The Deeper Dive: Artificial Intelligence is Crashing the Stock Market

Well, any claimed intelligence among stock brokers certainly looks artificial during the present tech train wreck.

Apr 22, 2024

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Writers, editors, and publishers are all predicting AI will write most of your news in the future. It will probably also preselect a lot of it and sometimes even create the actual events. It will be largely responsible for selecting most of what you learn about what is happening in the world. Not all of it, of course, until AI figures out how to crush people like me, there will still be alternative sites, trying to pick out the truth; but the job keeps getting harder.

The same editors and publishers try to re-assure you that humans will be guiding the process and culling the content and fact-checking it for truth since we all know AI lies because it learned how to create from the internet, which means from humans. It learned that truth doesn’t matter as much as a good narrative that says what people want to hear or what they fear … if you want to be successful. The writers, who will be replaced, are understandably less sanguine about AI, except to the extent that many like to use it to short-cut their own research.

Of course these same writers, editors, and publishers haven’t done such a great job quite often of fact-checking their own content. Plus we all know that many humans tend to be lazy, and many businesses (take Boeing as a glaring example) are run by bean-counters who will do just about anything to minimize costs in order to maximize earnings returned to shareholders. So, don’t expect much from the fact-checking.

Instead, expect your picture of the world to increasingly be guided by cost-saving, truth-fabricating AI. Even as I publish The Daily Doom, as an underfunded, one-man show, I don’t have time to fact-check all the headlines I link to. I try my best to ascertain if they are truthful, but it is more of a sniff-test than deep research in terms of the daily news links.

Some are conspiratorial in nature. I reject most of those, though they may be true. However, I publish links to conspiratorial-sounding stories that seem be credible because lately a lot of so-called conspiracies have proven to be true in our weird world. Still, I’m a skeptic, and I don’t begin to have the time to thoroughly check each story I link to, or I’d never have time to write my own editorials. It would easily take more than a day just to fact-check all of the daily stories I link to.

As much as I wish I could guarantee everything in The Daily Doom is true and no conspiracy is carried or advocated no matter how intriguing that is not true, I not only cannot guarantee that, but I have also increasingly begun to suspect (within a very short period of time) that many of the stories I read (though not any that I knowingly publish) are AI generated.

If I sense that, I dispense with them immediately, even if they might be true. They are simply not a credible source. The sniff test there picks up on peculiar word or thought arrangements, odd grammar—the little giveaways that still sound a bit like a machine. However, AI is advancing so quickly it is even surprising Bill Gates in one story carried in the headlines below that is about how happy he is that AI will soon help us to genetically engineer cows to be less offensive to global warming (hence his interest in buying up farms to experiment with) or to create meat that doesn’t require cows. (NO thanks on either.) That passed the sniff test for me, since it was about Bill Gates (well, that and it included a video of him saying it, though even that could easily be AI-faked).

Within months it will be impossible to tell which stories are AI-generated and which are not. So, even The Daily Doom headlines will not likely be free of all AI-generated content as I would like them to be. (Of course, I don’t have much issue with such content if it is true, except that I am highly concerned about the path by which reality will become even more confusing than it already is as AI learns to form its own objectives and programs other AI with less concern for truth than whatever objectives the current AI might have.

I’m all about truth, even presenting truths I don’t like to see coming (like what I’m writing now) or that people don’t like to read, but it is getting harder to be objective and truthful, even when you fully intend to be because less and less content is reliable. So, a current trend that I don’t like but that I need to point out now is that truth is likely to become more scarce at a fairly quick rate now that AI is self-developing quickly and is often run by nefarious humans with their own agendas and can be used for a $20-per-month rental fee by just about anyone.

The Daily Doom will be as committed to raw truth as ever. It’s just getting harder, as most mainstream media rapidly shifts to using more AI-created, AI-edited, and AI-selected content in order to cut human costs and as things like AI photos and videos become abundant. Every day now, I come across stories in mainstream media where I say, “This has to be AI-written because it is so awkwardly put together or repetitious” like a program sewing together bits of stories collected across the internet to create an article. However, in a year those seams will no longer show. The stitches will be tighter. The repetition less than my own.

That’s a truth I’d rather not share, but it is a truth you need to be aware of, even when reading The Daily Doom. Some stuff may slip through the net, as I only have four hours a day to commit to this endeavor, because I have to earn a living at an eight-hour job, too, and still need and want to spend time with family. It’s important to share this warning like the one on a pack of cigarettes because a world of chaos is rapidly engulfing all of us.

That is part of why I’ve predicted this will be “the Year of Chaos.” Sure, the wars building and swirling around us will add a great deal of chaos and already are. The breakdown of the stock market, which I’ll lay out in the paid-subscriber-only section of this Deeper Dive that follows the headlines below, will certainly add chaos. The breakdown of bond markets as inflation does what I have always said we can expect—forces the Fed to tighten harder for longer than the economy and financial markets can withstand—will add chaos. To a likely greater extent, the present election in the US will dump all kinds of chaos in our laps because a win by either Trump or Biden will cause public outrage and rebellion by the other side. With all of that, a key new factor adding chaos will be the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence throughout journalism, feeding in its own lies.

One article today warns,

AI a 'fundamental change in the news ecosystem'
…More media will probably be created and originated and sourced by machines. So machines will do more gathering in a lot of journalism, will do more of the producing, the audio, the video and the text, and will create the kind of experiences of consumption that consumers have.

Including, in less scrupulous publications or those that also cannot fact-check everything, the fake videos and photos that will tell tales that never actually happened. They will show the next president of the United States saying things he never said—maybe even the current president. We’ve already heard him saying things he never said in campaign-season phone calls to US voters.

We don't know how long it's going to take—it may be two, four, seven years. I think it's going to be faster because there is very little friction.

I think it is going to be faster, too. Based on the clues of AI-created news in the content I come across, it is already sweeping through much faster than I thought it would, even as I’ve published headlines about major publishers laying off human staff to replace them with AI.

There is a tool that Google has built—the code name is 'Genesis'—that they are testing with publishers. Some publishers are building their own. There will be platform versions of these tools….
What the journalist is doing is coordinating the tool, verifying the content all the way through to the end, and editing. The job becomes using the tool, like an editorial manager of this AI tool.

Or just being a tool. Surely none of those guys and gals will get lazy and just let the AI stuff slip through, poorly checked because they have a quota of stories to get out in order to meet the bean-counter’s metrics. And can we count on AI to want to do investigative reporting by interviewing real people around a story that emerges or to analytically and logically criticize the content it finds on the internet to build stories out of, or will it, as we’ve seen it do in many examples, just make up the quotes it needs or parrot whatever it reads if it fills the objectives for a story?

I find reading the news and writing about it, as in that editorial I published last week about grossly rigged government unemployment numbers, constantly requires critiquing the information I come across. When something doesn’t pass the smell test, I go digging (if it takes a lot of analysis, then in a Deeper Dive). Readers of sites like The Daily Doom have already realized the mainstream financial media is either lazy or bought because it endlessly parrots just about anything the government or the Fed feeds it (as we saw in that article). So, does AI have the curiosity to check the info it uses from the internet to build its stories and to critique it? I doubt it.

I expect we’ll get a dumber public fed by an even dumber media because AI doesn’t likely care that much about humanity’s future or what it needs to know. It will be programmed to publish what is popular and have less concern for truth than journalists do. So, confusion will become worse (though hopefully the typos will become fewer than my own as sometimes I don’t even have much time in my four hours to do much proofreading. So, there could be some improvement there!)

That's a big question: is it going to be enthusiastically adopted, to be used in a way that isn't very productive in the long run or will that enhance the productivity of newsroom dramatically?"

I suspect it will be about high productivity over objectivity because the media already does not seem too concerned about objectivity or the truth behind the data fed to it from the government.

It's a much more open form of AI: both smaller newsrooms can do a lot with, and more junior individuals in more established newsrooms can do a lot with. I think it's a good thing, but it's also a disruptive thing. Often the internal politics in newsrooms are disrupted by that".

The internal politics is exactly what should be disrupted. There is too much groupthink. So-called journalists, however, will be more like operators than actual writers, churning out volumes of content. Maybe I’m mistaken, and AI will just help them collect more data in order to investigate because time is no one’s friend in daily-news journalism. I hope that I am wrong.

The risk to journalism is that other organizations, start-ups, tech companies will do things in the news faster than the news world itself. Lots of start ups have no editorial component at all. They are swiping the content of news organizations, some are covering niches: they are monitoring press releases, social media channels, PDF from reports".

The risk is that all newsrooms will be in a race against AI, forcing even sloppier fact-checking. So, in all that rush and churn to get existing stories published as original ahead of the AI-powered competition, I’m sure the quality of content will suffer.

As Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia School of Journalism, says, '+AI is unignorable force that journalism will have to organize itself around'. [Sic. on the period placements in the quoted article.] It's not going to adapt itself to journalism.

In the remainder of this article, which follows the headlines for paying subscribers, I’ll go into the financial realities of AI right now. I’ve heard again and again, how AI is the reason stocks will continue to soar for the next two years to levels never dreamed of because of the AI revolution. While I do not doubt the AI revolution is coming and will be huge, don’t believe the tall tales about stocks at all. They are already a train wreck as I’ll lay out below.

(Here’s an another story I came across today about sifting out the truth from a writer I enjoy: “Who Can You Trust? Finding truth in big piles of lies.”)