news
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today/ . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
view the rest of the comments
This is neither here nor there, but I want to talk about the little audio track that all these major news sites have now of an AI voice reading out their articles.
I don't like them.
Obviously there's an argument to be made in favor of accessibility, and they aren't really doing anything that built-in voice-over accessibility settings weren't already doing, except maybe a little more pleasing to listen to, so I'm not saying that when the cultural revolution comes such things should be banned outright. I just feel like major institutions like the NYT or WAPO could easily afford to pay a small staff of people a very nice wage to read their paper aloud.
My butlerian-jihad-esque reflexive hatred of anything labeled "AI" or "automated" maybe isn't totally appropriate here, I could see a reasonable argument being made for smaller, online-only outfits that still want to have this accessibility feature being allowed it. But if the NYT doesn't want to pay a narrator to read the articles or an audio engineer to alter the recording in case of later corrections or whatever hypothetical argument could be launched against this seems like labor-"saving" bullshit to me.
Yeah, I hate that shit. Some places (e.g. the New Yorker, ProPublica) work with Audm and have professional voiceover done on some of their features, which is actually great and usually the way I read those articles.