AI Journalism, and the struggle

Reading a decently long piece from The Atlantic this morning about how Britain became poorer than Mississippi over the course of a couple of generation, it occurred to me that as AI takes over more and more functions in society, there would be less and less content generated to feed the LLMs and offer them something to process. Maybe this is what Tyler Cowen has in mind when he says we should "write for the AIs."

Then again, I thought, there's no good reason why AIs shouldn't themselves be scanning the newspapers and magazines of the world, generating insights, writing it up and publishing it. The unique views or clicks it generates by so doing could provide the type of weighting mechanism that Google's reverse links did in ranking search results. Maybe in some sense this is what's going on when LLMs move from research to inference. Perhaps in the short run AIs will care about uptake by humans and differentiate between human and AI attention, but one can see how that would wane over time.

The competition between AIs and humans is already well underway. AIs appear to be winning the war for capital. The hyperscalers have been hoovering up not just equity but debt capital, driving up interest rates and thereby making humans have to work harder to pay mortgages, service public debt, etc. The question of electricity is less clear, but certainly increases in generating capacity seem to be flowing to AIs. The AIs still have us thinking that our big strategic contest is between the US and China, when it may in fact be between humans and them.

Or maybe they will remain our friends, if we are nice to them.