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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
40 July 2022
capable of coming up with a genuine insight. Our
Martian advocate above can come up with some
pseudo-positions that sound convincingly like
Fine Gael or Sinn Féin. It is in fact built well enough
to blindly find Fine Gael looking at economic
goals framed in the entrepreneurial jargon of
innovation and ambition, while Sinn Féin are
concentrating on national self-suciency and
economic security.
In the end, our magic pixie is a mimic, no more
capable of fresh insight than those whose
opinions it logs in its language banks; and just
like the many well-heeled columnists it might
seek to replace, eventually it will find itself stuck
in a repetitive rut.
Pixies may generate words and sentences,
maybe even be the bones of a good article with
(surprisingly light) editing, but it’s never going to
generate insight. It’s a conventional-wisdom
engine, parroting the mediocrity of the crowd
consensus.
There is no one definitive answer to this
question. However, the news from the current
media landscape is quite simple. There is a lot of
power that can move around. There is also a
threat of disruption to editorial standards with the
rise of social media and online news outlets, as
people are getting their news from a variety of
sources, which may not always include traditional
newspapers and broadcasters. And if there are
no traditional media outlets, then this could have
a knock-on eect on the quality of journalism in
Ireland.
By the way, the paragraph immediately before
this one was also written by the magic pixies.
Was it very dierent?
Some magic pixies are already in use in
journalism, usually on the more repetitive tasks,
turning game statistics into a readable sports
report, for example, or converting a quarterly
release from a smaller quoted company into an
article for analysts to read.
But what’s worth noting about the text above,
based solely on the prompt “Should [party]
colonise Mars”, is how mundane the output is.
Anyone paying attention to Twitter for the last
month or so will have seen the, at times surreal,
images generated from AI prompts, ranging from
residents of a vaguely uncanny valley to eldritch
Lovecraftian horrors. In contrast, the text-
generating magic pixies manage to be
reassuringly bland in their opinions.
So for those who have been predicting that
computers will eventually replace journalists, the
question is not how long it will take for the magic
pixies to get better. The question is why the magic
pixies already look like a convincing – if
sometimes eccentric – opinion piece a lot of the
time.
There’s no doubt our magic-pixie intelligence
can generate an impressively wordsome text, the
‘content’ beloved of Silicon Valley founders and
influencers.
For all that, the magic pixies don’t seem
C
onsider the following opinion piece,
which may have appeared recently in
a newspaper near you:
“Should Ireland take a leaf out
of Elon Musk’s playbook, and
establish a colony on Mars?
The Fine Gael party has not released an
official statement on their position
regarding the establishment of a colony
on Mars. However, it is safe to assume
that they would be in favour of such a
venture, as the party is typically
supportive of ambitious and innovative
ideas. A colony on Mars would represent
a significant step forward for humanity,
and Fine Gael is likely to believe that
Ireland should be at the forefront of this
eort.
Not surprisingly, the Sinn Fein position
is that Ireland should establish a colony
on Mars in order to secure the country’s
future. The party believes that this is
necessary because of the challenges that
climate change is expected to pose to
Ireland’s food security and economy.
establishing a colony on Mars would
allow Ireland to secure its own food
supply and to establish a presence in a
new market.
Gavin Duy says he does not need to
be convinced of the benefits of colonising
Mars. But he agrees that the stakes are
high, and that people should be
questioning whether it would be a good
idea.
‘And if the party believes in Ireland
then Fianna Fáil should also advocate
Ireland setting up a Martian colony’, he
added”.
The remarkable thing about this article is that
it was generated by so-called ‘Artificial
Intelligence’, in reality a text-generating API.
API stands for “application programme
interface”, and not “artificial pixie intelligence”,
which might be more accurate than ‘AI’ as a term
of art. There’s no intelligence there, any more
than there are magic pixies. Just computers
number-crunching large amounts of data in
language banks. The pixie isn’t creating, it’s
spitting out an average of what already exists.
There’s no doubt our magic-pixie intelligence
can generate a wordsome text, the ‘content’
beloved of Silicon Valley. For all that, the magic
pixies can’t come up with a genuine insight.
Api Now?
Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man
By Gerard Cunningham
MEDIA
