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Final week, BuzzFeed nuked its complete newsroom, shedding an already considerably decreased workforce that had by no means been fairly the identical because the firm pressured out droves of investigative and politics reporters final March. And whilst you actually couldn’t name this the primary main newsroom layoff in historical past, it did really feel distinctive for one specific purpose.
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In an email that firm CEO Jonah Peretti despatched to his soon-to-be-jobless employees, he talked about that BuzzFeed would now concentrate on “rising velocity and effectiveness” whereas additionally pivoting to “convey AI enhancements to each facet of our gross sales course of.” No matter Peretti thinks meaning, it positive sounds like the corporate has determined that automated content material era is cheaper and extra worthwhile than hiring precise journalists to report the information.
Should you work within the information enterprise, that ought to clearly fear you—rather a lot—as a result of BuzzFeed isn’t the one one which appears to be following this highway map.
Insider, which lately introduced that it could be piloting a trial AI program for content material era, revealed—on the identical day that BuzzFeed Information died—that it could be shedding 10 p.c of its employees. This adopted on the heels of comparable information from tech outlet CNET, which—after secretly launching an AI content material generator final yr—laid off 10 p.c of its employees in March. CNET was infamously caught utilizing its AI program to pen droves of error-ridden explainers on the behest of its proprietor, media agency Purple Ventures. On the time of the layoffs, CNET claimed—unconvincingly—that the cuts had nothing to do with its AI use. CNET’s editor-in-chief grew to become its “senior vp of AI content material technique.”
The media trade is clearly present process some modifications—and plenty of of these modifications are tied to the emergent discipline of “generative AI.” Stated discipline—which leapt onto the worldwide stage final November with the launch of ChatGPT—makes use of new data-intensive applied sciences to generate human-like textual content and visuals, and its purposes and merchandise are swiftly reshaping the very construction of our digital economic system.
The information trade is clearly scrambling to benefit from that restructuring one of the best that it will possibly. Through the earnings calls of a number of main media corporations late final yr, executives expressed a want to make use of AI to function newsrooms in leaner, extra versatile methods. In calls with Buzzfeed Inc., in addition to with newspaper giants Gannett and Dotdash Meredith, and with The Enviornment Group (which owns Sports activities Illustrated, Males’s Journal, and a lot of different manufacturers), prime company officers had been fast to quote evolving enterprise methods. The CFO of Gannett, Doug Horne, advised traders that he thought AI might be used to “create efficiencies” that might in the end assist the corporate to save lots of “at the least $220 million” a yr. Buzzfeed, in the meantime, advised traders that AI could be transitioning “from an R&D stage to [become] a part of” the corporate’s “core enterprise.” The Enviornment Group’s CEO Ross Levinsohn defined that AI instruments had already spawned “productiveness enhancements.”
Whereas executives appear to have steered away from explicitly mentioning layoffs, the tenor of the dialog within the trade just isn’t so arduous to understand.
“On the coronary heart of the road of questions we’ve heard throughout quite a few calls is how automation can exchange folks, and what that in the end means for income… and money stream,” Daniel Kurnos, a media analyst with the funding banking agency The Benchmark Firm, beforehand advised Digiday. “We’ve heard a number of executives talk about cautious testing phases, however I believe everyone seems to be ready to see how the tech evolves earlier than totally committing by hook or by crook.”
In brief: in the event you work within the information media, it wouldn’t be loopy so that you can really feel such as you’ve simply been added to a brand new endangered species record. Automation of a kind we’ve by no means witnessed earlier than is now coming for complete new sectors of the worldwide economic system, and in the event you worth your job, it might be that “generative AI” finally ends up inflicting you much more issues than it solves.
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It’s not as if there haven’t been indicators that issues had been trending on this course.
Because it began, generative AI’s greatest proponents have pitched it as a cost saver—a way for companies to cut down on “labor intensive” processes, as well as reduce spending, optimize worker “efficiency” and “maximize ROI.” Prognosticators haven’t been shy about the fact that a lot of this corporate-speak is really just code for giving workers the boot. A recent report from the vampire squid itself, Goldman Sachs, notes that AI automation could “impact” as much as 25 percent of the labor force in both the U.S. and Europe in the years to come. Other projections, like one from consulting giant McKinsey, estimate a total displacement of roughly 15 percent of the global workforce, or some 400 million people.
You might find these predictions horrifying but, to the C-Suite, it’s clearly a positive turn of events: Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, recently told the Financial Times that he thought it was “a good thing” that AI will replace workers because such disruption will help bolster the unemployment rate in the U.S.—thus keeping things nice and flexible for corporations. Of course, the other reason that people like Krishna are excited about AI is that it promises to make them even richer than they already are. A recent report from Grand View Research suggests that while AI will disrupt certain sectors of workers, it’s also projected to bring in billions in new corporate revenue over the next decade. With all that in mind, it’s hard not to feel that AI tools are—from a corporate perspective, at least—largely just a way to hike profits by automating labor.
Sam Altman, CEO of the startup OpenAI which spawned the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has spent years writing about AI’s hugely disruptive potential on his personal blog, and so seems to have been quite ready to respond to critics when murmurs about “job loss” and “displacement” started cropping up online not long after his product’s launch. In December, Altman preempted complaints from the rank and file about AI’s job-killing potential, tweeting out what appeared like a pleasant missive in regards to the world to come back:
“good abilities for the longer term: adaptability and resilience. i believe these are learnable! arduous to reply the query of ‘what jobs can be protected’, however people at all times discover new issues to do, and the longer term will possible be wonderful. embracing change can be vital.”
Tech moguls like to say stuff like this, and you may completely see why: of their eyes, the longer term belongs to them. I’m positive issues will be completely wonderful for Sam—who’s so wealthy that he by no means has to work once more and might afford to waste tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} on doubtful investments—like life-extension startups. Monetary opulence of that kind tends to make a man optimistic in regards to the future.
For the remainder of us, although, the reality is that this: generative AI is coming in your job. Perhaps it’s not coming tomorrow, possibly it’s not coming subsequent yr, however relaxation assured, it’s coming.
Kicking Editorial to the Curb
The outlook is very precarious for journalists, whose trade is threatened by an ever accelerating economic crisis.
The complicated financial ecosystem in which the news business finds itself these days means that there’s no guarantee that traditional forms of reporting will be protected amidst broader technological disruptions. The alliance between private equity and journalism, for instance, has never been a happy one—and it could get a whole lot less happy soon. For lack of a viable alternative financial model, newsrooms have latched onto this money-grubbing industry, which is populated by firms that see journalists less as achievers of a public good than as a quick route to profits. A 2022 study from NYU showed that private equity’s management of local newspapers had resulted in an “unambiguously negative” impact on the communities they were supposed to serve. News coverage devolved from more local-specific coverage to national news that was easier to syndicate. The report states that this coverage shift resulted in declines in “voter knowledge of local policy issues and participation in the political process” and generally contributed to a less educated (and less involved) electorate.
Now that new automation tools appear to offer a quicker way for firms to get the same product without paying actual human journalists, it seems almost inevitable that—when it comes to content quality—they’ll continue a veritable race to the bottom in an effort to chase bigger and bigger profits.
Journalists’ work, meanwhile, threatens to be transmogrified into little more than the stultifying task of editing an algorithm’s output. That certainly seems to be what’s in store for whoever answers this job posting from the Gannett-owned USA Today Network, which says it is currently in the market for “forward-thinking journalists passionate about using new technology to fuel quality journalism in service to local news.” Among these lucky new employees’ duties will be the responsibility of “obtaining, cleaning and automating data in preparation for publication,” presumably from some ChatGPT-type generator.
The Robots Are Coming
It’s not just journalists and media professionals that are under threat here. A slew of assessments have shown that many different industries could soon be subjected to massive disruptions as the result of automation. This is where the threat of AI get decidedly more existential—and where the conversation gets a whole lot more theoretical.
There’s been a decades-long debate about whether robots will ultimately steal most of our jobs. Some analysts say this won’t happen, others say it will, and, to a certain degree, both seem to be right—depending on where you’re sitting. Automation has undeniably been hollowing out some lower- and middle-class industries for decades—and this trend is only projected to accelerate in the years to come. While predictions about AI’s future displacement of labor are hotly disputed, what isn’t so disputed is that we’re headed for more automation, not less. Some have predicted that AI will wipe out white-collar industries and leave the blue-collar economy intact, but I wouldn’t be so sure of that. It definitely looks like the folks at Boston Dynamics are working their butts off to invent the first generation of automated warehouse worker.
If and when AI “massively disrupts” both white- and blue-collar industries, that sorta begs the question: uh, what are people supposed to do with their time? How do you participate in an economy that doesn’t have any need for you? Where is the average worker supposed to get their money?
This is where Sam’s “adaptability” and “resilience” concept comes in, but this is basically just shorthand for: “fuck if I know what you’re going to do! good luck!”
For years, the tech industry has pitched a theoretical solution to the automation-labor problem. The answer to AI’s impending job wipeout, many Silicon Vally bros tell us, is simple: once robots make up most of the labor market, the government should start sending everybody a monthly check in the mail. This is what is known as “universal basic income,” or UBI. Tech libertarians are huge fans of this idea (shoutout to presidential loser Andrew Yang), which is very strange because it’s basically the modern day equivalent of welfare—a concept that, historically, libertarians have also been known to hate. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, the world’s most starry-eyed lefties imagine a future in which, after the robots take over, our lives are born aloft by “fully automated luxury communism”—a daffy utopianism that sees all of us living the life of leisure while automation takes care of every human need.
No offense to fans of either of these ideas, but they are both quite stupid—for a number of reasons.
For one thing, enacting such a redistributive program would necessarily involve the federal government. Let’s set aside the fact that Congress is currently so polarized that it can’t even agree on what happened the last time we all voted. More importantly, there is no political will to make something like this happen. The GOP has long pushed for a drastic reduction of social welfare benefits, frequently lobbying to cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. More than a few Democrats are on the same page. The idea that, in this day and age, Congress would ever pass legislation allowing large swaths of the population to sit around and do nothing all day, all with the help of government subsidies, is utterly fanciful. It’s like predicting that Bill Gates might soon declare himself a socialist. Sure, it could technically happen, but it won’t!
On another level, it’s hard to imagine how a society in which most people don’t have jobs would actually function. Psychologically, how would Americans—whose identities and lives so often center around work—deal with the fact that they are no longer considered important to the functioning of the economy? How would a middle-class lifestyle be sustained on what is sure to be a less than optimal government handout? In short: would being unemployed forever actually make you happy? It’s easy to dream of a world in which your life is an endless vacation, but social analyses of communities where the population is jobless show decidedly darker results. Remember that old saying about idle hands? There’s got to be a reason that billionaires and mega-millionaires like Sam Altman still insist on working—even when they don’t have to.
To cut to the chase, Silicon Valley’s “plan” to have the government pay everybody money so that robots can take there jobs is not an actual plan. Instead, it is a PR dodge, a marketing stunt—tactically deployed bullshit—meant to keep the public from freaking out for just long enough that the companies pushing AI can swoop in and make their products the bedrock of the new economic superstructure. After that, it doesn’t really matter what happens—at least, not to them.
Labor Organizing as a Stop Gap
So things seem pretty bad out there. But there’s a much needed caveat to the foregoing rant that it seems necessary to include at this point: it’s certainly possible that I could be engaging in a certain amount of pessimistic alarmism. If I’m just being honest, I have been known to do that. In truth, the future is unwritten and literally anything could happen. It could be that AI is just a flash in the pan. It could be that the market deployment of these tools never takes off. It could be that the economy crashes next week and AI never gets back on track. Or, maybe newsrooms will forego worker displacement, instead fusing human and machine collaboration to make the most awesomest AI journalism ever!
Seriously, who knows what’s going to happen?
But even if any or all of that ends up being true, it still seems like a smart move for people to work together to enact some protections against the disruptions that this new technology will undoubtedly bring. In truth, there are really only two things that meaningfully fit that bill: labor organizing and government regulations. If the rest of us are smart, we’ll try to take advantage of these participatory outlets the best that we can. Indeed, given the media industry’s recent upsurge in labor organizing, it seems there’s a real opportunity for some sort of collective action that is offensive rather than defensive. That is, journalists don’t have to wait around until their newsrooms are actively being gutted to do something about this situation. A push for industry standards or additional regulations that protects workers from undue displacement is possible, if people act together. Similarly, broader regulatory frameworks of the type being rolled out in Italy and other European countries should also be considered here. It is in those frameworks that protections for labor can be effectively carved out.
On an entirely different level, there needs to be a broader civic conversation about this technology before it is so thoughtlessly foisted upon society. AI should be interrogated, not simply accepted as the next evolution in our economic journey. Are these tools really going to make people’s lives better? Or are they going to make a small amount of companies an immense amount of money while the rest of us struggle to catch up?
Want to know more about AI, chatbots, and the future of machine learning? Check out our full coverage of artificial intelligence, or browse our guides to The Best Free AI Art Generators and Everything We Know About OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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