Disgusting, how could they?

ChatGPT will generate a reasonable-sounding answer to your prompt, which doesn’t mean it’s right, but it doesn’t stick out as horribly wrong. In that way, it does what most journalists do. It’s not going to replace Jancis Robinson who actually has some expertise in her subject, though.

I wonder. If you scored your average journalist for accuracy, numeracy, grammar & spelling against the bot, which one would get the higher marks?

I suspect the bot would score more highly on original thought too. In the Graun, once you read the byline you know in advance what you are about to read. I wonder if one of the imitated journos was Marina Hyde

I was reading a Tv review on the groan A Very British Cult review by lucy mangled. Three quarters of the way through she inserts a character called Waugh – no introduction as to who this character is and what his role is in the organisation the show is sposed to be about. You need to use google to understand that Waugh is the leader of this cult. I’m sure Chat gpt could make a better fist of the review.
@diogenes – whatever humour Marina Hyde once exhibited is long gone in a blizzard of tories and orange man bad.
I maintain that the groan is a hate publication -it certainly hates the white working class/brexit voters. It’s a pity that despite it’s declining circulation it appears to be the policy maker for the conservative party.

According to a book wot I read – Flat Earth News – written by an ex-journo turned journalism professor – about 70% of the “news” in the papers is taken directly from press releases, which are specifically written with separate tabloid / mid-market / broadsheet versions for ease of cut-n-paste, as Peter says above.

He also claimed that hacks who used to write 2-3 stories a week now knock out 5 a day, with limited scope for understanding what they are writing, let alone fact checking. That was before you could write an article which just lists a bunch of tweets from any old nutter as “raging controversy online”.

The capabilities of ChatGPT, Bard etc are being overblown by idiot politicians, but I’m sure knocking out articles based on farming twitter is easily achievable.

Deborah Ross (hardly a ‘journalist’, I know) in today’s Times* has her annual why-oh-why column on the gender pay gap. Not much of a stretch to think ChatGPT could do a far better job.

* behind paywall

Being a retired local politician, the best way to get *anything* in the local rag is to do the “journalist”‘s job for them and write their copy. Anything they can just cut’n’paste into the markup wotsit.

I have friends who are still lawyering, who tell me that the new young associates are all hot and heavy on having most brief-writing done for them by some version of AI.

But they’ve discovered that the results are often-enough-to-be-worrying simply made up. Legal citations to cases that don’t exist, or that actually say the opposite of the point being made. If they use AI, they end up having to do so much detail-checking that it’s a wash in terms of billed hours.

But it’s new and cool and so they’re still pushing it, plus now they can justify even more billed hours because every opposing brief has to get that exact same detailed “is-it-fake?” investigation.

surely you mean the improvement in spelling and grammar? Pretty much all newspapers are pushing the same dross!

They actually don’t need much human input. All it really needs is to change the names in and dates of previous articles.