Major media outlets are now replacing their journalists with AI. We can all agree that most journalists are expendable, but what happens when AI starts taking real jobs? We ll discuss. Also, The Daily Wire unveils the trailer for our first feature-length comedy and it s already getting a huge reaction. Plus, Derek Chauvin was stabbed and almost killed in prison, and in our daily cancellation, the leftist mob comes after a random child for wearing a costume to a football game. We ll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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00:01:51.720About a year ago, Sports Illustrated uploaded a video to their various social media channels.
00:01:56.560It shows Steph Curry, the Golden State Warriors point guard and NBA champion, making five full court shots in a row, just about 30 seconds.
00:02:05.200Now in case you're not familiar with basketball, this is an athletic feat that is about as close to statistically impossible as you can get.
00:02:13.760But Sports Illustrated played it straight.
00:02:16.440The outlet wrote on their Twitter account, quote,
00:02:18.900Now, watching it, there's no obvious way to tell that it's fake, even if you watch it a few times.
00:02:28.460You see him shoot the basketball, the camera follows the ball, goes in the hoop, looks basically legitimate.
00:02:34.380But of course, none of it was legitimate.
00:02:37.420And Sports Illustrated knew that because the creator of this clip, who they tagged in one of the posts, is known for manipulating videos like this one.
00:02:46.180So the whole thing was basically just a bid for some attention on social media.
00:02:52.320Now, nobody really followed up on this whole episode.
00:02:55.420There was no ensuing conversation about ethics in sports journalism.
00:02:59.680When Sports Illustrated ultimately admitted that it was a sham, nobody cared.
00:03:03.300And on one level, that's not especially surprising, since Sports Illustrated is a shadow of what it once was.
00:03:09.020Other than the annual swimsuit edition, which presumably now features trans and plus-size models and all the rest of it,
00:03:15.820there's no longer anything to distinguish the magazine from any number of other low-quality sports blogs you can find all over the Internet.
00:03:23.160And that's been true for quite some time.
00:03:24.480But what's interesting about this episode is what happened afterwards.
00:03:29.760Sports Illustrated didn't stop lying to its audience after this.
00:03:33.140They didn't decide to renew their commitment to serious sports journalism to the extent that serious sports journalism isn't an oxymoron.
00:03:41.700Instead, Sports Illustrated chose to start faking a lot more than just videos.
00:03:46.060A website called Futurism just published an investigative report into the scam that Sports Illustrated has been running.
00:03:55.620And apparently, the company has been using artificial intelligence to draft not just little videos like this, but entire articles.
00:04:05.380And more than that, they've been using AI to create fake authors as well, complete with fake biographies.
00:04:12.160The outlet never disclosed any of this to its readers, obviously.
00:04:15.320So here, for example, is their biography of somebody named Drew Ortiz, who appears to be a white male with brown hair and blue eyes.
00:04:30.500Drew has spent much of his life outdoors and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature.
00:04:38.940Nowadays, there's rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn't out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents' farm.
00:04:47.560Now, obviously, most of the biographies that you read online are stilted and fake like this.
00:04:52.680But even by that low standard, Drew Ortiz's bio is a little suspect.
00:04:57.340What does it mean to keep you from falling to the perils of nature exactly?
00:05:05.360And once you find out that AI was responsible for it, the perils of nature line starts to seem more than a little bit creepy.
00:05:12.880But you're not supposed to dwell on Drew's biography.
00:05:15.160Instead, you're supposed to click on his articles because that's how Sports Illustrated makes money.
00:05:19.320And once you do that, once you click the AI-generated clickbait, here's what you'll find.
00:05:25.060One of Ortiz's articles, which was originally published last year, is entitled,
00:05:29.020Play Like a Pro with the Best Full-Sized Volleyballs.
00:05:32.300And the point of this article is to advertise a series of volleyballs so that Sports Illustrated can get a kickback when people click on the links and buy volleyballs,
00:05:39.960which is pretty standard in digital media, as you probably have noticed.
00:05:43.640First, the Drew Ortiz artificial intelligence, for its part, was tasked with writing a paragraph to introduce all of these affiliate links.
00:05:58.180Volleyball is one of the most popular sports in the world, and for good reason.
00:06:01.520It's fast-paced, has a high-skill ceiling, and is generally an exciting sport to both play and watch.
00:06:06.720Even people who don't watch sports can easily understand the intensity and skill required to play volleyball whenever they watch clips.
00:06:13.640There's a reason why it's been such a mainstay in modern sports to this day.
00:06:17.800Volleyball can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.
00:06:23.820Now, up until that last line, you can see why somebody might be fooled into thinking that Drew Ortiz is a real person.
00:06:30.480He comes across as maybe an earnest guy, just trying to explain why he loves volleyball in as many words as possible.
00:06:37.020But towards the end, Drew enters the uncanny valley by saying that volleyball can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice.
00:06:47.400Well, that's kind of an understatement, Drew.
00:06:49.100It's a bit like saying water polo is hard to get into without water, or cooking is hard to do without food.
00:06:55.840It's the kind of thing that no human being would ever actually say.
00:06:58.560So, needless to say, the AI known as Drew Ortiz wasn't exactly producing the most compelling copy.
00:07:04.820We can assume that very few people bought volleyballs on Drew's professional recommendation.
00:07:10.180And that could be why, sometime this summer, Sports Illustrated quietly replaced Ortiz with another AI.
00:07:17.060And this time, the name for the AI changed from Drew Ortiz to Sora Tanaka.
00:07:24.800According to her biography on Sports Illustrated website, quote,
00:07:28.200Sora has always been a fitness guru and loves to try different foods and drinks.
00:07:32.400She is fond of varying her workouts and believes that everyone should participate in some form of physical or mental activity at least three times per week.
00:07:43.880She believes everyone should participate in some sort of physical or mental activity at least three times per week.
00:07:50.040So, talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
00:07:52.980We can infer from this that AI doesn't exactly have a high opinion of humans if this is the bar it's setting for us.
00:08:01.000Just use your body or your mind three times a week is all.
00:08:06.280Let's just start there, AI is saying to the human race.
00:08:10.260And I'd like to say, I'd like to think anyway that robots are underestimating us here, but I don't think that they are most likely.
00:08:16.320At this point, it's important to mention that Sports Illustrated didn't just have AI-generated articles and fake biographies and fake writers.
00:08:24.240They also generated fake headshots for these writers.
00:08:27.400They generated images out of thin air for people who don't exist and who they were claiming were writing articles that were not written by any human at all.
00:08:35.800Both Tanaka and Ortiz had these AI-produced headshots, and we know that because the headshots were available for sale on an online marketplace that sells AI headshots because that's something that exists now apparently.
00:08:51.760And eventually, after they were confronted by futurism, Sports Illustrated took all these articles down and the headshots down, and they scrubbed it all from their website.
00:08:59.160Now, in a statement, the company blamed a contractor for all this.
00:09:03.400They denied that the articles were written by AI, although they didn't deny that the headshots were AI-generated.
00:09:09.500So I guess they're claiming that there were real people who wrote the articles, but they made up fake people to, say, wrote them.
00:09:17.700They also claim that editors carefully review all the content that's uploaded.
00:09:22.300And that's a claim that several other websites and media outlets have made in the past when similar things have surfaced about them.
00:09:29.700CNET, for example, insisted that while it was using AI to draft articles, editors were carefully fact-checking every detail prior to publication.
00:09:40.940A few months ago, CNET published an article claiming that a $10,000 deposit in a savings account earning a 3% APY would return $10,300 in profit after the first year, which you don't have to be a math whiz to know.
00:10:07.220Bankrate, one of CNET's sister sites, has had the same problem.
00:10:10.720They claim that their editors carefully review AI-generated articles, but these articles are full of mistakes as well, including mathematical mistakes, which is the one thing you would think AI would always get right, but apparently they don't.
00:10:27.420You know, it's easy to mock outlets like CNET and Bankrate, whatever that is, and Sports Illustrated, which nobody reads anymore.
00:10:34.800But it's not hard to see where this is all heading.
00:10:36.760We are rapidly and willfully moving towards a dystopian world where AI does everything, and most human effort and labor has become redundant.
00:10:48.920Everyone can see this coming, and they know that it's bad.
00:10:52.800But, of course, it seems like our leaders, none of them, have the fortitude to do anything about it.
00:10:57.640And AI replacing Sports Illustrated writers is the least of our concerns in this regard.
00:11:03.820What happens when AI starts replacing, oh, I don't know, truck drivers and rideshare drivers?
00:11:09.800These are jobs that a significant portion of the American middle class depend on in order to survive.
00:11:14.860What happens when Waymo and Cruise and Tesla manage to perfect their self-driving AIs?
00:11:24.440It'll likely be several more years until AI is capable of doing any of that.
00:11:28.720And it's still possible we'll eventually elect leaders in time who will do something to prevent the potential destruction of millions of jobs in this country all at once, which is where this is headed.
00:11:38.380In the meantime, it's important to look closely at the jobs that AI is capable of replacing right now and what that says about these jobs and our culture at large at the moment.
00:11:50.260You know, it's hard to deny that journalism, and sports journalism in particular, has become so vacuous and so pointless that it can easily be replaced by robots, and most readers don't even notice.
00:12:02.900It's generally not a good thing to replace human jobs with AI.
00:12:09.460But in the media, the point is that so many of the humans doing these jobs are already barely human as it is, so it feels more like a lateral move.
00:12:19.000And this isn't just happening at Sports Illustrated and CNET and Bankrate.
00:12:22.560It's happening at all the various tiers of garbage journalism, including gaming journalism.
00:12:27.180The website Kotaku now features a few AI-written articles.
00:12:30.700Microsoft Start, which is the homepage that Microsoft presents to users of its internet browser, recently featured an obituary with this headline.