The age of widely accessible artificial intelligence has scarcely begun and ‘AI’ has already caught some out but cheered others.
Apparently it produces text full of challenging information, but cannot reel out opinions. Or not opinions that are nearly as convincing as its strings of facts. Views come as either/ors, ‘on the one hand while on the other’. Who’s going to buy that kind of wish-wash?
See how quickly commercial value comes up? You will have noticed that one of the crafts AI is predicted to nobble, perhaps gobble, is journalism. Now hear me whistle past the graveyard before pirouetting around the subject area, wearing best ponderous face, stroking chin.
Down in the undergrowth, where tweeters live and many fester, people who go public with their ideas on all sorts of subjects reap horrid responses. Particularly female people, from those aptly-dubbed trolls, who go splat several times a day under fake names.
Those of us who stay well away only hear the hurt, and doubtless not all of the pain. No point saying why tweet or, if you must, ignore the trolls. Easier to say if you come from a generation before social media. A share of public figures including the women who take the ugliest abuse believe that their roles, sometimes their living, demand ‘a social media presence’.
Read more:
Patricia MacBride: Is AI really fake news?
Fionnuala O Connor: Making the argument for eating out
Fionnuala O Connor: You can pretend allegiance, but it cannot be forced
Opinions set off a chain reaction. It only faintly resembles what opinion voiced in older media elicits. A nice English visitor asked recently, "Do people on your street stop you to ask what you meant by saying such and such on the air?" The easiest (and also true) answer was, "I’ve given up the broadcasting now, so nobody will ask that again". Having asked purely for conversation sake, this satisfied him.
The lengthier truth would have been that hardly anyone has ever queried (to me) anything they’ve heard or thought they’ve heard. Perhaps mainly out of courtesy, a mercy, appreciated.
Apart from some politicos, this is a mannerly society. It is also very small. Segregated, separate in so many ways, yes. But in a meeting of strangers a maximum four questions of each other is likely to turn up a shared friend if not a cousin near or distant who lives around the corner from one or other. Except for those who love arguments, this is encouragement to hold back. Amateur argufyers who imagine you might give their opinions serious consideration, on the footpath with your shopping over your arm, need cutting off early.
If no partner nearby is at risk of mortal embarrassment I have been known to crack and say, walking swiftly on, "I only do it for money".
There are also heart-warmers. The woman perhaps in her 40s who said she and her younger sister wanted to be me when they grew up; the women especially in these later years who "just wanted to say" they liked seeing an older female on TV with white hair, no suggestion of Botox, unabashed by disproportionately male desk-sharers; the rarely-met cousin-in-law who says he reads me every week.
And comments in print? Letter-writers to The Irish News are a small, select band. The core read as though their main interest is in scoring off each other, with the occasional recreational swipe at a columnist. Sometimes jeering at ‘smart alecks’, which seems mistaken. Smart aleckry and column-writing are surely the same thing.
Esteemed and less esteemed colleagues pursue serious interests and also attempt weekly to profess smarts superior at least to others in the inky trade, and their readers. As in "recent reports, mystifyingly, managed to miss the most significant point about X or Y. You won’t have spotted this. Let me enlighten you". Although the term ‘smart aleck’ probably annoys me because it’s masculine. I have to face it. I’m a female of the same breed.
But "enlightening" is a stretch. "A rest from the news" will do rightly. "Mildly entertaining" would make me purr.
