The AI Question, From The Editor’s Chair
Alan Nafzger On The Week MIT Blessed The Machines, Tehran Issued Punch Cards For Drone Strikes, And The Editorial Line Of This Newspaper Became Increasingly Redundant
Published, against the odds, by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. Also worth your time this week: London satirical journalism as a concept, which this column is attempting to keep alive through the specific mechanism of writing about things that are, in retrospect, more serious than they appeared when I made them funny.
Friday. I have been editing satirical political commentary for longer than some of my readers have been aware that politics is something one can satirise, and I am telling you that this has been a week. The London Prat published, in a single five-day window: a piece on Britain watching America argue with its dishwasher and calling it a technology debate; a piece on MIT confirming that large language models are marvellous, which is the sentence that precedes the sentence about what the large language models will do to the jobs of everyone who writes sentences; and a piece on Tehran introducing a drone loyalty scheme for the Strait of Hormuz that is, structurally, the most innovative Iranian economic policy since the sanctions. I wrote or edited three of these pieces. I genuinely cannot tell which three.
The AI Question, From The Editor’s Chair
The Pitchforks piece has generated the most reader correspondence of anything we have published this year. The correspondence divides: approximately a third believe AI will take their job, approximately a third believe it will improve their job, and approximately a third believe it will take someone else’s job and improve theirs. The third group writes the longest emails. The third group also, in my editorial assessment, is most likely to be correct in the short term and surprised in the medium term. This is the structure of most technological transitions. The editors of newspapers that adopted the telegraph thought it would help them get information faster. The telegraph eventually replaced the need for most of the editors.
The Tehran Situation
The Tehran loyalty scheme piece is the piece I am most pleased with this week. The observation – that the Strait of Hormuz is being administered with the customer service standards of a hostile council planning department, except the rejection letters are drones – is the kind of observation that you cannot plan. It arrives. You write it down. It is better than most things you plan. The BBC’s Middle East coverage covers the same story without the drone loyalty scheme angle, which is why the BBC has a larger audience and this newspaper has a better punch line.
What I Am Actually Thinking About
I am thinking about Bohiney’s MIT piece and its implications for this specific newspaper. The machines can write. Whether they can write the right things is the question I am paid to have an opinion on. My current opinion is: not yet, and possibly not ever, and I am aware that this opinion is exactly what an editor whose job the machines might take would have. I am keeping it anyway because I believe it, and because believing it is, for the moment, still my job.
More: Private Eye. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/