As I mentioned before, I get a lot of my news from news aggregators like Google News, or Flipboard. As I haven't put in any filters, the news I get often comes from the United States. That isn't great, because about 90% of the content I get that way from America is stories about the culture war. Just click on the link to the Flipboard site, and without being logged on you'll see how many stories there are about Trump, about DeSantis battle with Disney, or about what some Republican or Democrat lawmaker said. Pretty much all of those culture war stories are partisan, with the left being outraged by anything the right does, and vice versa. As some of my American readers pointed out, the view somebody outside the USA gets from how life is in the USA is completely distorted, because in reality Americans have real lives with real problems and aren't constantly involved in culture war issues 24/7. But their media are, especially the online only part of the media.

Now I spend a lot of time reading and writing, and I know a thing or two about what constitutes quality writing, and what not. And if you scroll through the stories of any news aggregator, you need to be lucky to find any quality writing, or any deep thought. Outrage is the main subject not only because it sells well, it is also the most easy to write. And I suspect there are other commercial reasons for the flood of such stories: It is a lot cheaper to use the "gig economy" to let somebody write about his outrage, than to hire a trained full-time journalists who is giving a subject some deep thought and balanced view. But because the news today aren't something that a Walter Cronkite or Woodward and Bernstein would recognize, there is also a new fundamental danger to the new journalism: AI.

AI chat programs can write mediocre text. And if you look at these texts, they don't offer much depth or original thought, because they are just assembled from frequently associated words on the internet. It's the lowest common denominator approach to writing. And that isn't all that different from the online news you can read today. High quality journalism with original thoughts and stories can't be replaced by AI, but AI needs to be fed by a lot of existing stories in order to write one. But the existing state of online journalism is of such repetitive nature and predictable thoughts on stuff that has been discussed a million times, that it would be easy to generate with AI. You just need an AI that has been fed recent news stories (ChatGPT won't work), and you can easily generate an online publication with very similar headlines and stories than the existing ones, for a fraction of the cost.

My general thinking about AI is that if your job can be replaced by AI, that says a lot more about the quality of your job than it says about the state of the art of AI. It isn't an accident that among the first publications to use AI to write articles are names like Buzzfeed, rather than let's say the Washington Post. If you already have a publication that cares more about search engine optimization than about journalistic values, and more about quantity than quality, then it is only a small step from "pay by word" journalists to AI journalists.

So maybe print magazines and newspapers have a future if they can manage to provide deeper analysis and more original thoughts than buzz. I've read some quality publications over the years, like The Economist, and while an AI could write "in the style of The Economist", any reader would quickly spot that this wasn't written by a real Economist journalist. For many online only publications, an AI version would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Maybe the future of AI is to replace Bullshit Jobs; would that really be such a bad thing?