It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up.
> Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999
> Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart.
She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually.
Why only rural newspapers and South China Sea?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260629011021/https://theeditor...
And yes, I said both.
Cambridge Analytics is going to seem like a child's toy compared to how targeted, how sophisticated this will be. Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly.
I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
If there's one thing I've seen in my life, is that there's no such concept as "too low" or "too scummy" for politicians.
CA was accused to literally causing three civil wars in third world nations. I often wonder, will the US have the honour of being the first in the West to fall apart due to misinformation?
I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed)
So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted.
Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week.
So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
That is horrifying and destroys jobs, removes expertise from the world, and makes our lives worse.
I do not see how AI could be a net positive either.
agree, given that we have a natural tendency to believe what we read - or only comprehend what we believe.
There is your “pro” argument.
The “con” argument would be all the other ways dynamite has been twisted and used since.
This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.
Ultimately, a lot of topic-du-jour punditry is a hustle for clicks.
Sarcasm aside, I enjoy the irony.
It's reasonable to expect stories the real local press finds discussion worthy (because they are both false and relevant to the local press) are an effective way of using the local press to throw more link strength at their own site.
it's quite cringe, like a not-so-subtle troll on the people who share the image
00 you seed some articles
10 wait for traffic
20 bot fetches GA / GSC
30 bot analysis what works what does not
40 instructed to create more of what works
50 more ai slop that works in search / social
60 Go To 10
aka a "positive" / unchallenged feedback loop
content cost dismissible - cents per article