The daily deadline and insane quotas for "content" is the result of cost-cutting corporations that don't allow for broad, curiosity-driven reporting. But we'll address that problem by removing the few remnants of curiosity-driven reporting.

I could go on forever about this, but my point is that the hardship of work, the struggle, the messiness, the *humanity* of it, if you will, is what's most valuable about it. It's how we learn, it's how we grow.

Replacing that with "AI" cheapens and degrades the process, and leaves us the poorer.

I commented to someone the other day that I often find that when people for whom English is a second language struggle to find the right words, the very act of the struggle conveys more meaning than a more practiced English speaker could express.

9/

Every writer knows what it's like to struggle to find the right words, the best argument and voice to express something. And often, perhaps always, doing that work leads to creative insight, a better argument, a more persuasive voice.

8/

That's just one example. Consider the act of writing, something I do every day. Sure, I could ask a generative AI program to write such-and-such, and it might even produce something that sort of sounds OK.

What's lost there, though?

7/

My point is that doing the hard work is how we learn.

If I had asked a machine learning tool to analyze death records for violent deaths, I would have never discovered the tuberculosis outbreak.

6/

I soon realized that the tuberculosis outbreak was a bigger story than the violent deaths, and so I started working on that instead, and found that no one has written about this before. It's a work in progress.

5/10

For example, I was looking through death records in Nova Scotia in a particular year, looking to find a specific kind of violent death (long story). But as I was looking at those "dreary records," I kept coming across deaths from tuberculosis, which I was not looking for at all.

4/5

The article dismisses "scurrying to some dreary records room or scrolling through a spreadsheet."

But doing that difficult work can lead to unexpected discoveries.

3/5

Database processing can be useful! It can be save time for someone looking for one particular thing. “I don’t think I could have done that without this database,” said the reporter. Sure!

But what was missed?

2/5

No. This did not happen.

www.yahoo.com/news/article...

What's funny about this to me is that, yeah, sure, wearing a poppy is political, but so is not wearing a poppy.