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by goatlover 633 days ago
So you're saying major media companies are going to outsource their writing to people overseas using LLMs? There is more to journalism than the writing. There's also the investigative part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc.
2 comments

This has become such a talking point of mine when I'm inevitably forced to explain why LLMs can't come for my job (yet). People seem baffled by the idea that reporting collects novel information about the world which hasn't been indexed/ingested at any point because it didn't exist before I did the interview or whatever it is.
People in meatspace are not (in James C. Scott's sense) legible to HN's user base, and never will be.
They definitely try to replace part of the people this way, starting with the areas where it's the easiest, but obviously it will continue to other people as the capabilities improve. A big example is sports journalism, where lots of venues have game summaries that do not involve any human who actually saw the game, but rather software embellishing some narrative from the detailed referee scoring data. Another example is autotranslation of foreign news or rewriting press releases or summarizing company financial 'news' - most publishers will eagerly skip the labor intensive and thus expensive part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc, if they can get away with that.