Zach Seward, a friend from my days at Harvard and NYU, got a kickass job, starting up the AI effort at the NYT. He's just the right guy for it. Young, curious, creative, and very ambitious. And he has a strong startup journalism background. I couldn't think of anyone I'd want more to be in this position. #
Now that he's published notes for a talk he gave at SXSW, it's time to share some ideas I have for the NYT re AI.#
Current events. This is something ChatGPT doesn't do. Not sure why. I'd like to be able to connect to ai.nytimes.com and ask it to give me a rundown on the lawyer who's testifying in Congress today about how our president is "elderly." I don't want pointers to stories, though they should be included in the response, I want a custom report, like the ones ChatGPT provides, that answers the questions I have about the MAGA lawyer. Maybe the AI will just give me the story without the spin. #
More useful NYT archives. When I was a kid I spent so much time at the big library in Jamaica (Queens) going back through microfilm of the NYT from before I was born. So far all we've done is replicate the microfilm user experience (which is great and very useful) but the thing that ChatGPT does so well is prepare custom reports. All that source material, used to answer very specific questions. Answer questions like "has anything notorious happened in the neighborhood I grew up in, as far as the NYT knows?"#
Sell a service to your readers where you manage the archive of their blogs, and in doing so you create a much broader archive for historians, journalists and others to study in the future, and, in the context of AI, feed it all kinds of perspective on the time we live in. Maybe in the future history won't be written by the winners (lotsa luck with that). Anyway, if at some point the NYT and other journalism outlets will harness the energy, knowledge and intelligence of the readers, why not start now? #
I criticize the NYT a lot, I know. But that means I care. When I stop criticizing you'll know that I've given up. #
Alan Kay said of the Mac, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. That's the spirit. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)