Lunch had been a handful of cashews, munched in the car on my way to Pullman to listen to sixth grade girls talk about their lives.
Now it was 2 p.m., heading home, and glory be, a White Castle ahead on 111th Street. I pulled into the drive-thru line.
Should I order two cheese sliders or three? I have my svelte figure to consider, so called up whatever AI helpmate crouches on my iPhone, like a troll under a bridge, and asked: How many calories in a White Castle cheese slider? Answer: 340.
Hmm. I thought. That isn't right. The true figure had to be fewer — a McDonald's cheeseburger is about 300 — and ordered two. Which, later exploration determined, was what AI had in mind. White Castle considers a pair of sliders to be one serving. Hence the mistake. It was as if I asked AI for the price of a single shoe.
The "this isn't right" reflex is hard to teach a computer, apparently, given the glaring wrongness artificial intelligence routinely serves up — the six-fingered hands and uncanny valley fake people who are somehow off, a little or a lot.
That reflex should have kicked in for anyone reading the "Heat Wave" section jammed into the Sunday paper. The special section was produced by an outside vendor, King Features, and handled by the Sun-Times circulation department. Someone missed the AI-generated imaginary book titles in the summer reading list on Page 62.
Not AI, but human failure. Someone apparently read the section's painfully generic listicles without thinking, "This is embarrassing."
Or maybe no one read it at all. That's being investigated. Someone dropped the ball. And when trusted people don't do their jobs in newspapering, catastrophe can result, as happened here. The good name of the Chicago Sun-Times, dragged backward through the mud, coast to coast.
Sunday I had missed the section entirely. Wrapped in the funnies, it went unseen directly to our recycling pile. Monday passed without remark.
On Tuesday morning, Bluesky started snickering, with trolls joining hands and dancing in a gleeful circle, chanting. The Sun-Times was damned for cutbacks, damned for laying off staffers. I'm surprised nobody mentioned Wingo.
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Mea Culpa. I snickered. I thought the list was funny and yes, I am amused by AI. Indeed, someone dropped the ball. So. It's a book list. Many more balls will be dropped in the future because we aren't robots. We're at a new stage where we now have to be diligent, which was someone's job anyway, regardless if it was AI generated or some punk messing around.
ReplyDeleteI'll reply to my own comment because this story is in my brain. I said we have to be diligent, but this is a newspaper. It doesn't matter if two people are left to run it. Don't blame AI or shortage of staff. Someone didn't do their job. Yes, I find the list worth a snicker, but holy moly, a newspaper scr*wed up royally.
DeleteWINGO! Wow! from the Rupert Murdoch era, around 1984.
DeleteWhich was when Royko crossed the street, heading for the Trib.
Nobody mentioned Wingo because it's been forty years, so fewer and fewer people remember that debacle anymore. Fewer and fewer people remember Royko, either. Just the older folks...the readers over fifty.
To me AI seems in many ways like a glorified Google. Meh. This is a sad story because I remember when newspapers were assembled and delivered by human beings. Our use of the internet has nearly gutted the industry. People make mistakes. I feel bad for a system that is stretched so thin to keep it all going.
ReplyDeleteOn another note I sure miss the days of reading the paper early in the morning before work. I'm a dinosaur.
Dave, you can still read the paper in the morning. I do. You can get it delivered -- my condo neighbors get their paper/s/ around 5:00 a.m. I go out and walk to the gas station about a mile away -- I find the Sun-Times a powerful incentive to get my daily exercise in, both mental and physical.
Deletejohn
There was a saying that seemed to echo through my formidable years, "Money is the root of all evil." Though perhaps we should rewrite the saying to "Money is the route of all evil," but i digress.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, AI -- and the papers book error -- represent one of those moments in time where society will pay a considerable (and expensive) price for the quest for more money, specifically profits.
People will always make mistakes, and that's OK. But when people are removed from the equation completely (or nearly) how can we moderate or confirm what is published. AI is great in some aspects, but it seems that in a lot of instances it's causing much more work for the unequipped few that remain.
What is the point of a newspaper? What is the point of news? What is the point of AI?
We seem to be at some crossroads; split between money and altruism. Or perhaps money and society, or even money and the people.
Where do we go from here? What is the point of what comes next if there is nothing left to serve it?
Not money, but the love of money, is the root of all evil.
DeleteWe're not split. Money won years ago. It's just it no longer hides behind manners.
DeletePeople just don't proof read or spellcheck much of the time, so not checking whether AI is correct or not isn't surprising.
ReplyDeleteI had a meeting at the State of Illinois Center years ago & at a nearby office, a notice had been printed out about something & as I read it, I saw about half a dozen spelling errors. No one bothered to ever tell the author about the mistakes, even though the date on it was a week old.
During the decade before I retired, I was a copy editor and a proofreader, and I was pretty good at it, because my eye for catching spelling errors and factual goofs got even better, thanks to all that practice. And practice makes prefect.
DeleteThere are now more screw-ups in printed and online text than ever before. People either don't know, or else they just don't care. Some of them make me laugh, but many of them make me shake my head in amazement, and almost want to cry suntimes. So much complete ignorance out there. It's appalling.
If I were still working, I'd be tearing my hair out.
From the sheer number of misteaks. Every goddamn day.
With the little I know about AI, I don’t want to fly in a plane designed exclusively with it.
ReplyDeleteHuman error. No malicious intent. But online AI scammers are another story.
ReplyDeleteI actually skimmed the thing on Sunday via the e-edition, blowing through it in about 5 minutes for curiosity's sake. It was remarkably lame, indeed, which made blowing through it all the speedier.
ReplyDeleteI did stop for a bit at the book recommendations. I'm not enough of a reader to have identified the fake titles, though, and I didn't read many of the descriptions. What I thought was odd was the inclusion of Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury, from 1957 and Atonement, by Ian McEwan from 2001. Both fine books, which I've read, but not exactly cutting-edge suggestions. "Enjoy an ice cream cone" - level content, one might say.
This reminds me of a somewhat similar matter that came up some years ago. Seems that a Comptroller of a large company was taking the odd cents payable to each worker and redirecting them to his own account. Nobody noticed. Until a janitor, with OCD apparently, counted up the amounts he was owed each payday and the amounts he was actually paid. He was 8 cents short. And complained about it. And the Comptroller's scam was unearthed.
ReplyDeleteAnyone reading of the exorbitant power usage to run AI? It ain't "green".
ReplyDeleteYou would think that AI systems could include sanity checking. The kind of thing you do when a calculation says the mass of the earth is 27 kg. You look at it (as you did the burgers) and say, "That can't be right" and try again. I had an AI advise me that Lake Michigan flowed into Lake Superior, which is of course exactly backwards. I do have to say, when you point out errors to an AI, it is appropriately (thought possibly not sincerely) contrite.
ReplyDeleteNot backwards, just false, Lake Superior flows into Lake Huron. Now while the hydrologists consider Michigan & Huron to be a single lake, their level is always identical, but Lake Michigan has the lowest outflow of all five lakes, as the sole way the water in it changes is water from Huron, even if some of Huron's water is from Superior. The only real outflow from Michigan is the water Chicago uses to drink & flush away our sewage to the Mississippi!
DeleteWhite Castle stops for older men must ALWAYS be done on the sneak. It's an overwhelming impulse when you're out alone doing dumb-dumb errands. Nobody can know. Park well back from the street. Slip in the side door. ALWAYS eat inside the restaurant! The smell of White Castle hamburgers and fries lingers in a car for two or three days. There's no way to explain to the Nosy Parker in your life.
ReplyDeleteWhen it used to be a pint or two of Jack Daniels every day, a wife can be surprisingly accepting when it comes to indulgences like a couple sliders every five years.
DeleteCount your blessings. You still have White Castles in Chicago. Cleveland and Akron lost all of theirs a decade ago. NYC also lost many of them around the same time, in 2015.
DeleteIf I want the Real Deal, I now have to wait until I'm in Detroit or Columbus.
The frozen sliders don't measure up, and they don't have onions.
Only the South Side had White Castles when I was growing up. Didn't have one on the Northwest Side until the late Seventies, when and Addison and Elston became the go-to corner after the bars closed. Far North Side didn't get one (at Clark and Ridge) until the early Nineties. Also a favorite for late-night drinkers. I made up for all those lost years once I turned thirty.