It’s happening! God!

Do the verge next

The AI manager generated a report that indicated that human staff were the problem and should be removed. The AIB (Board) accepted the report. The HRAI agreed.

They all agreed to rebrand CNET as SKYNET too :-)

Then the smoking crater that Ars Technica became.

Yep them too

I read CNET about once a week and already had assumed they automated almost all of it.

Journalists are no longer needed for daily beats or even industry reporting. A computer can do it, and much better - both from the reader's perspective (less politics) and from the publisher's (more politics, adjustable on an easy-to-use knob). There will still be journalism, but it'll be journalism that readers will want to pay for. This tends to either be long-form, technical works like a book (or perhaps part of a book, assembled into a digest) or investigative journalism. Both require skill and craft, which most journalists do not have.

Haven’t read cnet in years

A lot of jobs depend on, or are outright based on, bullshit generation. As it turns out, ChatGPT is really really good at generating bullshit. So everyone whose job basically is bullshit generation is terrified at the prospect of being replaced, and rightly so - given how loyal modern companies are to their employees, there may be a lot of people getting fired once ChatGPT gets a few hundred/thousand/million more "generations" of improvements under its digital belt.

Do fox next. Maybe we can the get better stories accuracy than whatever their humans are pumping out

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TIL CNET still exists.

Meh. Sorry for the individuals that are losing their jobs, but this has happened again and again throughout history as new technologies become mainstream. Today's roles aren't special or uniquely safe compared to roles in the past that disappeared due to the invention of new technologies.

I feel for the individuals involved, but this has always been what technological progress looks like.

So when will share holders realize that AI is really good at replacing CEO and other executive decision makers. It's time we got rid of these overpaid random function generators. Teach AI economics, engineering AND a basic MBA and you have CEO in a box.

it's funny, but is it going to get them off their tractors?

Fox news is a leftist outlet. It's the lefts attempt at parody of the right.

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As if we didn't have too much bullshit already, feels like we're going to be drowning in it in a few years.

Do you have a good alternative to Ars ?

The news source that essentially plagiarized other news sources replaced its human plagiarizers with AI plagarizers…

While we’re at it we should factor distribution into economic analysis. Perhaps then economic forecasts would seem less insane to most people.

Insert Jackie Chan wtf.jpg here

This. Before the recent stories about CNET came to light I am not sure that I had hardly heard about them in maybe 10 years. After the controversy from CNET's then owner of CBS intervening in best of CES awards they lost a lot of credibility although I think that Ars Technica passed them by whereas quality of tech news writing >20 years ago. It was news to me that CNET had been resold to new owners that apparently paid a small fraction of what CBS paid. Not clear if CBS retained anything of meaningful value that they didn't resell, but precluding that it indicated that CBS did little to slow the slide of irrelevance of CNET.

There are some exceptions, but I think that indications that AIs are able to pass some MBA exam at Wharton I think that question may not be far fetched. Obviously not everyone that can pass an MBA is great management material, but once an AI can successfully demonstrate it can do that you'll see people start questioning it. In the not so distant future you may get some corporate boards question whether they really need to pay a high priced CEO at all. Maybe some companies will simply have a paid actor "act" as a public figurehead like some Chinese companies pay white foreigners to play as senior execs, but I don't think that is far fetched.

This. I hardly think you were the only one that stopped reading them. Their human writers were second tier for a long time. Ars Technica passed them by a good 20 years ago. After CES kicked them out of best of CES from the controversy about a decade back they lost what little credibility they still had left. They got resold from CBS for a fraction of what CBS paid for it. Needless to say their impact on tech journalism has waned dramatically and in my opinion already were one of those websites from the late 90s that technically still existed, but were no longer relevant.

This. Even the stuff that they didn't plagiarize was pretty low quality. The few people that they had that had any quality quit a decade or more ago. CNET imho has been a 90s zombie brand for years. i.e. not technically out of business, but a company that is a shadow of what it was in the late 90s.

More so the army of get rich quick tech bloggers are kicking out AI generated trash. I’m comfortable with my tech knowledge but fear for younger generations. 25 yo gamer daughter doesn’t understand ethernet from wifi from coax cable

While I think the latest shift is going to hit CNET more I think that they were circling the drain long before anybody heard of chatGPT. Whereas tech knowledge I think a bit of a difference for those that grew up in the 90s or earlier was that you needed a bit of basic tech knowledge on some level to do even basic tasks. Today things have been dumbed down considerably.

I watched Buzz Out Loud daily for years until they dropped basically all their podcasts. It was such a baffling move to me at the time. YouTube was growing so damn fast back then, and it would have been such an easy choice for them to start a family of channels that drove clicks back to their main site. Yet they not only failed to capitalize off a new platform, they basically shut down their podcasts right as viewership was exploding on the platform.

Then once they actually started taking their channel seriously, they produced some of the most bland, corporate content ever.

Good. I could still be a CEO and make my dad proud.

Why pay dozens of employees to do a job that one bot can do?

Sadly too true.

Thanks to short attention spans and humanity's astounding ability to adapt to new circumstances, CEOs are embracing the "random bullshit, go!" method of distracting and deflecting in order to dissipate any accumulating pushback against their decisions. They just need to ride it out. Generative text AI is a nice, cheap, controllable way to help with that. It's designed to sound good but not actually mean anything, and is easily disavowed if it acts up.

Look at how quickly everyone's gotten over the fact that Twitter has been turned into a megaphone for narcissistic billionaires and Nazis. We've all just sort of accepted it as the new normal. Sure, lots of people are still mad and thinking about it, but it's no longer enough people to effect any change.

> Sure, lots of people are still mad and thinking about it, but it's no longer enough people to effect any change.

Yep, as long as enough people are all wrapped up in wedge issues and identity politics and kept in a perpetual state of "we versus they," there won't be enough critical mass to fight the real fight: "the rich versus the rest."