CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI

Off we go with Robot Journalism ... 

CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI,   By Futurism, January 12, 2023

CNET is far from the first; the Associated Press has been using AI to automatically write thousands of earnings reports since 2015.

Next time you're on your favorite news site, you might want to double check the byline to see if it was written by an actual human.

CNET, a massively popular tech news outlet, has been quietly employing the help of "automation technology" — a stylistic euphemism for AI — on a new wave of financial explainer articles, seemingly starting around November of last year.

In the absence of any formal announcement or coverage, it appears that this was first spotted by online marketer Gael Breton in a tweet on Wednesday.

The articles are published under the unassuming appellation of "CNET Money Staff," and encompass topics like "Should You Break an Early CD for a Better Rate?" or "What is Zelle and How Does It Work?"

From Futurism   View Full Article    

CNet Looks at Alexa Event

I attended, good overall.  Here a general overview.

Amazon's Alexa event shows the future of the Echo's voice assistant
Amazon hasn't revealed any major new Alexa-powered hardware this year, but today's Alexa Live developer conference gives insights into its voice-centric priorities moving forward.

By David Priest 

Last year's fully remote Alexa Live developer conference was good practice for this year, Daniel Rausch, Amazon's vice president of smart home, joked with me on the phone -- even though no one knew they were practicing at the time. It's late July in a year racked by pandemic, and although Amazon has not released a single major piece of smart home hardware, Rausch is excited.

"It's by far the largest set of developer-facing announcements about new features and new tools that we've ever [released] at once," said Rausch -- some of which he believes "represent a revolution" for a voice assistant now over five years old. So what exactly are these new features, and how are they going to impact you? Let's dive in.  .... "