Most of us by now have become more or less desensitized to a steady drip of AI slop: AI-generated influencers, musicians racking up millions of streams, LinkedIn posts—a sizable chunk of online content is now being churned out by bots, without any kind of federal regulation to keep it in check. Even the news is becoming automated: As Wired reported Wednesday, an AI-driven publication called RuntimeWire was the first to publish a major scoop about the recent hack into Hugging Face by rogue OpenAI models, beating actual tech publications to the punch by a significant margin. That obviously raises big questions around the future of journalism at a time when the industry is already struggling to contend with the rise of AI chatbots and their siphoning of traffic from traditional online search, which has long served as the backbone of digital publishing.
The theory behind RuntimeWire Much of the job of human reporters is pattern-recognition: spotting trends and connecting dots quicker than your competitors. That means that LLMs, with their superhuman ability to detect signals from oceans of noisy data, are at least theoretically well-positioned to spot story ideas that might elude human journalists. (An algorithm can scrutinize a companies’ tax records much more meticulously and quickly than a human can, for example.)
