AI Created
Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – More Sources = Less News
Here’s a question for you: when an interesting news headline comes your way, do you read the entire article? Thirty years ago, your answer would have been: “most often, yes.” Today, it’s probably going to be: “hardly ever.” Why the difference?
The answer is in my headline above: we are inundated by information and “news.” This has two inter-related consequences. First, there’s so much “happening,” that to follow it all we have to ingest lots of news, information, data, etc. Second, there’s the phenomenon called FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. No matter how much time and energy we spend consuming the news as readers/listeners/viewers, there’s a real chance we’ve missed something important that another news vendor is offering.
Several online newspapers (forgive the anachronistic word “paper” here) have taken to offering “AI synopses” of important news articles so that the reader doesn’t have to spend “too much” time on each. Other news purveyors note the article’s word count: an indirect “warning” of its length. Some even note how many minutes it will take to read it!
Not that the “problem” of article length is something new. Go online and seek out your favorite newspaper’s archival material – and look at the news from the 20th century (pre-internet). Back then, news items were invariably much longer, most without any visual accompaniment. Indeed, even further back (the 19th century) many literary authors doubled as journalists to make extra money, getting paid by the word (except for when afar they had to telegraph the story to the editorial desk – that cost a pretty penny for each word!). In short (pun intended), the average news word count has been steadily dropping for several centuries.
However, at least back then the reader didn’t have multiple news sites – and even if the largest cities had several newspapers, few had the money to buy them all on a daily basis. Whatever was in your hand, you’d spend lots of time going through it all. Today, with most online news venues offering free news we skim the headlines because they’re not something we’re normally paying for. And as I said, there are so many other news sources out there to get to – not to mention the “need” to leave time for social media engagement.
Some academic analysts consider all this to be a sort of “dumbing down” of the news audience. Not really. Rather, it’s the “superficialization” of news consumption i.e., more news quantity at the cost of quality is not necessarily a function of a lower “news IQ” but rather our conscious choice to be broader instead of deeper. This is what Isaiah Berlin called (in the academic field) the fox and the hedgehog: the former covers lots of ground but somewhat sketchily; the latter digs deep, but with a narrow field of vision.
As we’re talking here about a very long-term trend, what does the future hold in store? In a word: AI. Even if news suppliers continue offering “long-form” items, more of us (especially the younger generation) are going to ask for short summaries. And for the rare news item that we find particularly interesting and/or important, we’ll ask AI for a bit more “depth.” The end result: short, newspaper articles of the usual mid-range length will basically constitute raw material for AI synopses.
To be sure, AI is not the cause of this but rather a tool reflecting the declining attention span of Gen-Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) – the first to grow up in the age of social media with its “snippet culture.” As someone who has been teaching college students for close to 50 years, I clearly see the decline in their ability to read “regular length” research articles; indeed, even a serious video segment running more than two minutes causes them to shuffle in their seats. Thus, AI hasn’t led to their lower attention span. It does reflect the new generation’s greater need (and lower ability?) to deal with material demanding serious attention – perhaps also accelerating that trend.
Let me paraphrase Shakespeare: with AI we are “hoist with our own petard.” It helps us deal with the world’s information flood, but also appreciably adds to that flood because today it’s so much easier for journalists through AI to produce (write, film etc.) the news!
Which brings us to what is perhaps the primary problem with today’s news: AI hallucinations (fabrications, distortions, etc.). AI does such a good job of delivering the news in whatever format, that it’s increasingly harder to distinguish truth from fiction – not just textually but visually as well. Which means that there will be even more news in the future compared to today: much real, but some fake. At that point, “more will really be less.”
This is not a minor headache. Rather, it strikes at the very heart of democracy and public policymaking, for if the electorate can’t tell true from false, and is too overwhelmed by all the “news” to try and separate the wheat from the chaff among the myriad items, our modern system of government will be (already is?) in deep trouble. What can be done? How can we escape the trap of “More is Less”? Next week I’ll offer several possible “solutions.”
