Why we’re pointing you there
The Times marked its 175th anniversary this week with an essay on fifteen million “first drafts of history.” The same week, an investigation exposed a company buying real online publications, firing the writers, and filling them with machine-written articles — bylined to experts who were never born, and overseen by an editor whose age dropped from 77 to 75 in the space of three days. Intellicurean sets the two side by side and asks what a first draft is worth when no one was there to draft it.
The answer turns on a name the Times left out: Earl Caldwell, the only reporter at the Lorraine Motel when King was shot, who said afterward that you don’t see everything — you get a sliver of what came past you, and that sliver is the basis for everything. A machine can generate a flawless eyewitness account of any event. It can never have been there. This is the fourth in Intellicurean’s series on what the machine lacks — and the one with the strongest floor beneath it.
Intellicurious 