The most interesting thing we found may be who’s not advertising. Gone are the Big Four automakers – Ford, General Motors, Chrysler parent Stellantis and Toyota – which have chosen to dedicate their ad dollars to more tightly targeted marketing campaigns. Only Kia and BMW are stepping up to promote their new electric vehicles, while Volkswagen has advertising lined up to celebrate its 75th anniversary in the U.S.
Also missing this year will be GoDaddy, whose Super Bowl ads have generated buzz over the years. Its management has indicated that the company is exploring other marketing options that create more engagement for their target markets.
Instead, the majority of buys are going to food and beverage companies. The authors of this piece noted that these kinds of things tend to have a much broader appeal across an array of target markets.
In short, a wider range of people can be similarly persuaded about how good M&M’s taste or why Bud is the beer to drink, thus making a mass-market ad worthwhile for these brands.
RISKY BUSINESS: Companies take a huge risk that can amount to more than $20 million to develop, create, shoot and display a 30-second spot. Granted, the ad itself can be teased on social media, shared on YouTube and promoted through various other platforms prior to the game, so it’s no longer just a one-shot wonder.
Also, if you end up hitting a homer, it can live on forever. Just think about Apple’s 1984 ad:
Still, if you swing and miss, most of the country is watching and it can be an ugly fall from grace. This is among my all-time ad fails:
Because nothing says, “Hey, buy a car” like misogyny…
SAFETY AND VALUE IN NICHES: Like we’ve talked about before here, audience-centricity is crucial to all forms of media, and the fragmentation of audiences has led to a lot of shifts in media.
A recent demonstration that the old model of general content to a large audience is failing was the recent announcement that The Messenger would be closing after less than a year. The founders of the site planned to do something akin to a “60 Minutes” or major metro paper model, in which it was all things to all people. Clearly that’s not where media consumers are at.
This is what advertisers have known for a while and it’s being reflected in the approach to the Super Bowl ads. Rather than take one giant $20 million whack at a massive win, advertisers are diversifying among various smaller platforms, with smaller ads for smaller audiences. The idea is that with this kind of investment, they can do more with less while avoiding the big risk of a Super Bowl failure.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: The Super Bowl isn’t hurting for money, so this isn’t a “Titanic is going down” kind of concern. All the ad spots were sold for the ungodly sum of $7 million well before we even knew who would be playing in the game.
That said, this is an alert that there are icebergs out there, and other ships have hit them, so it’s worth taking notice of this situation. Newspapers, which are continuing to self-immolate at the hands of hedge funds, ignored similar warnings when the internet came along. Cable and TV folks didn’t pay as much attention to streaming as they probably should have and are continuing to course correct well after the fact.
It’ll be important to watch the continuing shift moving forward, especially as things change in terms of AI and influencer culture. The one thing media folks who aren’t in advertising forgot about folks in advertising over the years is that ad folks are buying eyeballs. Their loyalty is to that principle, which means you can’t say, “Well, they’ve ALWAYS bought (time/space/impressions) so I’m sure they will again.”
MOMENT OF ZEN: My favorite Super Bowl ad of all time still remains the one for Fidelity, featuring Mr. Britney Spears (Kevin Federline) making fun of his fall from grace. To this day, when Amy or I drift into a daydream on the other, one of us will say to the other, “FEDERLINE! FRIES!” and then laugh hysterically.
Milwaukee’s NBC affiliate TV station stirred up some ill feelings after marketing an opportunity to local Black-owned businesses to appear on a morning program during Black History Month, but only if they were willing to pay $1,000.
WTMJ-TV sent marketing emails to several Black business owners in the area offering an opportunity to appear on “The Morning Blend,” TMJ4’s daily lifestyle program, which airs weekdays at 9 a.m.
Despite looking and acting like a local news program, “The Morning Blend” is actually a sponsored-content program and part of the larger Scripps media brand. It appears in some form or other on stations in Las Vegas, Tampa and Milwaukee, each of which Scripps owns. The sponsored-content format is not unique to Scripps, and means you basically pay to play: If you are willing to cough up some cash, you can get a five-minute spot to promote basically anything.
If you don’t believe me, here’s the back end of a segment John Oliver did on “Last Week Tonight,” in which he bought space on sponsored-content programs in three media markets to promote “The Venus Veil.”
(If you want to watch the entire segment, which outlines how this works, why it’s a huge problem and how major media lines are being blurred, you can click the link below. That said, I have to warn you that there’s a great amount of F-bombs, a weird George Clooney segment and allegations of a man engaging in sexual relations with a ham.
To be fair, he’s always been weird, but the pandemic was going on when Oliver filmed this and that really pushed ALL of us into the exponentially weirdness zone…
The station manager at WTMJ tried to explain away the controversy of honoring people by asking them to pay to be honored with the same level of specificity and success as my kid does in explaining why her room is always a disaster zone:
TMJ4’s station manager, Gregg Schraufnagel, told the Journal Sentinel that “The Morning Blend” is a lifestyle program, not part of the news division, and that it is common for content to be sponsored on the program. “That’s always been the format of the show,” he said.
“The Morning Blend” has been on the air for 18 years.
Schraufnagel declined to get into the specific details of show’s makeup, how many of its segments are sponsored, its typical practices for reaching out to possible guests, or whether the program has charged for Black History Month segments in the past. “Things are evolving all the time,” he said.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This entire situation has the comic-tragic vibe of a 1980s sit-com, in that so many things went wrong to make this as terrible as it is.
Start with sponsored content. It’s ubiquitous in the field and has been around for decades, if not longer, if you want to count things like advertorials and infomercials. Even the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s own website features it. In this case, right next to the story about WTMJ’s sponsored content:
As John Oliver notes, the lines here get really blurry, particularly when it feels like news and this stuff is all of equal value. The traditional commercial breaks in news or the display advertising in newspapers and websites were much more obviously promotional when compared to this stuff. As consumers tuned out these forms of advertising, marketers looked for ways to play a game of “here comes the airplane” with consumers. The pay-to-play world of ads has essentially borrowed other storytelling formats to make this happen.
That said, to average consumers, this can feel a bit like finding out that Santa is just a guy from your dad’s work who can really rock a white beard. You get used to these trusted local figures who tell you that something is good or something is fun and you believe it. To find that the whole program would sell you a fake Nazi-era sex blanket for the right price can really shatter your world view.
The second key problem here is everything about this pitch.
It starts off with a weirdly stylized Black History Month logo, that I can’t find anywhere else but here. It applies the colors of the month as well, although I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that nobody who built that logo could explain what those colors actually mean.
I get that they’re the hosts, but the photo of Molly Fay and Tiffany Ogle just does not work with this pitch. These folks in those poses seems to say, “Check out what confident white people can do for you!”
The pitch for Black History Month says how important it is for Morning Blend to feature black businesses as the show wants to “promote diversity” and “foster inclusivity,” a sentiment only slightly undercut by the “but only if you have $1,000 to spare” closing paragraph.
The second half of the pitch is essentially the same thing they’d send to ANYBODY at ANY POINT in the year, as this is the entire proposition of sponsored content: Come here, pay us money, we’ll have a positive chat and you’ll get air time plus a video clip to promote the hell out of yourself. This isn’t tied to Black History Month alone, nor is there some sort of “Black History Month Discount” for Black-owned businesses. These businesses could do the same thing around Juneteenth Day celebrations, MLK Day or Kwanzaa if they wanted. Hell, they could do it on St. Patrick’s Day or Casimir Pulaski’s birthday if they wanted.
When approaching certain topics, it always pays to be much more self-aware than this. I don’t know what it’s like to be anything but me, so I have limited knowledge of how best approach topics related to race, gender and ethnicity. That’s why I usually a) reach out to people I know who have insights before I do something like this, b) try to be more specific than general when I approach topics outside my area of expertise and c) know that I have a far greater chance of failing than succeeding in a truly massive way, so I need to be really, really careful. I don’t see that here at all. In fact, I’d bet that this thing gets a one-paragraph swap out at the bottom of the first column for every target audience the marketing department pitches.
EXERCISE TIME: Find a sponsored content segment and analyze it for its approach to the topic. Look for ways in which you would approach it differently if you were a reporter and trying to present this for a true news feature story.
“I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again,” Thompson said. “I would make up the report sometimes because, A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime or it was too late and I was like, I didn’t want to screw up the report, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.'”
She then explained there was no harm in anything she would say to audiences.
“No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field,'” she continued. “Like, they’re not gonna correct me on that. I’m like it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.”
“When on a podcast this week, I said I would make up reports early in my career when I worked as a sideline reporter before I transitioned to my current host role,” she said.
“Working in the media I understand how important words are and I chose wrong words to describe the situation. I’m sorry. I have never lied about anything or been unethical during my time as a sports broadcaster.
“In the absence of a coach providing any information that could further my report I would use information that I learned and saw during the first half to create my report. For example if a team was 0 for 7 on 3rd down, that would clearly be an area they need to improve on in the second half. In these instances I never attributed anything said to a player or coach.
So, if you’re following along at home, Thompson glibly did the “I’m so cool I can make stuff up and nobody cares” thing until she realized that EVERYBODY cares about the accuracy of sports journalism. Then, she did the “I chose my words poorly” thing, which is usually saved for when people make a career-ending comment and are desperately trying to save their careers.
It’s not a rare thing, unfortunately, to talk about people in journalism breaking the basic ethical codes of the field. It also seems to be in some of the dumbest possible circumstances, in that you rarely see a story like the one Jayson Blair made up about the D.C. Sniper and more so in situation where a reporter didn’t feel like asking a salt-of-the-earth pancake-eating source what they thought of inflation.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: The first and most obvious thing is that, as a journalist, you don’t make stuff up. You can’t include the word “reporter” in your title and then pretend that the tenets of accuracy and honesty don’t apply to you.
When I look at the career of a sideline reporter, I can’t imagine a more difficult job because of who tends to fill it, how the world tends to perceive them and how hard they have to hustle. The majority of these reporters are women, and sports have never been too kindly to female journalists. The book, “Who Let Them In?,” does an amazingly and painfully detailed job of explaining what path-breaking women in sports journalism went through and what women in sports journalism still go through.
The television element adds the issue of physical attractiveness to the topic at hand. You might get a heavy-set guy with the remnants of a bad teenage bout with acne on the screen, but you’re almost assuredly not going to see a woman of a similar description.
One of the first women to have a nationally prominent role on an NFL television program was Phyllis George, a former Miss America. Critics pointed out that George had limited television and sports experience, and was intended merely as eye candy for men. Unfortunately, as viewers got a heavy dose of female reporters on the sideline over the years, each of whom was “visually appealing,” the rap on these journalists became that anyone who could successfully rock a “Hooters” uniform could probably do the job.
The fact of the matter is that these journalists have to hustle harder than their counterparts in so many ways and be ready for almost anything. As some reports on this topic mentioned, when Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest on the field, the sideline reporters were the first and most direct line of communication to the public about his situation. When players are injured, when fights break out in the stands or when any other kind of bedlam takes place, these journalists are pushing for information and trying to keep the audiences informed.
When one person of a particular group (sideline reporters) breaks the code and kind of does it in a “oh, well, I’m not really a journalist anyway” kind of fashion, it hurts the remainder of the people in that group. That’s why you saw Laura Okmin, Andrea Kremer, Tracy Wolfson and dozens of other sideline reporters and female sports journalists coming out on social media to say, “We don’t make stuff up. Never. Don’t even think about it.”
Thompson’s actions and her disclosure in this fashion caused a great deal of harm to journalists who already have to work way too hard to be considered journalists at all, let alone equals of people who often have less journalism-based education and media training than they do. As we have seen in some of the other cases noted earlier, this is a firing offense and it should be.
The Filak Furlough Tour took a stop at Morgan State University, where we covered a couple of really great topics in two classes. Milton Kent, the professor there, was extremely nice to me after I screwed up the name of his student newspaper in a post I wrote a while back, so I wanted to make it up to him and his crew as best I could.
In one class, we talked about some reporting and writing stuff while in the other, we talked about editing, fact checking and such. It was such a great time that I forgot to grab a screen shot photo for this.
Oh, well. You’ll have to take my word that I actually wore a different shirt.
Onward…
MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY – Baltimore, Maryland
THE TOPIC: We went with a lot of Q and A in the first class, and we’ve kind of touched on a lot of that already, so we’re going with the second class a bit more, with the idea of how to edit and what to do.
THE BASICS: There are a couple key things that really help me when I need to edit something. The first one is particularly helpful when I am trying to edit something I wrote.
Write, get the heck away from it, come back, put on my “editor’s hat” and then go to work.
Editing right after you write something doesn’t tend to work that well in a lot of cases, particularly because you figure if you wrote it, you probably figured it was right in the first place. It’s also hard to edit right after you wrote it, at least it is for me, because my mind kind of “fills in” stuff that’s not there because I knew what I meant when I wrote it. That makes it harder to do a true word-by-word edit.
Getting away from the piece for a while can help you mentally reboot and come back at it with a fresh set of eyes. I also like to pretend a bit that this came from someone else, so I can be like, “OK, what the fresh hell is this?” Like most things when you’re working with writing and editing, you find little ways to make things work for you. Once you find them, stick with them.
A couple other tips I liked to use:
ASSUME EVERYTHING IS WRONG: One of the easiest ways to get something wrong is to assume everything is right and then only check on things that appear wrong. It’s a pretty standard thing editors who are strapped for time do. Editors who work with high-end pros a lot also tend to go this route, because you expect stuff to be right if the person is a high-end pro.
Me? I work with a lot of students and I’ve read a lot of things that, while outlandish, tend to be true. I’ve also read stuff that seemed to be logical, only to find the kids made it up. This kind of weird confluence of experiences has put me in t he position where I just assume everything is wrong and I have to go about proving it to be accurate.
For example, if a source said, “I got arrested in New York in 2004 for a string of burglaries and got sent to Smithton State Prison for 10 years. While I was there, more than 20 people got killed in prisoner on prisoner violence.” I’ve got a lot to look at:
Can I prove the guy got arrested and for what charges?
Can I prove the time and place of the arrest and conviction?
Can I prove he went where he said he went and for that amount of time?
Can I prove people got killed there and if so, can I prove the number of deaths?
The same thing is true of simple things like name spellings, ages, job titles and more. Assume it’s wrong and prove it right.
SINS OF OMISSION ARE VENIAL, SINS OF COMMISSION CAN BE MORTAL: Going along with what we talked about above, if I can’t prove something is right, I’m probably not going to use it. This isn’t always possible. I love going back to this argument in Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” where the main character (a fact-checker at a magazine) has a discussion with a notoriously sloppy writer:
“Where did you get this about the French government owning a controlling interest in Paramount Pictures?” you say.
“Don’t they? Well, shit. Run a line through that.”
“Your next three paragraphs depend on it.”
“Damn. Who told me that?”
In many cases, however, it’s easy enough to either check the fact and prove it so you can keep it in or check the fact and disprove it so you can cut it. If you can’t do either, it’s better to leave the thing out than to be wrong.
In writing, we talk about sins of omission and how they can undercut a piece. That’s true, but those sins, to borrow from my Catholic upbringing, are venial. You can be forgiven for not being as complete as you need to be. If you screw up because you guess wrong, those sins are mortal and you can pretty much kill a piece (or even your career).
WHEN YOU SCREW UP, ADMIT IT: Mistakes will happen. I think I make about 353,532 a day, and that’s when I’m only awake for 12 hours. The ones you put into the public sphere, however, can really damage your reputation among your peers and your audience.
The one thing I did when I talked to Milton Kent’s class was to apologize for screwing up the name of the school’s publication. I’d already fixed it on the blog weeks earlier and I made an email apology to Milton, but I wanted to let the kids know I was sorry as well. The goal was simple: Be a decent example.
It’s hard to feel OK about screwing up and it’s even harder to fess up when you make a mistake, but people tend to trust you more when you are honest and open about errors. Like most hockey goalies, even the best editors occasionally let one slip past them. There’s no shame in raising one’s hand and saying, “That’s on me.”
BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do you think of the situation with Hasan Minhaj and The New Yorker’s fact check of his comedy? He told some broader truths and after the piece questioned his accuracy, he did a video where he “brought the receipts” for what he said in his act. What’s your take on all this?
BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (plus an update): (When the student asked me this, I’d read the New Yorker piece, seen some response pieces and heard the Bill Maher bit on this concept of “emotional truth.” I had not actually seen Minhaj’s response video, which I did explain to the class. After watching it, I might have changed a couple things (which I’ll touch on after the main answer), but overall, I think the answer itself stands up.)
It felt kind of strange to me that a writer at The New Yorker would spend this kind of reporting capital on fact-checking a comedic routine. There did seem to be some problems with what he said in his comedy and the ramifications of those statements for other people.
(In one part of his comedy that was examined by the writer, Minhaj mentions that he tried to take a white girl to the prom, only to be turned away at her doorstep because her family didn’t want her in prom pictures with a “brown boy.” According to the story the girl (now woman) and her family caught a lot of online harassment for this, even though it didn’t happen in that way, and she ended up marrying another “brown boy” later in life. )
When you make up stuff and it negatively impacts real people, that’s not good, even if you’re doing it for comedic effect. Minhaj is operating in a world of comedy that’s different from the past days, as comedy and fact have become blurred. That means there is a greater risk when you bend the truth or play to broader issues with made-up examples.
Comics have always made up some parts of their act. The late Rodney Dangerfield notoriously made jokes about his wife cheating on him. (“When I come home, the parrot says, ‘Quick! Out the window!'” would be one of those.) While “Fat Albert” in Bill Cosby’s routine was based on a real person, there’s no real proof of people like “Mushmouth” or “Dumb Donald” existing. Richard Pryor, while turning significantly terrible aspects of his life into true comedy, did add elements to his comedy that didn’t exist or were untruthful.
(I’m not linking to any of Pryor’s stuff here, as I don’t want my editors at SAGE to have a heart attack. Speaking of which, one of Pryor’s go-to bits was about how his father died, which is both truth and fiction. If you look it up on YouTube, listen with headphones and don’t say I didn’t warn you…)
That said, those tweaks didn’t create significant negative impact for real people. If people had spray painted “WHORE!” on Dangerfield’s wife’s car or she got kicked out of her ladies at church because of his jokes, yeah, that’s something he’d need to answer for. If something terrible happened to “Fat Albert” because of Cosby’s comedy or significant harm happened because of Pryor’s tweaks to the truth, the same thing applies.
Here were two things that stuck out with me about the Minhaj situation:
First, I’m not doubting that he experienced negative things like the ones he mentioned in his comedy specials. The racism he discusses has been well documented in far too many facets of life for this to be viewed as just lies for the sake of a laugh. (Just like Pryor’s routine about being pulled over by the cops because someone “looked just like you” probably didn’t happen the way he said it in his routine, I have no doubt he and others experienced that kind of thing and that it was terrible.)
Using humor to draw attention to social inequality and similar issues has merits. I think Minhaj just “punched up” a few of his real examples to make the comedy better while trying to make a bigger point. (I often joke about 12 years of Catholic school and getting battered about by nuns. We did experience some significant smacking around and some emotional trauma from more than a few people, but it wasn’t all nuns and it wasn’t all the time.) Comedy creates awareness in some significant ways.
Second, I think that doing a deep dive on Minhaj just felt a little shady. There are hundreds of comics out there talking about “real things” that weren’t 100 percent verified. For the sake of the exercise, go through this Jeff Foxworthy routine about his “Cousin Sherry’s Wedding.”
I have no idea of Foxworthy has a cousin named Sherry. If he does, I have no idea if she actually had a “hurry up wedding” in his Uncle Wayne’s backyard. I also don’t know if she was 8 months pregnant when she got married or, as his mother supposedly said, “That’s the same dress her mother got married in.” I found it funny, regardless.
But we could take apart that routine or a dozen others about his family (“The Clampetts go to Maui” is a classic for this kind of analysis) in the same way The New Yorker went after Minhaj if we wanted. Dare I say, we probably wouldn’t, which probably points toward the racial inequity Minhaj was trying to raise more than anything else.
POST SCRIPT: After I got done with the class, I went to find the video the student referenced that I hadn’t seen. Minhaj does a 21-minute video where he picks apart the article and explains himself. He does apologize if he led anyone astray with his comedy, which I think is fair. I also think he’s probably more accurate than the New Yorker gave him credit for being. He “brought the receipts” in the form of emails, texts and other supporting evidence.
In most cases, he’s more right than wrong and where he did bend the truth, he made some solid explanations for why he did so. He also pointed to some of the spots where the article’s writer made choices that put a decided slant on how he was coming across. He’s not “emotional truthing” this thing to death, making claims that are untrue but feel like they should be. He realized some of the stuff he said could be a bit further out than maybe he intended initially, but he probably never figured someone would fact check him within an inch of his life.
If nothing else for me, this demonstrated the key principle I always try to push to my students: Before you make a decision, get all the facts you can.
BACKGROUND: Lillard joined the Bucks in the off-season from Portland in a blockbuster trade. His debut against the 76ers lived up to the hype, as he scored 39 points, grabbed eight rebounds and handed out four assists.
The problem is that people started figuring out this wasn’t legitimate, as the game was on TNT, so why was ESPN alone on this interview? Also, what was up with the weird pole thing? More detailed sleuths took issue with the fact the Bucks arena floor and Lillard’s jersey didn’t look right compared to the game footage they’d seen.
ESPN then issued a statement trying to explain away the fact they’d taken a video from the 2020 “Bubble Era,” removed TNT’s logo, PhotoShopped a Bucks jersey over Dame’s old Portland jersey and basically made stuff up:
“We occasionally look to connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery and storylines as part of our social content. While it was never our intention to misrepresent anything for fans, we completely recognize how this instance caused confusion.”
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:
Uh-huh. SURE you didn’t mean to mislead people.
It’s hard to know the motivation of any one person and any one post, but this self-serving statement is total crap. That said, here’s the bigger problem: When you are the purveyor of actual content (games, SportsCenter, breaking news on athletes’ lives etc.), you are held to an actual ethical standard higher than that of a dipshit teen playing with an Instagram filter.
The spin that ESPN put on this thing about trying to “connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery” is laughable at best. If they had done something like a series of clips of Lillard over his career, with that audio over the top, fine. That’s at least “past meets present” (sort of).
But what they did was fabricate reality in a way that they KNEW would lead people to believe this was a contemporary moment, captured in its entirety by ESPN. (Also, what, exactly, was the need to PhotoShop out a competitor’s logo and PhotoShop in yours, if this was only an issue of trying to “connect sports moments?” Seems more like a cheater’s attempt at self-promotion to me.)
The ethical problems revealed by ESPN’s inexplicable lack of judgment are complex but illustrative of the battle currently being waged in sports media, and in news media overall.
First, there’s the problem of much of society seeing sports as entertainment, rather than news. If you justify sports as a space where people come to have fun — especially NBA Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, which is undefeated in terms of passionate fans who continually make hilarious memes and videos — then pretty much anything is ethical, right? After all, we’re all just having fun; no one thinks any of this is real.
And that’s very much the attitude had been many in the sports media space including, apparently, whoever green-lighted the Dame video at ESPN. And with the loss of shows that featured actual investigative reporting in sports, like ESPN’s Outside the Lines and HBO’s Real Sports, the space for real journalism in sports media continues to shrink.
In short, if you want people to take you seriously, you can’t do stupid crap that says, “Hey, we’re just screwing around with stuff for fun!”
DISCUSSION STARTER: What, if anything, should ESPN be doing in this arena?
Should it be making stuff up, but telling people enough to let them know it’s made up? Or will that just perpetuate a problem and keep sliding toward the line between journalism and fiction?
Should it get the heck out of this kind of “construction of reality,” in that it’s not ESPN’s gig, even if everyone else is doing it?
Should it find ways to use the digital technology that helped them do this in specific ways but not other ones?
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we’ll kick off the start of the academic year schedule with our “Mass Com Monday” post, geared toward a broader discussion for those folks doing intro classes or those looking for bigger topics to examine. I am apparently at the last university that still has yet to start classes, but since you all are going to work, we go to work on the blog.
If you like this content, style or approach, let me know. If not, let me know that, too, as this is a transition in progress for the blog.– VFF.)
A BRIEF RECAP:Artificial intelligence is nothing new, but its more recent applications in education and journalism have brought the topic to the forefront over the past year or so, when OpenAI released its ChatGPT. The chat bot could craft reasonably decent written copy that could lay waste to the ways in which we once thought of writing as a humans-only skill.
Given the general freakout about all this, it looks like we’re about six months from this happening…
Or maybe not…
THREE KEY THINGS PEOPLE FORGET ABOUT AI:
IT OPERATES OFF OF WHATEVER IS AVAILABLE: The concept of “garbage in, garbage out” is usually credited to IBM programmer George Fuechsel, who coined the term in the 1960s. Simply put, the computer (or any logic-based system) will do what it’s trained to do with whatever input it receives. If the input is good, the output will be good. If the input is crap, the output will be crap. To this point, ChatGPT and other similar programs have been the beneficiaries of a wide array of high-quality content from a vast group of sources. That might not always be the case and even if it is, ChatGPT might not know the difference.
One major concern raised here is that ChatGPT doesn’t really distinguish between the work of high-quality sources that have created tomes of knowledge and chuckleheads who run blogs. Another is that, as ChatGPT continues to generate more and more content, it becomes a self-feeding loop, like a snake eating its own tail.
At the point of its launch, any and all material online was the company’s oyster, because nobody really realized what these folks were doing at the time or how they were doing it. Now that folks are digging in a bit deeper, those open lanes on the information superhighway are likely to become restricted, thanks to copyright issues and the folks who own those copyrights. This leads us to…
COPYRIGHT OWNERS TEND TO GET TESTY WHEN PEOPLE STEAL THEIR STUFF: The folks running ChatGPT are already getting their first taste of what the legal battle could look like regarding copyright infringement issues regarding the training and output associated with this program.
In the simplest of terms, copyright basically says the person who created a work owns the ability to do with that work whatever they see fit. If someone else takes that work and does something with it that you don’t want them to, you can seek some sort of restitution. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying this, but it’s the first week of classes or so and law won’t hit you until mid-semester at the earliest…) Several authors have already sued the tech company over the use of their work to help build this thing, as has comedy pro/author Sarah Silverman. The bigger concerns are coming down the road, as a class-action suit in California states that the OpenAI’s data scrapers violated “terms of service agreements and state and federal privacy and property laws.” In addition, the New York Times has put a blocker on the ChatGPT webscraper and is “mulling” a lawsuit against the company. (As a good friend used to say, “It ain’t a lawsuit until it’s filed,” but when an organization as big and powerful as the Times publicly ponders something like this, it’s at least a shot across the bow for OpenAI.)
If this kind of thing continues, it could substantially limit the effectiveness of AI programs like ChatGPT and potentially force OpenAI to start the process over from scratch.
CHATGPT IS ONLY AS GOOD AS OUR FAITH IN IT: If you want to see an amazing look at how simply “believing” in something can both rocket something to stardom and crash the hell out of it in a few short months, watch John Oliver’s look at cryptocurrency and then come back here.
As much as the people building and playing with ChatGPT might not want to believe it, this system fits that same mold: We use it because it does something for us that we think is good, but the minute we figure out that it might not be all that and a bag of chips, our faith in this thing can crater rapidly. According to the Washington Post, the “neat new toy” vibe of this thing is already starting to wane. Additionally, the earlier look at what the Columbus Dispatch has done in pulling out of the AI writing gig demonstrates that we’re not on the road to SkyNet quite yet.
DISCUSS AWAY: Consider a few angles for potential discussion about discussion in class from these angles:
BASICS:
To what degree have you played around with GPT? What’s your early sense of what it can do and what it can’t?
How and why would you or wouldn’t you use ChatGPT?
HISTORY:
Look back at some of the other “early innovator” elements associated with our media (Napster, Friendster, AskJeeves etc.) and see how each of them either started a revolution or fizzled out. What kind of pattern do you see for ChatGPT based on these previous efforts?
LAW:
Do copyright issues concern you generally speaking and do you have concerns about them as they relate to the ChatGPT situation?
Is there a way to balance the rights of copyright owners with the interests related to developing software like ChatGPT?
If these suits eliminate significant sources of quality material from which ChatGPT can draw, how confident would you be in using this kind of program?
ETHICS:
Given what you’ve seen about how ChatGPT can write essays and even get you through a freshman year at Harvard, how do you feel this could impact your education or the education of others in your peer group?
Is it fair to use a program like ChatGPT to do some of your work? If so, what kind and how much?
