This blog, I will dive further into the impact generative AI has on media and if it will change how we perceive media.
During the last few months, I started to notice that people on LinkedIn use the same format over and over again. This is the format I perceived: people start of with a catchphrase and one or more emojis to tell you what the article is about and the rest of the post they start of each different part with a relevant emoji. Here is an example:
Figure 1, LinkedIn post
In light of my first blog, I decided to further dive into this. My first step of investigation was to ask ChatGPT to write me a LinkedIn post. Given the fact that ChatGPT is currently up to date, I should receive a post in this same format if this style of posting is indeed common on LinkedIn. And what do you know, when I asked ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn post a format that is popular in 2023, I got exactly the same result as I was seeing on LinkedIn.
In light of this confirmation, I started to wonder: does my perception of the value of LinkedIn post change if I think it is likely that they are written with the help of ChatGPT or another Gen AI? Personally, I became a bit more skeptical of LinkedIn posts due to this discovery. I think at the core of this lies the question:
Once you are unsure whether media is written by a person or AI, what does this do to the value of the media?
So, what do you think? Do you think your perception of media changes if you know or suspect it is written by AI?
References
Will AI-generated images create a new crisis for fact-checkers? Experts are not so sure. (z.d.). Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/will-ai-generated-images-create-new-crisis-fact-checkers-experts-are-not-so-sure
Hey Mees I also see so many of these posts and I never realised these could come from generative AI. Your pos made me think about something else. Social media works by pushing people to create content and rewarding them when this content reaches a large audience. This model made it that more and more people are trying to get on the same trends and create similar posts because they see that it works for some people so why not them? This ultimately reduces the value of all the content that is created because we do not see something new and people dig and dig to find one more topic to talk about with a similar structure and ultimately the topic has no relevance and the post says nothing (new) really. I see it as a vicious cycle where social media encourages such behaviour and is flooded by similar posts making that chatGPT also does not create anything new since everyone does the same thing (and thus the same data is created) and this goes on and on. So this creates a chicken-egg problem, is chatGPT the reason value is decreasing or is it the way social media works that then influences chatGPT’s prompts?