I usually agree with him very much, but his late August piece is doubly wrong. And, I don't want to get into an argument with him, though he may have done so with my quote-stacking.
First is his attempt to defend Stanley Druckenmuller using AI to help write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. Actually, he doesn't even defend it. He just makes a fiat statement that it's OK, links to a Shit by Semafor that other people do that and that's that. That is, ultimately, a modal variant on the old ad populum fallacy, only with it being this time, "everybody's doing it" rather than "everybody believes that."
The other is the weird hangup he has about still not linking to Wikipedia as a source. That's even though he then adds that Wikipedia is often a very good source.
The first subissue is that this gives another round of ammo to people who say "But Wikipedia."
The second is that, other than his caveat, it's a fiat statement.
The reality is that Wikipedia is generally very good. I tell people who pull out the "But Wikipedia" bullshit to look at how many footnotes an entry has and what they link to. If it's got in-depth citations of reputable sources, that's the bottom line.
He did respond to my quote-stack:
The point on op-eds isn’t that everybody does it, but that everybody expects it. And I thought I was being self-critical on Wikipedia; sorry if that wasn’t clear.
I debated about responding, and eventually did:
Got it on Wiki, and I’ll buy that. Maybe I was being too critical of you not appearing to be self-critical. Today’s Wiki is much better than 20 years ago. For people who say “but Wikipedia,” I respond, how many footnotes does it have and what are the sources they link?
==
On the op-eds? I’m not part of that everybody. Maybe that’s something that’s wrong with “Acela corridor” media or whatever term you prefer, or something that’s wrong with critics of such media.
ow, if a Druckenmiller had outsourced his op-ed to a human ghostwriter, a PR person or whatever, then stamped his signature on it? I’d expect that. I still wouldn’t find it totally desirable, but I’d expect it. And, at least it would be a human being, and one paid to be an amanuensis.
So, starting with that sense of “expect,” no, not me — I wouldn’t expect a CEO type to have AI do that. And, I’d find it even less desirable than a human amanuensis to do it.
I guess next, we’ll have AI memoirs “from” or “by” the rich and famous. You won’t have to pay a ghostwriter, and you won’t even have to worry about whether or not you put a second name on that.
Next, we'll have the enshittification of the AI ghostwriter, I guess.
I did add that, a la Wittgenstein, Dick and I may not be using the word "expect" in exactly the same way.
No comments:
Post a Comment