By Andrew R. Duckworth
And now that I have your attention, I wish to discuss something that is not a new issue by any stretch of the imagination. However, in the age of artificial intelligence, it can become an even greater problem if one isn’t too careful. We live in a world where news is often stretched in the headlines. What I mean by this is that often the headlines we click on in our daily news make the actual story much more dramatic than it actually is. “The World Ends Next Week: Here’s How.” When you see a headline like that, particularly if you’re into things like eschatology, you’re nearly forced into clicking… and then, when you start reading, you realize that the author is not talking about an end of all existence, but rather their perceived end of how we currently conduct daily life, and its based on little more than something that may or may not happen… and that “something” is really just concerned with one small portion of the world. So, your anxiety has gone up, your curiosity has shot through the roof, only to open a story that tells you little more than something you might have already known by someone who might not know at all what they’re talking about. Clickbait.
When I was growing up in the 90s and early 00s, the internet was definitely a thing, but it wasn’t nearly as accessible. In some ways that was bad, in others—extremely good. Instead, you got the majority of the news you consume from actual journalists who made it their life goal to thoroughly investigate something. The internet made things less complicated AND more complicated—less complicated in that you now have a variety of sources you can choose from, you can access recent news updates whenever and wherever you want, yet more complicated in that many journalists are “journalists” and a million of them are saying completely different things over the same subject. In order to make a voice stand out, or a story stand out, you’ve got to get creative. Well, in some ways, that creativity got a bit too creative to the point that article titles barely match the articles they represent.
First, let me give some rationale on that title, which, if you’re still with me, you realize is not at all talking about literal “beasts” or “controlling the weather.” BUT, if you’re to take it in a figurative way, the beasts might be the “journalists” I previously mentioned, and the “control the weather” bit might be metaphorical—weather meaning journalistic atmosphere. Or, it can mean figuratively anything I want it to mean. See how that works? It is easy to provide a rationale for any title I come up with. All I have to do is express that YOU took it the wrong way.
So, how does AI figure into any of this? Many articles nowadays are AI generated. Some call that genius, I call it lazy as hell. No longer does anyone have to do any actual work at all. I often criticize “artists” who claim they have created great artistic masterpieces via AI when they’ve done nothing of the sort. They have issued a prompt. The AI then creates an image or a video based on it. It isn’t work. It’s trash and should be treated as such. That having been said, with the dawn of AI generated articles, will the trend of clickbait improve or get drastically worse? That, I suppose, will also depend on the prompter (I do not consider these “journalists” to be journalists or writers. They are prompters… and that’s it).
With the dawn of social media, this became a worldwide problem with worldwide implications. Nowadays, it is impossible to fully trust (if there ever was a time) the media we consume. Clickbait only makes up a portion of the problem, but clickbait hasn’t gone away. It is still alive and well, and the authors of such articles benefit off of our curiosity and drive to discover new information.
So, how do we combat such things? That’s an excellent question and one that is not easily answered. It is actually easier to explain how the initial problem takes shape than explain how one individual combats the problem. One thing does come to mind and that’s this: verify everything. Then, make sure that the sources are not AI. After a while, you will discover who the authors are who are bad actors and who the authors are that you CAN trust, at least to relay reliable information.
