I do not have any great sympathy for popular science writing, which I see as largely biased to the Left. This is from the contents of the articles, as well as what is covered by the narrative. Thus, regarding the recent revelation that the popular Australian science magazine Cosmos published articles generated by artificial intelligence (AI), we can learn from this. Really, the sorts of material required by such popular science magazines could be generated by AI very easily and cheaply, and just as good, as these articles are mainly summaries of research. Much mainstream news items, are based upon other reports, and machines can do the job just as well.
Not so for dissent material as the large language models have been programmed to generate Leftism, and the search engines used are policy biased.
"[A]decision by popular Australian science magazine Cosmos to publish articles generated by artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn criticism from its own contributors and former editors, including two co-founders.
The CSIRO, which publishes Cosmos, says it backs the "experimental project", which is designed to investigate the "opportunities and risks of using AI", and scheduled to run until February 2025.
But critics say the AI service undermines journalism and was built without proper consent.
The project was the result of a 2023 grant from the Meta Australian News Fund, administered by the Walkley Foundation which supports excellence in journalism.
The controversy is an example of growing anxieties around the role of AI in journalism as publishers experiment with new productivity tools. Hundreds of journalists employed by Nine Entertainment went on strike last week, partly over AI protections.
Cosmos ran into financial difficulties and lost half its staff earlier this year, having won dozens of journalism and industry awards over 20 years of publishing. National science agency CSIRO took over the publication in June.
The grant supporting AI-generated explainers pre-dates that takeover.
During two weeks last month, Cosmos published six AI-generated explainer articles on its website on topics ranging from black holes to carbon sinks.
Each article stated, "This article was generated by our custom AI service."
"Our service was built to focus on our archive of more than 15,000 factually correct science news stories and features. It also uses Open AI to help create the content. All generated content is fact checked by a trained science communicator and edited by our publishing team."
Cosmos contributors reacted to the move with disbelief, saying their work had been used to develop an AI service that generated articles and, in their opinion, undermined their role as journalists.
Many were angry they had not been consulted and said their calls to the publisher had gone unanswered.
"I've contacted CSIRO and the Cosmos editors twice in the last week and had no response," Bianca Nogrady, a freelance science journalist and Cosmos contributor, said.
Editorial staff at Cosmos were also not told about the proposed custom AI service, two former editors said.
According to Ian Connellan and Gail MacCallum, Cosmos's former publisher, the Royal Institution of Australia (RiAus), did not tell them it was applying for funding for a custom AI service in late 2023, even though they were in charge of Cosmos's editorial decisions.
"We had no knowledge of the proposal to employ AI as a background writer creator," Mr Connellan, who was the RiAus editor-in-chief until February, said.
"As editor-in-chief, I would have said this is a bad idea."
Ms MacCallum, Cosmos's managing editor at the time, said there were questions to answer about the ethics of using AI in such a way.
"I'm a huge proponent of exploring AI, but having it create articles of fact is a little past my comfort zone."
Kylie Ahern, who co-founded Cosmos in 2004 and served as chief executive until 2013, said AI-generated articles were "not the right direction" for her former employer.
Wilson da Silva, another co-founder who edited Cosmos from 2004 to 2013, said it was "definitely not what [he] would've done."
AI not specifically trained on Cosmos articles: CSIROCosmos's acting editor, Gavin Stone, referred questions from the ABC to CSIRO Publishing.
In a statement, a CSIRO Publishing spokesperson dismissed concerns that Cosmos's AI service was trained on contributors' articles.
"This experiment does not involve training OpenAI's GPT-4 model (which was pre‑trained by OpenAI)," the spokesperson said.
The service works by using OpenAI's GPT-4 to generate text on various topics. It then automatically fact-checks this against the publisher's large, well-researched database of 15,000 stories and feature articles using a process called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
GPT-4 was trained on vast datasets including CommonCrawl, a repository of content scraped from billions of web pages, including those of Cosmos Magazine. The legality of this approach is still being decided, and The New York Times and several authors are currently suing OpenAI for using scraped copyrighted work to train its AI.
The RAG method means Cosmos's AI service wasn't specifically trained on Cosmos articles, although it ultimately relies on this body of work to fact-check its output.
The CSIRO Publishing spokesperson said the project was an experiment to assess the "possible usefulness (and risks)" of using a model like GPT-4 "to assist our science communication professionals to produce draft science explainer articles".
The experiment was under "continual review", they added.
"This ongoing review could involve testing changes in how we program the tool, how we choose to use the tool, and whether any further usage or development of the tool is to continue after the end of the project."
Cosmos has not published an AI-generated article since the end of July.
'We didn't see it as being a tool that would generate articles'Despite the relatively recent public use of the technology, Cosmos's experiment with AI-generated explainers was underway well before CSIRO Publishing took over in June.
In late 2023, RiAus, which published Cosmos from September 2018 to June 2024, applied for a digital innovation grant through the Meta Australia News Fund managed by the Walkley Foundation.
Meta (formerly Facebook) set up the $15 million three-year fund to support Australian journalism in 2021, following its public spat with the Morrison government over the News Media Bargaining Code.
Will Berryman, executive director of RiAus, said he applied for a grant to develop an AI tool to help journalists with background research, "as an aid to journalism and not a tool that generates articles directly".
"When we thought about doing this we didn't see it being a tool that would generate articles," he said.
"These were tools that were put together to help them do what they do."