News Versus Content Versus Ads

  

I’m reading Val McDermid’s books at the moment. I love her relaxed writing style that I know from experience is hard to create, let alone sustain. The one I’m reading at the moment - 1979 - is about journalism. It’s interesting because she seems to suggest that not all journalists in those days were very good writers and some cheated by getting editors, sub-editors, and even their assistants to write for them. No AI to help back then.
 
   Ten years later - in the sequel, 1989 - the newspaper industry has already been swamped by willing freelancers, replacing journalists wholesale because they’re not unionized, don’t need cigarettes or toilet breaks, and they work harder for less money.

    Perhaps Val intends to write 1999, 2009 and then 2019 and, if she does, I’m sure she’ll mention how journalism has lately been transformed into little more than rapacious clickbait, that reportage has sloughed away and all but died along with offline newspapers and magazines, and that artificially created ‘news’ content abounds.

    We live in a world where journalistic prowess has been reduced to the production of state-approved press releases and trivia sound bytes that are endlessly broken down and rewritten by robots into a thousand different versions, each more bland and meaningless than the previous.

Our world is eating itself, regurgitating information, even fiction, into endless gobbets of mechanical content that delivers what people allegedly want but is not meant to be anything more than throwaway. Garbage. That’s the news. It’s no wonder TikTok is so big. It’s better at delivering the news quickly and with less fuss.

Written news articles are not important anymore. The only thing that matters is that when you’re reading, you’re on the same page as an ad, a money sponge. As far as the Net is concerned, your only function is to spend cash. You are nothing more than a buyer, a pool of resources that needs fleecing.

You are pocket change to the news corporation’s swag bag.

The fact you want to read something is actually an encumbrance for news media. That’s the difference between 1979 - then - and now. In the old days we knew on some level that the ads paid for the newspaper and/or the magazine. Now we have no doubt. It’s in our faces. The ads and the content are all the same, part of the same package. The punter can’t see the journalism because he has to beat down the ads to find any kind of value. Like forest predators we can barely see the wood for the trees.

The wood is the view and we have to forage for the news, for any information, within a sea of robotized padding and endless ads that ensnare us like computerized ivy. The cash grab is the parasite that weaves and pollutes the content. They’re symbiotic creatures. One cannot live without the other, in plain view, no longer disguised or subtle.

As writers, how do we compete?

Well, perhaps we don’t need to.

Just know that in the future there will be far more information managers than there will be writers. This will be true right across the board, from journalism to scriptwriting, from book preparation to genre fiction. The robots will become so good at organizing information that humans (those who still have a job) will be reduced to the mindless proofing of manuscripts, copy, and content, just to make sure the words are not offensive, too dull, or nonsensical. Come to think of it, I think the machines can probably take care of that too.

My wife often points out how bizarre it is that the corporate world is trying so hard to replace human workers with machines that there can be no other consequence than a vast sea of idle people wondering where all the work went. Who is then going to pay for all the unemployed to live and breathe?

Some of us, I’m sure, will always love words. And we will continue to fill the world with stories, entertainment, and with written opinion.

One thing I’ve noticed is that robots are not very good at personality. But I guess that goes without saying as the robots are, by definition, lacking in humanity. It’s curious because it’s personality that makes writing so good and ultimately so salable. It’s personality that makes a piece of writing sing in a way that machines seem to completely misunderstand.

Maybe it won’t take long before machines become self-aware and write with a wry sense of humor, or a chip on the shoulder, or with some other character trait that lifts the text above just being words. It’s a subtle thing, actually hard to quantify. But when you’re human, you know it when you see it.

AI generated text is for most of us easy to spot but soon it may not be. And who’s to say that the machines won’t actually need to get better? As so often happens, the punters will probably just become less fussy. That’s what happened to modern music, right?

When I read, I want the tone of voice of the writer to come through because that’s the thing that hypnotizes me and keeps me transfixed. But if machines learn how to get us into that trance state using a different method, then the result will be the same.

Not sure what I’m trying to say here. Perhaps that there’s some element of humanity that cannot be taught to a machine but, you know what? I’m saddened by the idea this might not be true. At all. Perhaps not only will the machines learn quickly how to emulate us but soon they’ll be better than we are.

That’ll be an interesting time to write about.

But who will be doing the writing?

The machines or us?

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell’s Writing Academy