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Audiogram with Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 logo, title “Hell is Other People’s AI Hype” and subtitle “There’s a special corner of AI Hell reserved for polluting the information ecosystem - and the WaPo’s AI search feature is an archival nightmare.” Captions: EMILY M. BENDER: So this is a Bluesky post reading, "LOL. The Washington Post replaced its archive search tool with an AI that tries to summarize the archive ahead of delivering any actual stories with no option to rank them by date." So I went to the Washington Post and put in a search, 57,600 results related to COVID-19 and indeed no way to rank this by date. ALEX HANNA: This is infuriating for someone who does like a lot of archival research. So for instance, you know, one of the examples that I use often was that the New York Times, I think up to 1987 didn't use the word gay. They would use the word homosexual and then they made the editorial change. It's actually quite important that you need to know when the term was used, when there was a discursive move between one and the other. EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah. So newspapers, they sit on these rich, rich resources of their archives. Making those less accessible is a harm to the information ecosystem.

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Audiogram with Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 logo, title “Hell is Other People’s AI Hype” and subtitle “There’s a special corner of AI Hell reserved for polluting the information ecosystem - and the WaPo’s AI search feature is an archival nightmare.” Captions: EMILY M. BENDER: So this is a Bluesky post reading, "LOL. The Washington Post replaced its archive search tool with an AI that tries to summarize the archive ahead of delivering any actual stories with no option to rank them by date." So I went to the Washington Post and put in a search, 57,600 results related to COVID-19 and indeed no way to rank this by date. ALEX HANNA: This is infuriating for someone who does like a lot of archival research. So for instance, you know, one of the examples that I use often was that the New York Times, I think up to 1987 didn't use the word gay. They would use the word homosexual and then they made the editorial change. It's actually quite important that you need to know when the term was used, when there was a discursive move between one and the other. EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah. So newspapers, they sit on these rich, rich resources of their archives. Making those less accessible is a harm to the information ecosystem.

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Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (emilymbender@dair-community.social)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 00:35:02 JST Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)

In Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Episode 47, @alex and I attempt to clear the backlog of Fresh AI Hell to create a clean slate for 2025:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes/16353749-episode-47-hell-is-other-people-s-ai-hype
Thx to Christie Taylor for production!

In conversation about 3 months ago from dair-community.social permalink