equally bad choices to suffer any real consequences, although I suspect he’ll still find plenty of takers for his services — as long as he plays the game and devalues his work enough.

Resistance Is Critical

“Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral… Each technology has an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Technology is never neutral, nor are the humans who build it and decide how to use it. AI (in its varied guises) is just the latest technology being leveraged by specific humans whose agendas have always been unrelated to journalistic credibility — or credibility of any kind, really.

The only thing “inevitable” about the fledgling Pivot to AI is the unrelenting pressure to blindly accept its inevitability.

Resist like your career depends on it — and inform that resistance with critical thinking every step of the way.

Source: Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash.