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Pakistani newspaper mistakenly prints AI prompt with the article

(twitter.com)
443 points wg0 | 3 comments | 12 Nov 25 11:17 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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chrismorgan ◴[12 Nov 25 12:05 UTC] No.45899143[source]▶
The current title (“Pakistani newspaper mistakenly prints AI prompt with the article”) isn’t correct, it wasn’t the prompt that was printed, but trailing chatbot fluff:

> If you want, I can also create an even snappier “front-page style” version with punchy one-line stats and a bold, infographic-ready layout—perfect for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next?

The article in question is titled “Auto sales rev up in October” and is an exceedingly dry slab of statistic-laden prose, of the sort that LLMs love to err in (though there’s no indication of whether they have or not), and for which alternative (non-prose) presentations can be drastically better. Honestly, if the entire thing came from “here’s tabular data, select insights and churn out prose”… I can understand not wanting to do such drudgework.

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michaelbuckbee ◴[12 Nov 25 13:11 UTC] No.45899711[source]▶
For years, both the financial and sports news sides of things have generated increasingly templated "articles", this just feels like the latest iteration.
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1. shagie ◴[12 Nov 25 16:20 UTC] No.45902025[source]▶
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-n...

    ...
    The rules for the race: Both contenders waited for Denny's, the diner company, to come out with an earnings report. Once that was released, the stopwatch started. Both wrote a short radio story and get graded on speed and style.
https://www.wired.com/story/wordsmith-robot-journalist-downl... https://archive.ph/gSdmb

And this has been going on for a while... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_journalism

    StatSheet, an online platform covering college basketball, runs entirely on an automated program. In 2006, Thomson Reuters announced their switch to automation to generate financial news stories on its online news platform. Reuters used a tool called Tracer. An algorithm called Quakebot published a story about a 2014 California earthquake on The Los Angeles Times website within three minutes after the shaking had stopped.
Sports and financial are the two easiest to do since they both work from well structured numeric statistics.
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2. simonw ◴[12 Nov 25 16:38 UTC] No.45902252[source]▶
I like Quakebot as an example of how to do this kind of thing ethically and with integrity: https://www.latimes.com/people/quakebot

> Quakebot is a software application developed by the Los Angeles Times to report the latest earthquakes as fast as possible. The computer program reviews earthquake notices from the U.S. Geological Survey and, if they meet certain criteria, automatically generates a draft article. The newsroom is alerted and, if a Times editor determines the post is newsworthy, the report is published.

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3. mschuster91 ◴[12 Nov 25 17:57 UTC] No.45903365[source]▶
> The computer program reviews earthquake notices from the U.S. Geological Survey

Probably a service that is provided to the general public for free, similar to NOAA and weather data - so chances are rather high it ends up on the chopping block or for-money only.