What AI brings to the table and its risks

LLMs do the same thing, but with more sophistication, and they present the content as their own, which creates a legitimate copyright issue. So some payment is due.

Further, most media sites these days limit free access to a fraction of the content on their site. The LLMs add much more value to their own offerings if they can access that content, and if they want to access it, a fee is also warranted.

In this case the media have effectively found a way to syndicate and sell some of their content, improving their economics on the income side, to the benefit of their employees and shareholders.

It also helps to solve a problem for the LLMs. Chatbots have been caught out making mistakes–wrong facts, and even hallucinating–completely making facts up.

There is also a risk that as internet content leans left, the AI systems will follow in their answers as well. By accessing credible news sources across a range of positions they can outsource neutrality and provide a more balanced output to their users.

The limits of AI

I've been using AI for 20 years now, and it created my original niche in journalism.

When I first started writing about political campaigns I didn't want to make a fool of myself, as most journalists did, by retailing as fact the gossip I picked up around the halls of power, or at Sunday afternoon barbeques with my mates.

So, along with Mike Kaiser, who had been Queensland Labor State Secretary and briefly a member of parliament, and who was also writing commentary, I devised a way to do focus group research using the Internet.

We collected our data online through surveys which involved thousands of responses to open questions.

Questions like, "What is the major issue for you this federal election?" This was like a massive scientific version of the vox pop, the form of journalism where you send a journalist out to a public space to ask individuals what they think.

Analysing that much data wasn't easy until in 2004 I came across Leximancer. Developed at the University of Queensland it looked for the occurrence of words and how closely they were associated with other words. It could uncover associations that were hard to spot otherwise.

Leximancer could sift through data and provide word maps showing from my survey questions how issues affected votes.