AI-Written Stereophile Articles

Back when I graduated from high school ('72), the average students vocabulary consisted of about 70,000 words. By the '90s, it was down to around 35,000. I hate to think what that number is now. I'm way past despair. 

All the best,
Nonoise

@mike4597 Your statistics are extremely alarming.  How many fully functioning young Americans are there?  You and I remember the anti-war Vietnam protests.  We were afraid of being drafted for a poorly conducted war which did not directly affect us, like an Afghanistan war (unending yet unwinnable just like the Soviets had found out although mineral rich). 

Today's pro-Palestinian pro-Hamas protests/riots are NOT like those as they are promoting terrorists/terrorism.  Those protestors/rioters hate America as well.  They are evil (and the students are basically stupid and uneducated, the fault of the education system and their parents family failure to instill American pride).  

@mike4597 Very sad.  I graduated UCLA in 76' double major in Political Science (bureaucracy specialty) and History (European history-never took an American history course though) in 3 years.  I was always good in English but not a consistently good test taker.  In 12th grade advanced placement English, I was considered the worst student because I am unimaginative as a fiction writer as well as uninterested in existentialism being taught.  Our requirement not to take dumbbell college English was to achieve a 550 score on the Achievement test.  I took it and scored a 390, failure. I told the teacher I had bad test day and took it again six weeks later.  The teacher was upset as she never had a student having to take dumbbelI English. I scored a 690, success.  She warned me not to waste my money on taking the AP exam one of four I took).  She was wrong again, I got a 4 out of 5 (and 3 5s on others).  Well I sort of lucked out.  Studying for the European AP history test, I studied English literature, Dickens in particular.  On the English AP test there were numerous references to Dickens literature.  As to the essay, I also lucked out as it required an written debate on any topic.  The prior week, Israeli leaders were split on whether or not to have a big military parade in Jerusalem, one said it would infuriate the local Arabs the other it would show their strength.  I made up the dialogue.  

I never took an English course at UCLA. Southwestern Law JD at 22 and MPA at 24.  History and Politics are my special knowledge areas.  I preferred taking science courses to English, read foreign language literature (I'm a major opera lover), took music and art history courses for no credit all at UCLA, six courses per quarter and 2 to 3 course papers.  No talent in art either-terrible, about as bad as my fiction writing ability; however, my dreams often have phenomenal and bizarre storylines.  I can't repeat jokes but I make hysterically funny comments extemporaneously (I keep my wife laughing and my choirs have had a ball laughing at a perfectly timed outburst-timing is everything).  

I attended a University of California campus (UC Davis, formerly the University Farm) in the 1960s.  All incoming freshmen had to take a Subject A English exam; if you failed the exam, you had to take a 3-hour one-semester course in remedial English that earned zero graduation credits for an additional fee.  If I recall correctly, about 35% of the freshmen—the top 10% of California high school graduates—failed the exam.  Again, If I recall correctly, by the 1980s the failure rate was over 50%, and I read reports that they eventually dropped the requirement.  This would indicate a failure in our elementary and secondary education system, but serious problems exist in higher education, as well.  I have read in a reputable source that at one of the Ivy League Universities, you can earn a BA in History without taking any American History.  When I was a freshman, all students in the College of Letters and Sciences had to take History 17A&B, two semesters of American History.  My suspicion is that as colleges and universities have added a wide range of new and at times narrowly-defined degrees in functional fields, they have jettisoned many of the basics.  

Finally, after receiving my BA in History, I earned my MA in Political Science.  When I started those graduate courses, I was very concerned that I did not know all the Poli Sci jargon, but I quickly found out that the younger students did not know their history, one student at the school even insisting that the U.S. started the Korean War in 1950 by attacking North Korea, an absurd position even before we learned from Soviet archives that Stalin gave Kim Il Sung the go-ahead to attack the South.  One of my best professors taught a course on revolution and change in the 20th century, an excellent examination of the Bolshevik, Italian Fascist, and Nazi seizures of power; by the 1980s, however, he wrote me that the most of the students just wanted to know “how to make bombs.”
 

Ignorance, and mindless activism in many cases, is bliss … at least to some.

AI is only a bandage for a slow decay in our education system. My wife is a graduate of one of the more better (see what I did there) journalism schools in the country. She has both taught English and worked for major associations as a writer/editor and marketing chief.

I, on the other hand am not nearly as skillful with language. Perhaps a minor excuse is that English is not my first language. I have spoken it almost exclusively since about 7 years old. I am pretty good at parroting so I can get by (usually) without embarrassing myself. My marriage to her has significantly improved my skill in regard to language use as can be attested to by the slap marks on my wrists.

To the point, she currently writes and edits a monthly for a professional trade publication. She has to edit, and many times re-write articles submitted by engineers. As nonoise mentioned about "educated idiots", Too many of them are excellent engineers but are unable to write coherent sentences.

I recall reading something many years ago to the effect that current college graduates don't have near the command of language of high school graduates of yore when working as secretaries. Excuse me, administrative assistants.

Perhaps we need to blow up the teacher's unions and start over. Less DEI, or as I like to refer to it, DIE and more of the three R's.

I occasionally watch YouTube celebrity biography and history videos. My wife and I laugh at the obvious A.I. generated narration which mispronounces names often and not in accordance with any foreign living person would do to the English language.

As to audio reviews, nearly all are positive and they are often subtle in their negative observations. Combine that with system synergy issues, acoustics and music selection for reviews, I cannot rely on reviews. I have to hear the equipment in my system. I attend audio shows where I have found phenomenally great sounding systems despite the acoustic and electrical limitations. Those were a few great systems. I also met a great distributor and dealer who understands and shares my preference for acoustical music reproduction first. My current audio system is based on use of his recommendations that didn’t cost me $1+ million but sounds close at 15% or $150,000 the cost. My best friend’s system which is just as satisfying if lower in resolution costing 15% of that, or $22,500. We have both have Von Schwiekert speakers.

@mike4597 + 1

A high school friend of mine who went to Harvard and eventually became head of the Clemson psychology department once told me that grade inflation was in his mind much more serious than economic inflation.

The decline in writing skills is a multi-decade phenomenon.  I was on the staff of an Army school in the 1980s; our students were mostly Army officers with advanced degrees from civilian colleges and universities.  I saw the same problem a few years later with slightly more senior Reserve Component officers, some of whom worked in institutions of higher learning. In both cases, some of them wrote superbly, but a good number had real problems in expressing ideas in a concise, direct, and meaningful manner.  I think the problem is that, to a troubling degree, our education system has shifted away from foundational skills that leave students less capable of clear expression, especially with the written word, and as these younger people enter the work force in increasing numbers, the problem will become even more evident.  Just my two-bits worth … inflation, you know!

WORD

Vold sounds like someone I'd like to share a drink with. All this brouhaha with AI is a result of our hubris, which can harm us (Forbidden Planet is a great lesson) and not a boon (out of the head of Zeus sprung Athena).

Being sentient doesn't imply brilliance or rational intelligence. Take a look around  at what's been going on for about 300,000 years with us. Half of us are still below average IQ.

This reminds me of what an old teacher told me of people he knows who are experts in their fields but outside of their fields of expertise, he sees them as educated idiots. 

Any AI program put in complete control of any program that could harm us, and does, cannot be attributed to the AI itself, but to the stupidity of the people who put it in charge. We've a long way to go before AI can supersede us but a short way to go for it to upend us.

All the best,
Nonoise

A Google engineer says AI has become sentient. What does that actually mean?

"If we think consciousness is important, it probably is because we're concerned that we're building some kind of system that's living a life of misery or suffering in some way that we're not recognizing," said Vold.

"If that really is what's motivating us, then I think we need to be reflective about the other species in our natural system and see what kind of suffering we may be causing them. There's no reason to prioritize AI over other biological species that we know have a much stronger case of being conscious."

@waytoomuchstuff.....*Loud applause with shouts and whistles*

Precisely.

AI:  Super senstivie measurements.  No subjective listening biases. Expansive vocabulary.

Audio review(er) problem solved?

Except ...

... people have less than perfect instruments on board, are subject to bias(es) and stumble with finding the right words to describe our observations.  So, we need people, not machines, to have meaningful conversations about high performance audio.

"....than by he, himself."

Better form.....that AI jargon must be catchy...

No one is more amused by asvjerry that he himself. He's cracking himself up. Harmless, though.

....yes, part of a superputer cabal formed to turn humans into semi-sentient drones constantly in search of the latest useless .....

Oh

Been there, did that....'scuse, go back to sleep....

*L*  To misquote Ben Franklin after his kite flight:

"All thee have to fear... is Me."

....he was never 'quite the same' after that little venture.....

Hey, is AI masquerading as @asvjerry?

😏...as a known abuser of the Anguished Stranglage, I can safely claim that any AI that would post the things I’ve done and may do in the future.....

...would have gotten a C/Format input early on.....

Being the organic biped I is....too messy to deal with on a permanent basis.... ;)

...at least y'all can rest easier, knowing I do whatIdo on purpose, rather than a 6th generation machine learning cycle....

They've been discovered that they 'forget'.....*LOL*

I've read terrible English-language writing, spelling, grammar, syntax, etc all over the internet and all over society for decades now; AI was not required for it; if anything, it might be better than what I read from a lot of humans. 

I feel your pain...

Years ago (before starting my own business in the 90's) I was a publications writer and editor for a division of a large corporation. I got the job because every pub they issued I would mark up with all the errors they had made, and they had to recall and republish it.  They figured my salary would be less than the incessant reprinting costs and they would save money by having me do it right the first time.  My daughter followed a similar path and is a published author and magazine editor.  

My current source of amusement in my retirement years is to "read" pulp Sci-Fi creations on YouTube, where the voice will seldom pronounce the same word the same way twice, the scrolling script will have a different spelling for repeat uses of the same name or descriptive term, and it is very easy to work out that what the author had actually intended is often a third variant!  I currently consider "AI" to stand for Almost Intelligible.   YMMV has morphed into "Your Meaning May Vary". 

I see a direct parallel between the current state of AI writing skills to be equivalent to typewriters 50 years ago that tried to write in cursive.  Both were hyped to be faster than what they tried to replace, but neither made a good first impression.

A few years ago, a reviewer posted a link to a review he had just written for one of the major audio publications, I can't remember which one, on another audio forum.  I read the first paragraph of the review, which consisted of a long string of words and a period at the end.  I must of reread it a dozen times, trying to figure out if it actually qualified as a sentence.  It just seemed to be a series of clauses without any point.  I asked him on the audio forum if it was actually a sentence.  He said, "no, it's not, and it wasn't meant to be one."  I'm all for creative writing, and poetic license, but there has to be a coherent idea in the writing for me to read it.

I think Chat GTP offered a fine response, nice catch secret_mission_1964

I had Ai do all my college and med school papers.i always got a participation trophy

If you ask AI chatbots, they're all biased and clueless in vast majority of cases. 

I own a restaurant & was in need of a new dining room manager several months ago & received many applications on Indeed which is a great tool for such needs. Some of the applications were well written & impressive ( which doesn’t necessarily correlate to the person’s actual ability to perform their job…), some were poorly done w/ incomplete sentences, improper punctuation etc & some were so absurdly over the top that it was clear they were written by AI.  They repeated more or less the same things over & over in slightly different ways it became entertaining. 

Has it occurred to anyone reading those articles that maybe how you comprehend them has changed over the years? As for the actual content, there's only so many ways you can say "blacker blacks" or "enthusiastically recommended" before you have to re-use terminology. 

It’s very easy to find out what AI thinks about hifi topics. Just download an app like Poe and ask away. No need to wait for Stereophile to cover your topic of interest. Warning: Your life may never be the same again!

I read Stereophile and TAS and I've also noticed a decline in writing quality. I have attributed this to a lack of editing. I think that the editors now just check for factural accuracy and let the articles go through with poor wording.

Let's face it; it's hard to make a review about a DAC interesting. What can you say that hasn't been said before? I suspect some of what we are seeing is the result of the reviewers trying harder and harder to say something original. 

I never thought about A.I. being a potential cause of this but I think that A.I. wouldn't be particularly good for writing audio equipment reviews. Maybe I just don't understand the capabilities of A.I. but the weird phrasing and odd syntax we are seeing is probably a clue that A.I. isn't being used. A.I. is better than that.

Reading my post above, I wanted to add that I have worked in large to middle sized corps my entire career and have met many wonderful people that are still friends after retirement.

This is just to add that I am not anti-corporation by nature as some are.

AI done right is good for certain things. They tend more to be objective not subjective things.

So in the case of hifi audio I could see using AI to help get facts straight in a product review. It may even be possible for AI to provide an accurate assessment of what something truly sounds like. People are more error prone doing that and less reliable if the AI is done right.

However people are very good at offering opinions. AI might do that also . In which case then the question becomes whose opinions will you value most? Nothing new there.

@bojack, they sure run a lot of press releases. 

+++@bolong, @nonoise

Fun experiment (or perhaps desecration): train AI to write like Harry Pearson. I still have mint copies of TAS from the age of innocence before CD. 

I have an absolute disgust for anything AI. Articles, photos, video with AI narrators, immediately gets reported as false/misleading information.

For those whose careers were not involved in the large corporate business world and its motivations, you can be sure that AI was created by persons interested in one thing, to make as much money as possible.  Their goal envisions the replacement of jobs being manned by people with computers so the cost of employing people will be reduced as they are eliminated.

Costs will be reduced even more than outsourcing work to other countries.

My day job is being Director of Content and media for a digital marketing agency. I can tell you that everyone is playing with AI generated content at some level. On top of this, everybody is using some form of AI grammar checker and grammar suggestion, such as Grammarly and a few others. That is probably why Content reads differently these days. 

+1 to @upward_bound for the AI generated response 😉

Motley Fool uses AI for some of it's prescription-service financial updates.  It's very good.

Others on this forum said they wouldn't mind if music was AI generated as long as they enjoyed the music. Perhaps the same can be said about articles. 

Let 1000 simulations bloom. As longs as the pleasure is experienced, authenticity is just the hangup of the old. Progress!

It's interesting that you bring this up. I have also noticed a decline in the quality of some articles lately. The phrasing and syntax in several pieces do seem odd and out of place, almost as if they were AI-generated or at least heavily reliant on automated tools. This is a significant shift from the high-quality, well-crafted content they are known for.

I wonder if this is a result of increased pressure to produce more content quickly or a deliberate move towards incorporating AI in their writing process. It would be reassuring to hear from the publication about their current editorial practices and whether they've made any recent changes that might explain the noticeable difference in writing style.

Has anyone else observed these changes? What are your thoughts on the possible reasons behind this shift?

I think that AI is gradually being used to replace humans. As for the OP’s statement about AI written audio reviews, that would not surprise me at all. I’ve even noticed that when you do Google searches now, the information written about the topic includes awkwardly structured sentences.

The Irish used to believe that all teachers should be poets. What a better world this would be if that way of thinking were still in effect.

All the best,
Nonoise

Spoken in HAL.

Well naturally I asked AI.

The definitive answer:

“ Unfortunately, I do not have any definitive information about whether AI systems write articles for Stereophile magazine. Stereophile is an audio equipment and music review publication, but the specific processes and technologies they use to produce content are not something I have detailed knowledge about.

As an AI assistant, I don’t have insider information on the editorial practices of particular publications. Whether Stereophile employs any AI-generated content is not something I can say with confidence. The use of AI in journalism and publishing is an emerging area, but the specifics of how it is being applied, if at all, by a particular magazine like Stereophile is beyond the scope of my knowledge base.

I can only provide information based on what is directly contained in my training data, which does not include details about Stereophile’s content creation workflows or the technologies they may utilize. If you have a more specific question about AI and publishing that I could try to assist with, please feel free to ask.“

ie:  “I don’t know”

@ozzy62 man that made me laugh. Dead on there

Six Moons is eccentric - not AI.

I would have to agree though that writing is deteriorating in general across the internet and in print media as well, and for obvious reasons - literature is not taught with much inspiration or confidence in the schools; and the vast majority of graduates do not care to luxuriate in language as in the days of old. It's all visual media now.

My daughter is a copy editor for The New Yorker online and she knows her stuff, but she was raised in a household that liked to read and liked to listen to music too.
Writing well day in - day out is a grind. It requires a pretty fierce work ethic to do it well and the assurance that there is still an audience capable of appreciating what you are up to.

The other problem is the pace of the modern workplace which is too rushed for anyone to catch a breath. It shows in the writing and the poor editing too. You can see in so called "major publications" awful, derelict editing - errors that any junior high school teacher would mark in red "careless error!"

They are not AI generated, but might as well be, considering the personalities of the authors. 

Any examples? There are ways to detect AI writings