Camden, Maine, home of the Midcoast Villager. Photo (cc) 2020 by Paul VanDerWerf.
The Midcoast Villager, an innovative weekly newspaper based in Camden, Maine, got The New York Times treatment last week. But though the Times lavished attention on the high-profile journalists who’ve been recruited to work there as well as the café it’s opened to extend public outreach, it missed entirely the Villager’s long history as a tech innovator — a history that extends all the way to the present.
The Times article and visuals, by Steven Kurutz and Cig Harvey, are certainly entertaining enough, starting with their portrayal of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald, who left a job covering Washington for NBC News to come to Maine. “I did an insane thing,” he tells the Times. “I left one of the last stable jobs in media and took a job in the worst sector of media — and possibly in the economy.”
This past weekend I listened to a bracingly entertaining conversation that the public radio program “On the Media” conducted with tech journalist Ed Zitron. Co-host Brooke Gladstone had billed it as a chance for Zitron to make sense out of DeepSeek, the new Chinese artificial-intelligence software that purports to do what ChatGPT and its ilk can do for a fraction of the cost — and, presumably, while using a fraction of the electric power burned by American AI companies.
But it was so much more than that. Maybe you’re familiar with Zitron. I wasn’t. As I learned, he is a caustic skeptic of American AI in general. In fact, he doesn’t even regard the large language models (LLMs) that we’ve come to think of as AI as the real thing, saying they are nothing but an error-prone scam that is attracting fast sums of venture capital but will never make any money. Here’s a taste:
The real damage that DeepSeek’s done is they’ve proven that America doesn’t really want to innovate. America doesn’t compete. There is no AI arms race. There is no real killer app to any of this. ChatGPT has 200 million weekly users. People say that’s a sign of something. Yes, that’s what happens when literally every news outlet, all the time, for two years, has been saying that ChatGPT is the biggest thing without sitting down and saying, “What does this bloody thing do and why does it matter?” “Oh, great. It helps me cheat at my college papers.”
And this:
When you actually look at the products, like OpenAI’s operator, they suck. They’re crap. They don’t work. Even now the media is still like, “Well, theoretically this could work.” They can’t. Large language models are not built for distinct tasks. They don’t do things. They are language models. If you are going to make an agent work, you have to find rules for effectively the real world, which AI has proven itself. I mean real AI, not generative AI that isn’t even autonomous is quite difficult.
As you can tell, Zitron has a Brit’s gift for vitriol, which made the program all the more compelling. Now, I am absolutely no expert in AI, but I was intrigued by Zitron’s assertion that LLMs are not AI, and that real AI is already working well in things like autonomous cars. (Really?)But given that we just can’t keep AI — excuse me, LLMs — from infesting journalism, I regarded Gladstone’s interview with Zitron as a reason to be hopeful. Maybe the robots aren’t going to take over after all.
